50 Fun Facts About Reconstruction Era

Which state ratified the constitutional ban on slavery only in 1995 and filed the paperwork in 2013?

Mississippi had rejected the amendment on December 5, 1865, a day before enough other states approved it to make it law. Its symbolic 1995 vote then sat uncertified for 18 years.

Which actor reportedly vowed that Abraham Lincoln's call for Black voting rights would be his last speech?

John Wilkes Booth stood in the crowd outside the White House on April 11, 1865, as Lincoln backed votes for former slaves. Booth shot him three days later at Ford's Theatre.

Which holiday marks the day in 1865 when a Union general announced in Galveston, Texas, that slavery was over?

Juneteenth blends June and nineteenth, the date General Gordon Granger's order reached Texas. Few Union troops had been stationed there, so the Emancipation Proclamation had gone largely unenforced.

Which Union general's land order for freed families inspired the phrase 'forty acres and a mule'?

William T. Sherman issued the order four days after meeting twenty Black ministers and lay leaders in Savannah. Andrew Johnson moved to undo it within months, promising pardoned Confederates their property back.

Which trade did Andrew Johnson, who never attended school, practice in Greeneville before entering politics?

Tailor was the trade Johnson was apprenticed to as a boy, and he ran away from his master after about five years. His wife later tutored him in mathematics and writing.

Which suffragist, arrested for voting in 1872, argued that the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the right?

Susan B. Anthony was convicted after the judge directed the jury to find her guilty. Fined $100, she said she would never pay a dollar of it, and she never did.

Which insult was aimed at Northerners, many of them Union veterans, who moved south after the Civil War?

Carpetbaggers were named for the carpet bag, cheap luggage made of carpet fabric that many of the newcomers carried. Critics cast them as opportunists out to exploit the defeated South.

Which constitutional amendment, ratified eight months after Appomattox, abolished slavery in every state?

The Thirteenth Amendment reached people the Emancipation Proclamation had skipped. Slavery was still legal in loyal Kentucky and Delaware until the amendment took effect in December 1865.

Which Confederate leader spent two years imprisoned at Fort Monroe on a treason charge and never stood trial?

Jefferson Davis walked free in 1867 on $100,000 bail, put up by backers including railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. The case was dropped after Andrew Johnson's Christmas 1868 amnesty.

Which agency, created in March 1865, built schools and negotiated labor contracts for formerly enslaved people?

The Freedmen's Bureau also helped families torn apart by slavery to reunite and performed marriages for freed couples. It operated only until 1872.

Which Southern state laws of 1865 and 1866 let officials arrest freedpeople as vagrants and force them to work?

Black Codes struck Republicans in Congress as slavery returning under another name. They answered by writing the Fourteenth Amendment.

Which farming arrangement tied many freed families in the postwar South to a landowner's fields and a merchant's credit?

Sharecropping paid families with a portion of the crop they raised instead of wages. A poor harvest left them owing the merchant, and working another year to clear the debt.

Which 1857 Supreme Court ruling was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship by birth?

Dred Scott v. Sandford had held that Americans descended from enslaved Africans could never be citizens. The amendment's first sentence erased that by granting citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil.

Which part of the Fourteenth Amendment did Brown v. Board of Education use to outlaw segregated schools?

The Equal Protection Clause had been read the opposite way in 1896, when the Supreme Court upheld segregated rail cars. Brown reversed that reading 58 years later.

Which former Confederate state, Andrew Johnson's home, was the first readmitted to the Union, in July 1866?

Tennessee earned its early return by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, against Johnson's wishes. Every other former Confederate state at first rejected the amendment.

To which party did Andrew Johnson belong when he joined Abraham Lincoln's ticket as running mate in 1864?

Democratic loyalties were the point: Johnson was the one senator from a Confederate state who kept his seat. He and Lincoln ran on a 'National Union' ticket to draw in War Democrats.

What name is given to the backroom deal, reportedly struck at Wormley's Hotel, that made Rutherford B. Hayes president?

The Compromise of 1877 gave Hayes the White House, and he pulled the last federal troops out of the South. Many Black Southerners called it the Great Betrayal.

Which New York governor, who had helped bring down Boss Tweed, won the popular vote in 1876 but lost the presidency?

Samuel J. Tilden finished with 184 electoral votes, one short of a majority. A special panel then awarded all 20 disputed votes to his rival, each time by 8 votes to 7.

Which minister, seated in the U.S. Senate in 1870, was the first African American to serve in Congress?

Hiram Revels had helped recruit two Black regiments for the Union army and served as a chaplain. Senators voted 48 to 8 to seat him, with every opponent a Democrat.

Into what did the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 group ten former Confederate states until they formed new governments?

Military districts, five in all, were run by the Army until a state accepted the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Black men the vote. Congress passed the measure over Andrew Johnson's veto.

Which 1867 law did Andrew Johnson defy by dismissing his Secretary of War, triggering his impeachment?

The Tenure of Office Act barred a president from removing certain officials without the Senate's approval. Congress repealed it in 1887, and the Supreme Court later said it had probably been invalid.

Which Secretary of War barricaded himself inside the War Department for weeks after Andrew Johnson tried to fire him?

Edwin Stanton held out until Johnson was acquitted, then resigned. In 1869 he was confirmed to the Supreme Court and died four days later, before he could take his seat.

Which Kansas Republican cast the decisive vote that kept Andrew Johnson in the White House, then lost his own seat?

Edmund G. Ross helped leave the count at 35 to 19, one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict. John F. Kennedy later featured him in Profiles in Courage.

Which Chief Justice, later pictured on the $10,000 bill, presided over Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial?

Salmon P. Chase insisted that the Senate sit as a true court of law. That same year he sought the opposition party's nomination for president, having tried for the Republican one in 1860.

Which Pennsylvania congressman led the House Radical Republicans and chose burial in a cemetery open to all races?

Thaddeus Stevens had the reason carved on his tombstone: to illustrate in death the 'equality of man before his Creator'. He died months after leading Andrew Johnson's impeachment.

Which Massachusetts Radical, caned on the Senate floor in 1856, championed racial equality during Reconstruction?

Charles Sumner spent his final days lobbying for a bill to open public places to all races, and on his deathbed begged visitors not to let it fail. It became law in 1875, a year after he died.

Which law, passed over Andrew Johnson's veto, was the first to declare people born in the United States citizens?

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first major bill Congress ever passed over a president's veto. Doubts about whether it was constitutional led Congress to write its guarantees into the Fourteenth Amendment.

How did Abraham Lincoln kill the Wade–Davis Bill, Congress's tougher 1864 terms for readmitting rebel states?

A pocket veto works by doing nothing: Congress adjourned and Lincoln simply left the bill unsigned. Its two sponsors hit back with a manifesto accusing him of usurping the power of Congress.

What is the usual name for Abraham Lincoln's lenient 1863 terms for bringing rebel states back into the Union?

The Ten Percent Plan let a state rejoin once a tenth of its 1860 voters swore allegiance and accepted emancipation. Radical Republicans opposed it as far too easy on the South.

Which phrase from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address promised the defeated South a forgiving peace?

'With malice toward none, with charity for all' opened the speech's final sentence, which urged Americans to bind up the nation's wounds. Lincoln was shot 41 days later.

Which insult, also a term for scrawny cattle, did critics hurl at white Southerners who backed Reconstruction?

Scalawags joined freedpeople and Northern newcomers in a Republican coalition that at some point governed every former Confederate state except Virginia.

Which Confederate cavalry general, a prewar slave trader, became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan?

Nathan Bedford Forrest owed the title to his wartime nickname, 'the Wizard of the Saddle'. In 1869 he ordered the Klan dissolved and its costumes destroyed, then withdrew from it.

Which federal body, created in 1870, won more than 550 convictions of Ku Klux Klan members under Ulysses S. Grant?

The Department of Justice was turned on the Klan almost at once by Attorney General Amos Akerman. Prosecutions were halted in 1873, partly because the flood of cases had outrun its manpower.

Which historically Black school in Washington, D.C., chartered in 1867, is named for a one-armed Union general?

Howard University honors Oliver Otis Howard, who helped found it while running the federal agency for freedpeople. He had lost his right arm leading his men at the Battle of Seven Pines.

Which enslaved pilot sailed a Confederate ship out of Charleston to the Union fleet and later sat in Congress?

Robert Smalls stopped to pick up his wife and children on the way out of the harbor. After the war he went home to Beaufort and bought the house of the man who had enslaved him.

Which Louisiana politician, sworn in for about five weeks in 1872, is commonly called America's first Black governor?

P. B. S. Pinchback stepped in when Louisiana's governor was impeached, and ten bills became law in his 35 days. No other Black American served as a state governor until Douglas Wilder in 1990.

Which former barber, who escaped the Confederacy to Bermuda, became the first Black member of the U.S. House in 1870?

Joseph Rainey had been conscripted to work on Confederate fortifications in Charleston before he got away. In 1874 he became the first Black American to preside over the House.

Which state was the last readmitted to the Union, in July 1870, after its legislature had expelled its Black members?

Georgia had already been readmitted once, in 1868, before white lawmakers threw out their Black colleagues. A monument at the state capitol names 33 of them, 'Expelled Because of Their Color'.

Which Confederate general joined the Republicans and led Black militia against the White League in New Orleans in 1874?

James Longstreet, whom Lee called his 'Old War Horse', was shot and unhorsed in the street fighting. His politics and his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant made him anathema to many fellow ex-Confederates.

Which New York newspaper editor lost the 1872 presidential race and died before the electors could cast their votes?

Horace Greeley was crushed by his wife's death five days before the election and died a month later. Of his 66 electors, 63 scattered their votes among four other men.

Which famous abolitionist was made president of the Freedman's Savings Bank just months before it collapsed in 1874?

Frederick Douglass took charge in late March 1874, and the bank went bankrupt on June 29. It had been dragged down by speculative loans made by its white officials.

Which system of forced prison labor supplied 73 percent of Alabama's state revenue in 1898?

Convict leasing let Southern states rent out prisoners, nearly all of them Black, to private companies and individuals. Contractors could pay as little as $9 a month for a man's labor.

Which voting device did the Supreme Court strike down in Guinn v. United States in 1915?

Grandfather clauses spared a man the literacy test if his ancestors could vote before the Civil War, keeping poor white men on the rolls and Black men off. The term now covers any exemption for people already inside a system.

Which 1896 Supreme Court ruling upheld 'separate but equal' rail cars, sealing the retreat from Reconstruction?

Plessy v. Ferguson began as a planned test case: Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only car in New Orleans. Only one justice sided with him.

Which 1915 film, screened at the White House, cast Reconstruction as a disaster and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes?

The Birth of a Nation was adapted from a novel called The Clansman. It is acknowledged as an inspiration for the Klan's rebirth, which came only a few months after its release.

Which mocking title dogged President Rutherford B. Hayes for all four years he spent in the White House?

'His Fraudulency' and the pun 'Rutherfraud' came from Democrats who never accepted his disputed 1876 victory. Hayes declined to run again in 1880, keeping his pledge to serve a single term.

Which body of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices did Congress create to decide who had won the presidency in 1876?

The Electoral Commission was meant to be evenly split, with one independent justice as the swing vote. He bowed out to take a Senate seat, a Republican replaced him, and the Republicans won.

Which 1873 Supreme Court ruling on a Louisiana monopoly sharply narrowed the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment?

The Slaughter-House Cases were brought by New Orleans butchers, not freedpeople, yet the 5–4 ruling shaped the amendment for generations. It held that one key clause covered only the rights of national citizenship.

Which constitutional amendment, ratified in 1870, barred states from denying the vote on account of race or color?

The Fifteenth Amendment drew opposition from within the women's suffrage movement, long allied with abolitionists, because it left women out. Southern states later hollowed it out with poll taxes and literacy tests.

Which city's three days of mob attacks on Black residents in May 1866 fueled support for Radical Reconstruction?

Memphis lost every Black church and school to arson, and a congressional report counted 46 Black people killed. The outrage helped Radical Republicans sweep that autumn's elections.