Deck 15: What Is Freedom: Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Question 1

With the end of slavery in the British Caribbean, more than 100,000 laborers came from where to fill the labor shortage?

A) South Carolina
B) Canada
C) Mexico
D) Australia
E) India

Answer 1

India

Question 2

What did the freedmen request in their "Petition of Committee on Behalf of the Freedmen to Andrew Johnson" in 1865?

A) the right to purchase a homestead
B) an opportunity to attend a black college
C) the purchase of some mules
D) help reuniting their family that had been sold
E) the right to vote

Answer 2

the right to purchase a homestead

Question 3

Which denominations had the largest followings among blacks after the Civil War?

A) Anglican and Catholic
B) Congregational and Presbyterian
C) Methodist and Baptist
D) Lutheran and Methodist
E) Episcopal and Baptist

Answer 3

Methodist and Baptist

Question 4

The Freedmen's Bureau:

A) was badly administered because director O. O. Howard lacked military experience.
B) won much southern white support because it consistently supported the planters in disputes with former slaves.
C) made notable achievements in improving African-American education and health care.
D) carried out a successful program of distributing land to every former slave family.
E) enjoyed the strong support of President Andrew Johnson in its work on behalf of civil rights.

Question 5

During Reconstruction, southern cities:

A) enjoyed newfound prosperity as merchants traded more frequently with the North.
B) were as poverty-stricken as rural southern areas.
C) benefited from the building of a transcontinental railroad from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles.
D) benefited as rice and tobacco production markedly grew.
E) experienced major population losses as blacks trekked north in the Great Migration.

Question 6

Which of the following best describes the black response to the ending of the Civil War and the coming of freedom?

A) Sensing the continued hatred of whites toward them, most blacks wished to move back to Africa.
B) Most blacks stayed with their old masters because they were not familiar with any other opportunities.
C) Blacks adopted different ways of testing their freedom, including moving about, seeking kin, and rejecting older forms of deferential behavior.
D) Desiring better wages, most blacks moved to the northern cities to seek factory work.
E) Most blacks were content working for wages and not owning their own land because they believed that they had not earned the right to just be given land from the government.

Question 7

The northern vision of the Reconstruction-era southern economy included all of the following EXCEPT:

A) emancipated African-Americans would labor more intensively than ever because they had the same opportunities for advancement that northern whites had long enjoyed.
B) northern capital and migrants would energize the southern economy.
C) the Freedmen's Bureau would establish a workable labor system.
D) the labor system would be as close to slavery as possible, thereby assuring high productivity.
E) the South would eventually resemble the North.

Question 8

Howard University is well known as:

A) the first medical school to admit women.
B) the first black university in Mississippi.
C) the oldest university in New England.
D) a black university in Washington, D.C.
E) the law school where Abraham Lincoln earned his degree.

Question 9

Sharecropping:

A) meant that African-Americans were paid their share daily for doing specific tasks.
B) was a compromise between African-Americans' desire for discipline and planters' desire to learn to do physical labor.
C) was most popular in the old rice-plantation areas of South Carolina and Georgia.
D) became more popular because of rising farm prices that brought increased prosperity.
E) was preferred by African-Americans to gang labor (because they were less subject to supervision).

Question 10

How did the Civil War affect planter families?

A) For the first time, some of them had to do physical labor.
B) They lost their slaves but were otherwise unaffected.
C) Few lost loved ones because they were able to avoid military service.
D) They endured immediate problems, but their economic revival was quick.
E) Since they defined freedom broadly, they got along well with their ex-slaves.

Question 11

General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order 15:

A) gave freed slaves the right to find family members who had been sold.
B) set aside the Sea Islands and forty-acre tracts of land in South Carolina and Georgia for black families.
C) gave forty acres and a mule to blacks who wished to move to the unsettled American Southwest.
D) gave his men instructions to burn their way through the southern interior to the Atlantic coast.
E) established the Freedmen's Bureau to help blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom.

Question 12

White farmers in the late nineteenth-century South:

A) by and large owned their own land.
B) included many sharecroppers involved in the crop-lien system.
C) refused to grow cotton because it had been a "slave crop."
D) were all enormously prosperous following the end of the Civil War.
E) saw their debts decrease as crop prices went up from 1870 to 1900.

Question 13

Which of the following is NOT true about Andrew Johnson?

A) Born into poverty, as a youth he worked as a tailor's apprentice.
B) Through hard work, he rose into the planter class and then became a successful politician.
C) He was the only senator from a seceded state to refuse to leave the U.S. Senate.
D) Lincoln's party nominated him for vice president in 1864 in hopes of extending its organization into the South.
E) He identified as the champion of the "honest yeomen."

Question 14

Andrew Johnson:

A) simply continued Lincoln's Reconstruction policies.
B) agreed with Lincoln that some African-Americans should be allowed suffrage rights.
C) won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1868, but narrowly lost the election.
D) lacked Lincoln's political skills and keen sense of public opinion.
E) displayed a great ability to compromise, very much like Lincoln.

Question 15

The crop-lien system:

A) applied only to African-American farmers.
B) became better as farm prices increased in the 1870s.
C) enabled yeoman farmers to continue to function under the same system as before the Civil War.
D) annoyed bankers and merchants who resented how it made them dependent on farmers.
E) kept many sharecroppers in a state of constant debt and poverty.

Question 16

The southern Black Codes:

A) allowed the arrest on vagrancy charges of former slaves who failed to sign yearly labor contracts.
B) allowed former slaves to testify in court against whites and to serve on juries.
C) were some of the first laws adopted as part of Radical Reconstruction in 1867.
D) were denounced by President Johnson and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
E) pleased northerners because they saw that the rule of law was returning to the South.

Question 17

During Reconstruction, the role of the church in the black community:

A) declined because ex-slaves realized they owed their freedom to fellow human beings, not to God.
B) changed as African-Americans joined white churches rather than worshipping separately.
C) declined as other black-run institutions became more central in African-American life.
D) was central, as African-Americans formed their own churches.
E) became less important, as northern white churches moved into the South and took in most blacks.

Question 18

How did emancipation affect the structure of the black family?

A) Men and women maintained equality within the household, making black families far more matrilineal than white families.
B) Men often remained at home while women went out and labored-a major shift from their roles while in slavery.
C) Black women adopted the domestic roles that white women had long had, but retained their duties in the fields and in the workplace.
D) The black family became more like the typical white family, with men as the breadwinners and women as the homemakers.
E) Emancipation did not lead to any changes in the black family's structure.

Question 19

Anything less than __________ would betray the Civil War's meaning, black spokesmen insisted.

A) new southern railroads
B) full citizenship
C) woman suffrage
D) farming jobs
E) due process

Question 20

For most former slaves, freedom first and foremost meant:

A) railroading building.
B) jobs.
C) land ownership.
D) voting.
E) jury duty.

Question 21

Radical Republicans :

A) tended to come from the border states that had seen most of the vicious fighting during the Civil War.
B) wanted legitimate democracy in the South, with power to be shared by planters and freed slaves.
C) fought Andrew Johnson from the day he entered the White House.
D) fully embraced the expanded powers of the federal government born during the Civil War.
E) agreed on the need to end slavery but disagreed with one another over whether the freed slaves were entitled to civil rights.

Question 22

When Congress sent Andrew Johnson the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, he:

A) signed it, creating an irreparable breach between himself and the Republicans.
B) argued that it discriminated against whites.
C) contended that it gave too much authority to the states.
D) won widespread public approval for his response.
E) suggested that it did not go far enough to secure racial equality.

Question 23

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the 1873 case in which Myra Bradwell challenged an Illinois statute excluding women from practicing law:

A) was the first time the Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment as establishing gender equality.
B) was a severe blow to the idea of "separate spheres" for men and women.
C) resulted the following year in congressional passage of the groundbreaking Legal Practice Act.
D) demonstrates that, while racial definitions of freedom were changing, gendered ones still existed.
E) was praised by Bradwell, who went on to become the first woman on the Illinois Supreme Court.

Question 24

For the 1868 Democratic presidential ticket, Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair Jr. had a campaign motto of:

A) Liberty, Equality, and the Southern Way.
B) Forgive and Heal. White and Black Men Should Work Together.
C) Civil Rights for All.
D) This Is a White Man's Country. Let White Men Rule.
E) I "See More" Peace and Prosperity Ahead with Real Reconstruction.

Question 25

The most ambitious, but least successful, of the Radical Republicans' aims was:

A) land reform.
B) black suffrage.
C) federal protection of civil rights.
D) public education.
E) reunification of the Union.

Question 26

During Reconstruction, southern state governments helped to finance:

A) railroads.
B) canals.
C) telegraph lines.
D) interstate roads.
E) colonization of freedmen and freedwomen.

Question 27

Black officeholders during Reconstruction:

A) were extremely rare.
B) were entirely carpetbaggers and scalawags.
C) helped ensure a degree of fairness in treatment of African-American citizens.
D) were limited to local offices.
E) demonstrated that whites had lost all of their political power in the South.

Question 28

What early 1868 action by Andrew Johnson sparked his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives?

A) He fired Secretary of State William Seward, an ally of Radical Republicans.
B) He vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau.
C) He bribed a Republican senator to support his Reconstruction policies.
D) He defiantly released a letter showing he had given support to the Confederacy in 1863.
E) He allegedly violated the Tenure of Office Act.

Question 29

"Waving the bloody shirt" referred to:

A) a powerful symbol of Ku Klux Klan violence against African-Americans.
B) a Democratic campaign prop that reminded voters that Republicans had been responsible for the Civil War.
C) a Republican attempt to associate Democrats with secession and treason.
D) a sign of surrender that southern whites used to signify their loss of power.
E) Andrew Johnson's use of Abraham Lincoln's death for political purposes.

Question 30

In March 1867, Congress began Radical Reconstruction by adopting the __________, which created new state governments and provided for black male suffrage in the South.

A) Fourteenth Amendment
B) Fifteenth Amendment
C) Civil Rights Act of 1867
D) Sumner-Stevens Act
E) Reconstruction Act

Question 31

The Fourteenth Amendment:

A) passed despite the opposition of Charles Sumner.
B) specifically defined suffrage as one of the civil rights to which freedpeople were entitled.
C) represented a compromise between the moderate and conservative positions on race.
D) marked the most important change in the U.S. Constitution since the Bill of Rights.
E) placed into the U.S. Constitution an essential holding of the Dred Scott decision.

Question 32

All of the following are true of passage of the Fifteenth Amendment EXCEPT:

A) it split the feminist movement into two major organizations.
B) the Democratic Party bitterly opposed it.
C) it led the American Anti-Slavery Society to disband.
D) it opened the door to voting restrictions not based on race.
E) it aided the election of Ulysses Grant to the presidency in 1868.

Question 33

With the beginning of Radical Reconstruction, southern African-Americans in the late 1860s and early 1870s took direct action to remedy long-standing grievances. These actions included:

A) sit-ins that helped to integrate horse-drawn streetcars in southern cities.
B) protest marches that desegregated public school systems in all the Upper South states.
C) violent attacks to intimidate Democratic voters from participating in politics.
D) the creation for the first time of all-black churches.
E) a series of lawsuits that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court's declaring segregation unconstitutional.

Question 34

Most of those termed "scalawags" during Reconstruction had been:

A) owners of large southern plantations before the Civil War.
B) non-slaveholding white farmers from the southern up-country prior to the Civil War.
C) enslaved African-Americans before emancipation.
D) Union soldiers during the war, but then they decided to stay in the South.
E) Confederate officers and Confederate government officials during the Civil War.

Question 35

Why was Andrew Johnson acquitted on charges of impeachment?

A) Johnson's lawyers assured moderate Republicans that he would behave for the rest of his term, so several voted to acquit him.
B) No one would testify against him.
C) Leading Radical Republican Benjamin Wade brilliantly managed the president's defense.
D) Ulysses Grant urged Republicans to acquit Johnson because convicting him might hurt Grant's chances in the presidential election.
E) Many feared a constitutional crisis because, without a vice president in office, no one knew who would succeed Johnson as president.

Question 36

During Reconstruction, those like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone who supported a woman's right to vote:

A) all endorsed the Fifteenth Amendment even though it did not guarantee female suffrage.
B) all opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not guarantee female suffrage.
C) found themselves divided over whether or not to support the Fifteenth Amendment.
D) strongly supported the Fifteenth Amendment because it did guarantee female suffrage.
E) refused to take a position on the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not define citizenship.

Question 37

Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce were the first two black:

A) members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
B) governors.
C) mayors of southern towns.
D) U.S. senators.
E) federal judges.

Question 38

The Civil Rights Bill of 1866:

A) was proposed by border-state Democrats.
B) provided African-Americans with the right to vote.
C) defined the rights of American citizens without regard to race.
D) allowed states to determine essential citizenship standards.
E) won the support of President Andrew Johnson.

Question 39

The Fifteenth Amendment:

A) sought to guarantee that one could not be denied suffrage rights based on race.
B) made states responsible for determining all voter qualifications.
C) granted women the right to vote in federal but not state elections.
D) was endorsed by President Andrew Johnson.
E) was drafted by Susan B. Anthony.

Question 40

Which of the following is NOT true of Thaddeus Stevens?

A) He was an outspoken opponent of slavery before the Civil War.
B) During the Civil War, he called for arming African-Americans.
C) He proposed confiscating land from disloyal planters and dividing it among former slaves.
D) He represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.
E) He was a strong supporter of racial equality during Reconstruction.

Question 41

Which of the following was NOT an accomplishment of southern governments run by Republicans during Reconstruction?

A) state-supported public schools
B) widespread transformation of plantations into black-owned farms
C) pioneering civil rights legislation
D) finance of railroad construction in the region
E) tax incentives to attract northern manufacturers to invest in the region

Question 42

The two maps of the Barrow Plantation demonstrate:

A) that little changed in the South after the Civil War.
B) the African-American commitment to education.
C) that slaves tried to move as far away as possible from their old masters.
D) that African-Americans had no interest in building their own churches.
E) that African-Americans were content to live in their old slave quarters.

Question 43

The bloodiest act of violence during Reconstruction took place in __________ in 1873, where armed whites killed hundreds of former slaves, including fifty militia members who had surrendered.

A) York County, South Carolina,
B) Marietta, Georgia,
C) Lynchburg, Virginia,
D) Colfax, Louisiana,
E) Guilford County, North Carolina,

Question 44

The election of 1876:

A) was won by Rutherford B. Hayes, by a landslide.
B) was finally decided by the Supreme Court.
C) marked the final stage of Reconstruction, which ended in 1880.
D) was tainted by claims of fraud in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana.
E) was won by Ulysses S. Grant, by a narrow count.

Question 45

The Whiskey Ring scandal took place during the administration of:

A) Abraham Lincoln.
B) Andrew Johnson.
C) Ulysses Grant.
D) Rutherford Hayes.
E) Chester Arthur.

Question 46

In 1875, when Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames asked President Grant for help because white rifle clubs had openly assaulted and murdered Republicans, Grant:

A) immediately sent troops to assist the governor.
B) arrested the white men responsible for the terror.
C) commended Ames for his swift actions.
D) accused Ames of falsifying reports in order to harm Democrats.
E) told Ames that the northern public was "tired out" with southern problems.

Question 47

The Liberal Republican movement in 1872:

A) sought stronger action to assure the political and social rights of African-Americans in the South.
B) was led by President Grant as a way of countering a Democratic resurgence in the southern states.
C) was successful in electing Rutherford B. Hayes president of the United States that year.
D) initially had little to do with Reconstruction but encouraged opposition to Grant's policies in the South.
E) drew most of its strength from southern black leaders such as James S. Pike and Albion Tourgée.

Question 48

By and large, white voters in the South returned prominent Confederates and members of the old elite to power during Presidential Reconstruction.

Question 49

In the 1870s, who claimed to have saved the white South from the corruption and misgovernment of northern and black officials?

A) Republicans
B) Carpetbaggers
C) Redeemers
D) Scalawags
E) Ulysses Grant

Question 50

The Enforcement Acts, passed by Congress in 1870 and 1871, were designed to:

A) end Reconstruction by allowing state governments to oversee citizenship rights.
B) stop the activities of terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
C) enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the Confederate states.
D) increase the authority of the Freedmen's Bureau.
E) eliminate racial discrimination in public spaces such as hotels and theaters.

Question 51

The Prostrate State depicts:

A) an ailing slave who is unable to live long enough to see emancipation.
B) South Carolina under allegedly corrupt Negro rule during Reconstruction.
C) an economically weak South unable to contribute to the national economy.
D) a terrorized black community during the reign of the Ku Klux Klan.
E) an apathetic Congress that has given up on Reconstruction after 1870.

Question 52

Black ministers during Reconstruction played a major role in politics, holding some 250 public offices.

Question 53

The Bargain of 1877:

A) allowed Samuel Tilden to become president.
B) led to the appointment of a southerner as postmaster general.
C) marked a compromise between Radical and Liberal Republicans.
D) called for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.
E) was made by Grant to prevent his impeachment over the Whiskey Ring.

Question 54

The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s is sometimes called the:

A) Equality Era.
B) Gilded Age.
C) Socialist Era.
D) Information Age.
E) Second Reconstruction.

Question 55

Southern Republicans during Reconstruction:

A) excluded former Confederates from their ranks.
B) established the South's first state-supported schools.
C) redistributed most former plantation lands to freedmen and poor whites.
D) helped elect African-American governors in four states.
E) ran the most corrupt governments in American history.

Question 56

Because of land redistribution, the vast majority of rural freedmen and freedwomen prospered during Reconstruction.

Question 57

By the mid-1870s, white farmers were cultivating as much as 80 percent of the region's cotton crop.

Question 58

The Civil War was devastating to the South, which lost nearly one-fifth of its white adult male population.

Question 59

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Slaughterhouse Cases that:

A) most rights of citizens are under the control of state governments rather than the federal government.
B) states cannot interfere with vigorous federal enforcement of a broad array of civil rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
C) the federal government has sole authority under the Commerce Clause to regulate the meatpacking industry.
D) voting rights of African-Americans under the Fifteenth Amendment cannot be abridged or denied by any state.
E) Reconstruction had progressed too far and was now officially ended.

Question 60

Compared to rebels in the rest of world history, the rebels of the defeated Confederacy were treated very harshly.

Question 61

With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, all people born in the United States were automatically citizens.

Question 62

In Mississippi in 1875, white rifle clubs drilled in public and openly assaulted and murdered Republicans.

Question 63

Opponents of Radical Reconstruction could not accept the idea of former slaves voting, holding office, and enjoying equality before the law.

Question 64

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 became the first major law in American history to be passed over a presidential veto.

Question 65

As part of the Bargain of 1877, President Grant appointed a southerner to his cabinet.

Question 66

James Pike's The Prostrate State was in support of the black Republican governments in the South during Reconstruction.

Question 67

The 1873 depression strengthened the North's resolve to ensure the success of Reconstruction since the depression really hurt the South's farmers, highlighting the need for reform in the region.

Question 68

Black suffrage made little difference in the South as very few blacks voted or ran for public office during Reconstruction.

Question 69

Investment opportunities in the West lured more northern investors than in the South, and economic development in the South remained weak.

Question 70

In the pre-Columbia Americas, some of the societies grandest in scale and organization were in present-day:

A) Canada.
B) Cuba and Puerto Rico.
C) United States.
D) Mexico and Central America.
E) Brazil.

Question 71

In 1870, Hiram Revels became the first black U.S. senator in American history.

Question 72

The Senate, following the House's impeachment vote, removed Andrew Johnson from office.

Question 73

Lucy Stone favored the Fifteenth Amendment and established the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Question 74

The Ku Klux Klan was an organization of the lower classes of the South-those who felt left out of white society.

Question 75

The Slaughterhouse Cases are an example of the Supreme Court whittling away at the freedoms gained by the blacks during Reconstruction.

Question 76

White southern Democrats considered scalawags traitors to both their party and their race.

Question 77

While Republicans were in power in the South, they established the region's first state-supported public schools.

Question 78

When the Union was restored by 1870, the southern states had Democratic majorities.

Question 79

The 1868 presidential campaign did not appeal to racism but only to economic concerns.

Question 80

Thaddeus Stevens's most cherished aim was to confiscate the land of disloyal planters and divide it among former slaves and northern migrants to the South.