Houghton Mifflin Social Studies
Chapter 13, Lesson 3, Southern Life Under Reconstruction (pp. 391-397)
I. Forty Acres and a Mule
B. Black codes were passed, which legally forced blacks to carry
passes, keep curfews, live in only specific houses, and lose other rights.
C. Under the new system of sharecropping, black families raised
crops on land owned by someone else and then gave a share of
their crop to the landowner and kept a share of it themselves.
II. The Reaction of White Southerners
B. Southern whites limited black voting rights by adopting poll
taxes and rearranging voting districts.
C. Some white Southerners used violence through such groups as
the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize and murder black freedmen and their supporters.
III. The End of Reconstruction
B. In 1876, Republicans agreed to withdraw all federal
troops from the South as part of a presidential election bargain.
C. Once Federal troops left the South, blacks were no
longer protected and Reconstruction was over.
IV. Legacies of Reconstruction
B. Once federal troops withdrew from the South, many rights that blacks
had gained during Reconstruction were taken away and replaced by
segregation (legal separation of races).
C. The amendments passed during Reconstruction would later be used
to attack other forms of injustice and to support the civil rights
movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Lesson at a Glance Outline
A. Except for a brief period right at the end of the war, freed
blacks did not receive any land, which would have helped them
to become economically independent.
A. White Southerners gradually regained the right to vote and
elected Democrats, who claimed the right to resist federal laws,
to state offices.
A. By the mid 1870s, the South's refusal to accept
Reconstruction wore down the North, and intimidation
of blacks weakened the voting strength of the Republicans.
A. The most obvious effects of the Civil War were the end of slavery
and greater authority for the Federal government.
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