Freedmen were offered 40 acres of land and a mule

Freedmen were offered 40 acres of land and a mule, that would become the symbol of
freedom
● The Freedmen’s Bureau’s head, General O.O. Howard expanded Sherman’s policy and
for land to be set aside for blacks
● Johnson did not support the Bureau, ordered Howard to restore their land and issued
pardons to former plantation owners
● SC was a strong Reconstruction state and established a state land commission that
provided land to black families, town known as Promised Land
● The best economic opportunity for former slaves was to return to their old plantations and
work as paid employees
● In the Johnson - Reconstruction Era, southern states passed laws that made it illegal for
blacks to be unemployed so they had to take jobs that were offered or be jailed
● Working black citizens became wage workers and did not like it because of how low
their wages were and had to work in the same place they were slaves
● Sharecropping - labor system that evolved during and after Reconstruction whereby
landowners furnished laborers with a house, farm animals, tools, and advanced credit in

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exchange for a share of the laborers’ crops, would be paid by Christmas for work, not a
lot of money
● Sharecropping began on sugar plantations in LA
● Landowners did not like the independence that their workers had, developed a cred
system whereby a plantation store sold everything from food to clothing on credit to the
sharecroppers to be repaid when the crop was harvested, was a good way for plantation
owners to make as much money in their stores and their crops, made workers fall into
debt
● Sharecropping became the primary means of agricultural organization in much of the
South
15.3 Terror, Apathy, and the Creation of the Segregated South
Opposition to Black Rights and the Roots of “Redemption”
● Scalawags - a disparaging term for southern whites who supported the Southern
Republican Party during Reconstruction
● Carpetbaggers - term used by white Southerners for Northern transplants who came to
the South to help with Reconstruction, used this term because it was claimed Northerners
would carry everything they own in one suitcase covered by a carpet like material,
Southerners believed they only came to get rich
● Carpetbaggers were younger, less prosperous, some came for money, some came to
implement policies, some were veterans of the Union army
● Post Civil War Democratic Party was known as white only government, their goal was to
keep black rights limited and to have white exclude blacks from power so that whites
could dominate every aspect of society, politically, economically, and culturally, their
enemies were the African-Americans of the Union Leagues, scalawags and carpetbaggers
● Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of MS, Democrat, reserved in Congress before the
war, was a general in the Confederate Army, entered politics after the war, tried to ensure
white rule in MS, received a presidential pardon and won a seat in Congress, attacked