Period 4: 1800-1848

Steamboat

Paddlewheelers that could travel both up- and down-river in deep or shallow waters.

Erie Canal

Most important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation's largest port.

Cotton Kingdom

Cotton-producing region, relying predominantly on slave labor, which spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and reached as far north as southern Illinois.

Cotton gin

Invented by Eli Whitney in 1793, the machine that separated cotton seed from cotton fiber, speeding cotton processing and making profitable the cultivation of the more hardy, but difficult to clean, short-staple cotton.

Porkopolis

Nickname of Cincinnati, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, after its numerous slaughterhouses.

American system of manufactures

A system of production that relied on the mass production of interchangeable parts that could be rapidly assembled into standardized finished products.

Mill girls

Women who worked at textile mills during the industrial revolution who enjoyed new freedoms and independence not seen before.

Nativism

Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent from the 1830s through the 1850s.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward

1819 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the original charter of the college against New Hampshire's attempt to alter the board of trustees; set the precedent of support of contracts against state interference.

Gibbons v. Ogden

1824 U.S. Supreme Court decision reinforcing the "commerce clause" (the federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce) of the Constitution; Chief Justice John Marshall ruled against the State of New York's granting of steamboat monopolies.

Manifest destiny

Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage U.S. settlement of European colonial and Native lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.

Transcendentalists

Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self-reliance.

Second Great Awakening

Religious revival movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the growth of secularism and rationalist religion.

Individualism

Term that entered the language in the 1820s to describe the increasing emphasis on the pursuit of personal advancement and private fulfillment free of outside interference.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Religious sect founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; it was a product of the intense revivalism of the "burned-over district" of New York.

Cult of domesticity

The nineteenth-century ideology of "virtue" and "modesty" as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.

Family wage

Idea that male workers should earn a wage sufficient to support their family without their wives having to work outside the home.

The “peculiar institution”

A phrase used by whites in the antebellum South to refer to slavery without using the word "slavery."

Second Middle Passage

The massive trade of slaves from the upper South (Virginia and the Chesapeake) to the lower South (the Gulf states) that took place between 1820 and 1860.

Paternalism

A moral position developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, which claimed that slaves were deprived of liberty for their own "good." Such a rationalization was adopted by some slaveowners to justify slavery.

Proslavery argument

The series of arguments defending the institution of slavery in the South as a positive good, not a necessary evil. The arguments included the racist belief that Black people were inherently inferior to white people, as well as the belief that slavery, in creating a permanent underclass of laborers, made freedom possible for whites. Other elements of the argument included biblical citations.

“Cotton is king”

Phrase from Senator James Henry Hammond's speech extolling the virtues of cotton and, implicitly, the slave system of production that led to its bounty for the South. "King Cotton" became a shorthand phrase for southern political and economic power.

Fugitive slaves

Slaves who escaped from their owners.

Underground Railroad

Operating in the decades before the Civil War, a clandestine system of routes and safehouses through which slaves were led to freedom in the North.

Harriet Tubman

Abolitionist who was born a slave, escaped to the North, and then returned to the South nineteen times and guided 300 slaves to freedom.

The Amistad

Ship that transported slaves from one port in Cuba to another, seized by the slaves in 1839. They made their way northward to the United States, where the status of the slaves became the subject of a celebrated court case.

Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy

An 1822 failed slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, purported to have been led by Denmark Vesey, a free Black man.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

An 1831 insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, led by an enslaved preacher, resulting in the death of about sixty white persons.

Democracy in America

Two works, published in 1835 and 1840, by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville on the subject of American democracy. Tocqueville stressed the cultural nature of American democracy and the importance and prevalence of equality in American life.

Franchise

The right to vote.

American System

Program of internal improvements and protective tariffs promoted by Speaker of the House Henry Clay in his presidential campaign of 1824.

Tariff of 1816

First true protective tariff, intended to protect certain American goods against foreign competition.

Panic of 1819

Financial collapse brought on by sharply falling cotton prices, declining demand for American exports, and reckless western land speculation.

McCulloch v. Maryland

1819 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice John Marshall, holding that Maryland could not tax the Second Bank of the United States, supported the authority of the federal government versus the states.

Era of Good Feelings

Contemporary characterization of the administration of popular Republican president James Monroe, 1817-1825.

Missouri Compromise

Deal proposed by Kentucky senator Henry Clay in 1820 to resolve the slave/free imbalance in Congress that would result from Missouri's admission as a slave state; Maine's admission as a free state offset Missouri, and slavery was prohibited in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory north of the southern border of Missouri.

Monroe Doctrine

President James Monroe's declaration to Congress on December 2, 1823, that the American continents would be thenceforth closed to European colonization, and that the United States would not interfere in European affairs.

Spoils system

The custom of filling federal government jobs with persons loyal to the party of the president.

Tariff of abominations

Tariff passed in 1828 by Congress that taxed imported goods at a very high rate; aroused strong opposition in the South.

Exposition and Protest

Document written in 1828 by Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina to protest the so-called tariff of abominations, which seemed to favor northern industry.

Nullification crisis

The 1832 attempt by the State of South Carolina to nullify, or invalidate within its borders, the 1832 federal tariff law.

Force Act

1833 legislation, sparked by the nullification crisis in South Carolina, authorizing the president's use of the army to compel states to comply with federal law.

Indian Removal Act

An 1830 law signed by President Andrew Jackson that permitted the negotiation of treaties to obtain Native Americans' lands in exchange for their deportation to what would become Oklahoma.

Worcester v. Georgia

1832 Supreme Court case that held that the Indian nations were distinct peoples who could not be dealt with by the states-instead, only the federal government could negotiate with them.

Trail of Tears

Cherokee's own term for their forced removal, 1838-1839, from the Southeast to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma).

Bank War

Political struggle in the early 1830s between President Jackson and financier Nicholas Biddle over the renewing of the Second Bank's charter.

Soft money and hard money

In the 1830s, "soft money" referred to paper currency issued by banks. "Hard money" referred to gold and silver currency-also called specie.

Pet banks

Local banks that received deposits while the charter of the Bank of the United States was about to expire in 1836.

Panic of 1837

Beginning of major economic depression lasting about six years; touched off by a British financial crisis and made worse by falling cotton prices, credit and currency problems, and speculation in land, canals, and railroads.