APUSH Knowt Units 1-5 (Mr. Paeth’s Edition)

Middle Passage

This term describes the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. It was one leg of the triangular trade route. From about 1518 to the mid-19th century, millions of African men, women, and children made the 21-to-90-day voyage aboard grossly overcrowded sailing ships manned by crews mostly from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France.

Slave Codes

Many states enacted these laws as early as the 17th century. These laws were state regulations governing the movement and activities of slaves. These goal was to prevent escape attempts, and to reduce the chances of any slaves gathering in large numbers for the purpose of revolts. South Carolina passed its first law in 1686. Additional laws were written after the Stono Rebellion of 1739.

Triangular Trade

This term describes trading patterns that developed among the American colonies, the West Indies, the coast of Africa, and the British Isles during the eighteenth century. In actuality, patterns of commerce were much more complicated than the term suggests. Many trading voyages involved more than three exchanges of goods, and others were limited to two ports. The term is most helpful, then, in suggesting the international and interactive character of American commerce at the time rather than describing a specific route.

Stono Rebellion

In 1739, approximately 20 slaves in South Carolina developed a plan for escaping to freedom in Spanish-held Florida. The slaves went to a shop that sold firearms, armed themselves, then killed the two shopkeepers who were manning the shop. Other slaves then joined the rebellion. By late that afternoon, they had killed twenty-five whites. By 4pm, local whites had set out in armed pursuit. By dusk, thirty rebel slaves were dead and most others were captured and executed. Tougher slave laws followed: no longer would slaves be allowed to grow their own food, assemble in groups, earn their own money, or learn to read.

Enlightenment

This was a cultural and philosophical movement that grew out of new methods of inquiry. The basic premise was the superiority of reason. In their scientific reasoning, intellectuals challenged traditional Christianity by opposing the teachings and dogma of the Catholic Church. These thinkers also contested the divine right of kings, and their writings inspired the American Revolution.

Great Awakening

This term describes the widespread evangelical revival movement of the 1740s and 1750s. Sparked by the tour of the English evangelical minister George Whitefield, revival divided congregations and weakened the authority of established churches in the colonies.

Jonathan Edwards

This theologian was an American revivalist of the Great Awakening. He was both deeply pious and passionately devoted to intellectual pursuits. His most popular sermon titled, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," appealed to thousands of re-awakened Christians.

Salem Witch Trials

This hysteria was precipitated when a nine-year-old girl attempted to divine the future in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When she and other girls subsequently began acting in peculiar ways, they were diagnosed as being under Satan's influence. The governor set up a Court of Oyer and Terminer (meaning "to hear and to determine") to examine the cases. Twenty-seven individuals were tried for witchcraft in1692; the 19 who refused to confess were executed.

Indentured Servants

Colonists who received free passage to North America in exchange for working without pay for a certain number of years.

Planters

Wealthy farmers with large plantations who owned more than 20 slaves.

Halfway Covenant

A Puritan church document; In 1662, the Halfway Covenant allowed partial membership rights to persons not yet converted into the Puritan church; It lessened the difference between the "elect" members of the church from the regular members; Women soon made up a larger portion of Puritan congregations.

Jamestown

This was the first successful English colony in the Americas--settled in 1607. However, it faced great hardships and a "starving time" due to disease and interference from surrounding Indian tribes.

Powhatan

Chief of the Powhatan Confederacy and father to Pocahontas. At the time of the English settlement of Jamestown in 1607, he was a friend to John Smith and John Rolfe. When Smith was captured by Indians, Powhatan left Smith's fate in the hands of his warriors. His daughter saved John Smith, and the Jamestown colony. Pocahontas and John Rolfe were wed, and there was a time of peace between the Indians and English until Powhatan's death.

Headright system

A land policy created in Virginia and Maryland designed to encourage settlement by providing 50 acres of land to anyone who settled in the colony

John Smith

Helped found and govern Jamestown. His leadership and strict discipline helped the Virginia colony get through the difficult first winter.

House of Burgesses

The first elected legislative assembly in the New World, formed in Virginia in 1619

Toleration Act

This act was passed in 1649 to allow a degree of religious freedom in Maryland. It was particularly intended to protect Catholics from persecution in a colony with a large Protestant population. It created one of the first statutes passed by a legislative body of an organized colonial government to guarantee any degree of religious liberty.

Bacon's Rebellion

This 1676 uprising in in the Virginia Colony was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen violently protested against the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, accusing him of levying unfair taxes, of appointing friends to high positions, and of failing to protect outlying farmers from Indian attack. After months of conflict, Jamestown was burned to the ground.

Plymouth-Pilgrims

English Separatists who drafted the Mayflower Compact and established Plymouth Plantation in 1620. They celebrated their survival with a Thanksgiving feast in 1621 with local Wampanoag Indians.

Mayflower Compact

This document written in 1620 by the Pilgrims establishing themselves as a "civil body politic" and setting guidelines for self-government for "the general good of the colony."

John Winthrop

He was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His "Model of Christian Charity" encouraged fellow Puritans to create a "city upon a hill." This organization of influential Puritan investors in England sponsored and organized a large expedition to North America in 1629 for the express purpose of establishing an independent Puritan community, free of what they saw as the corrupting influences of the Church of England. Centered in Boston, this company administered the colony during the region's early settlement.

Roger Williams

He was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for challenging Puritan ideas. He later established Rhode Island and helped it to foster religious toleration and separation of church and state.

Anne Hutchinson

She was a Massachusetts Bay Puritan who was banished for criticizing the colony's ministers and magistrates, and for her heresy of antinomianism. She then moved to the colony of Portsmouth in Rhode Island.

King Philip's War

This was the 1675-6 conflict between New England colonists and Native American Groups allied under Wampanoag chief Metacom. This war was the costliest in New England history and it largely crushed the Indian capacity for resistance

William Penn

He was the Quaker proprietor of a colony that became a refuge for persecuted Quakers. He treated Indians fairly, and his well-advertised colony became the most economically successful in English North America.

Quakers

Religious group that settled in Pennsylvania and led by William Penn—believed in equality, tolerance, and religious freedom

Navigation Acts

These laws were passed by Parliament to implement mercantilistic assumptions about trade. They were intended to regulate the flow of goods in imperial commerce to the greater benefit of the mother county. One of these laws, for example, called for imperial trade to be conducted using English or colonial ships with mainly English crews. Another law created vice-admiralty courts in the colonies.

Dominion of New England

In the 1680s, King James II reorganized the American colonies to bring greater imperial supervision of the New England colonies and New York. James II planned to combine eight northern colonies into a single large province, to be governed by a royal appointee (Sir Edmund Andros) with an appointed council but no elective assembly.

Joint Stock Company

Few individual merchants had the capital for the ships and cargoes needed to open new markets, let alone the wherewithal for warehousing, business permits, and living expenses in foreign ports. These chartered companies allowed a number of people invest money and agree to share liability and profits in proportion to their investment. Because it could provide a greater fund of capital, these companies became the preferred instrument for extending English trade to new markets.

Starving Time

The winter of 1609 to 1610 was known as the "starving time" to the colonists of Virginia. Only sixty members of the original four-hundred colonists survived. The rest died of starvation because they did not possess the skills that were necessary to obtain food in the new world.

John Rolfe

He was one of the English settlers at Jamestown (and he married Pocahontas). He discovered how to successfully grow tobacco in Virginia and cure it for export, which made Virginia an economically successful colony.

Pocanhontas

A Native American that was the daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan, the ruler of the Powhatan tribal nation. This tribal nation included around 30 Algonquian communities located in the Tidewater region of Virginia. She married John Rolfe.

Chesapeake Colonies

Term for the colonies of Maryland and Virginia.

City Upon a Hill/Arbella Sermon

A phrase that is associated with John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," given in 1630. Winthrop warned the Puritan colonists of New England who were to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony that their new community would be a "city upon a hill," watched by the world.

New England Colonies

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire

Middle Colonies

New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware

Southern Colonies

Made money by having slaves grow cash crops on plantations due to rich soil and warm climate. Included Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Christopher Columbus

Navigator of the first recorded European expedition to cross the Atlantic Ocean in search of the elusive route to Asia, this explorer landed instead on islands in the Caribbean Sea. His voyage, which was well publicized in Europe, stimulated exploration of what was for 15th-century Europeans an undiscovered world, the Americas.

encomienda system

This system was created by the Spanish to control and regulate American Indian labor and behavior during the colonization of the Americas. Under the this system, conquistadors and other leaders received grants of a number of Indians, from whom they could exact "tribute" in the form of gold or labor. The Spanish leaders were supposed to protect and Christianize the Indians granted to them, but they most often used the system to effectively enslave the Indians and take their lands.

Pueblo Revolt

Also known as Popé's Rebellion — this an uprising of most of Native Americans against the Spanish colonizers in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, present day New Mexico. The revolt killed 400 Spanish and drove the remaining 2,000 settlers out of the province. Twelve years later the Spanish returned and were able to reoccupy New Mexico with little opposition.

Columbian Exchange

The exchange of plants, animals, foods, human populations, communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres after Columbus's voyage in 1492. For example, the Americas offered tomatoes, potatoes, corn, squash, strawberries, and buffalo to Europe, while Europe gave wheat, sugar, tea, coffee, horses, cattle, and smallpox to the Americas.

mercantilism

This economic theory advocated a favorable balance of trade to guarantee the economic self-sufficiency of a nation and the growth of its wealth and power. Supporters of this theory advocated possession of colonies as places where the mother country could acquire raw materials not available at home.

Puritans

In the years between the mid-16th century and the early 17th century, this group of reformers developed within the Church of England who wanted to steer the church toward a more Protestant, Calvinistic theology and purge the church of all remnants of Catholicism. These reformers acquired their name because of the desire to purify the Church of England. Some saw that the discovery of the New World as an unique opportunity: they could create a model church in America as an example, a "city on a hill" for all to follow. In the 1630s, the they established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which quickly grew to have a population of several thousand people, many of them centered in Boston but others scattered throughout New England.

Predestination

Calvin's religious theory that God has already planned out a person's life.

Plain Folk

most common southerners, who were modest yeoman farmers. They owned few slaves or none at all. They either farmed for subsistence farming or grew cotton or other crops. These people were not part of the planter class and likely would never become part of it.

Peculiar Institution

a term for the southern system slavery that described its uniqueness in the fact that southern viewed it as special. In some ways, blacks had their own culture within slavery, and on the other, there was a unique bond between the enslaved blacks and white ‘masters’.

Slave Codes

special laws in southern states designed to control enslaved peoples, limit their ability to congregate, move, and restricted most freedoms.

Paternalism

the idea that slave owners acted in a fatherly or motherly role to enslaved people. In another sense, it was a view that African Americans were a lesser class than whites in the south.

Underground Railroad

system where many enslaved people escaped for freedom to the north. Conductors on this system, took enslaved persons from safe house to safe house on the long journey to freedom in the north or Canada.

Harriet Tubman

Escaped slave and leader on the Underground Railroad who helped dozens of people to their freedom.

Hudson River School

group of painters who incorporated nationalism and influence of European romanticism into their paintings, showing the beauty of American nature in landscapes.

Transcendentalism

movement of New England writers and philosophers who embraced a theory of the individual that rested on peoples’ reason, or ability to grasp beauty and truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

a transcendentalist leader in Massachusetts who left being a minister to devote his life to transcendentalism. He became a lecturer. He wrote his “Nature” essay and later “Self-Reliance”.

Henry David Thoreau

a transcendentalist who wrote about resisting conforming to societal norms. He lived alone near Walden Pond and wrote his book Walden. He later believed in civil disobedience, or protesting unjust laws by breaking them.

Mormons/Brigham Young

religious group or the leader who brought them West. They believed Adam Smith was spoken to by God. This group was run out of New York and later the Midwest because of their views that men could have multiple wives.

Temperance

antebellum reform movement focused on abstaining from alcohol. It was influence by the Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution, where it was feared men would leave their wives and children in need as they drank life away.

Horace Mann

school reformer and educational leader in Massachusetts who pushed for public education, the education of teachers, lengthened the school year, and helped organize curriculum. 

Normal Schools

a precursor to teaching schools, these were two years schools to prepare teachers to teach.

Dorothea Dix

reformer who began a national movement to change the treatment of the mentally ill.

Seneca Falls Convention

1848 New York meeting of women and men to organize and push for women’s rights in the United States. It was the first meeting of its kind.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Lucretia Mott/Susan B. Anthony

Leaders at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and early women’s rights and suffrage leaders.

Declaration of Sentiments

introductory speech at Seneca Falls Convention which laid out grievances against men and the government. It’s structure was much like the Declaration of Independence.

American Colonization Society

early abolitionist group which sought to buy enslaved peoples’ freedom and send them to the colony of Liberia in Western Africa.

William Lloyd Garrison

ardent and fiery abolitionist who started the newspaper The Liberator. He was more extreme and impatient. than prior abolitionists

Abolition

belief that slavery should be outlawed.

Frederick Douglass

escaped slave and abolitionist whose written and spoken words inspired abolitionists in the US and in Europe. He is very well known for his speech “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”

Free-Soil/Free-Soilers

political organizers or belief that any new territories should be settled as non-slave areas in the US. This group largely was before the Republican party.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe which showed more of a human side to slavery and rallied many who were previously indifferent to slavery, against it.

Manifest Destiny

belief that it was God’s plan and America’s fate to spread the North American continent

Alamo

Battle that became a battle cry for Texans in their war for independence from Mexico.  This locations’ inhabitants made their last stand, dying to the last man, against a stronger Mexican army.

Oregon Trail

trail that many settlers took to the American northwest. It passed through various lands inhabited by natives and through the Rocky Mountains. This was a dangerous pass. It was also a popular PC game in the early 1990s. Many of your teachers may have played it.

James K. Polk

President of US, elected in 1844.  He was a strong proponent of Manifest Destiny and sought to take Texas and the Oregon territory.

“54° 40’ or Fight!”

slogan for James K. Polk’s 1844 election campaign that meant he wanted all of the disputed Oregon territory from Britain/Canada.

Mexican American War

war between the US and its southern neighbor that was sparked by the US annexation of Texas. It took place between 1846-1848.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

treaty that ended the Mexican American War. It ceded Texas and much of the current US southwest from Mexico to the US. It also allowed Mexicans in this area to become citizens of the US.

Mexican Cession

land given up by Mexico from the Mexican American War. It was significant because it was the largest land addition to the US since the Louisiana Purchase.

Wilmot Proviso

1846 proposed amendment to a war spending bill by a northern congressman. In hit, he proposed outlawing slavery in any lands won from the Mexican American War. It passed the House of Representatives, but did not pass the Senate and failed. It did further increase sectional tensions around the future of slavery.

Popular Sovereignty

idea during the antebellum period of westward expansion that people of a territory should vote to determine if the territory would become a free or slave state.  It was championed by Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois.

49ers/Gold Rush

term for people or the movement of people that headed to California to make it rich off precious metals in the ground.

Stephen Douglas

Democratic Senator from Illinois who came up with Kansas Nebraska Act. He is famous too for his 1856 debates for Senate against Abraham Lincoln across Illinois. He was a champion of popular sovereignty and the transcontinental railroad. He ran for president in 1860, losing to Lincoln.

Compromise of 1850

settlement which came about as California was being debated for statehood after the Mexican American War.  It included many parts, including the outlawing of the slave trade in Washington DC, a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, California as a free state, and Utah and New Mexico to be determined by popular sovereignty.   

Fugitive Slave Act

part of the Compromise of 1850 which made northern states help return escaped enslaved peoples or risk being punished themselves. The south liked this law a lot. Some northern states sought to nullify it. Many in the north despised it because it made them part of the system of slavery.

Kansas Nebraska Act

1854 law that divided up part of the Missouri Compromise and Louisiana Purchase to allow for popular sovereignty in two new territories in the west.  It was the idea of Stephen Douglas and caused violence and immense tension.

Republican Party

a party of the Third Party System that was made up of former Whigs, anti slavery Democrats, and Free Soilers. Their main platform in the mid 1850s was to stop the spread of slavery to new territories.

“Bleeding Kansas”

term for the violence that took place in a western state after the Kansas Nebraska Act. It was caused by pro slavery Border Ruffians crossing the border as well as anti slavery settlers trying to influence elections in a particular state. It is often thought of as the start of the American Civil War, well before any battles took place. It is estimated in this event that over 50 died.

John Brown

abolitionist from the north who, with his sons, murdered five pro slavery settlers during Bleeding Kansas. He was lauded as a hero by many in the north and feared in the south for these actions. Later, he would raid a federal arsenal in Virginia with his sons and others, ultimately being captured and sentenced to death. He was largely seen as a martyr to abolitionists and feared by southerners who saw him as an operative of the Republican party.

Dred Scott v. Sanford

1857 US Supreme Court case in which an enslaved man sued for his freedom on the basis that he was brough to free states during his enslavement.  Roger Taney, the Chief Justice, and the majority of the court argued that he was property and could not sue, that slaves were property, that blacks were not citizens, and that people were entitled to their property and therefore people could bring their slaves anywhere, including the Louisiana Purchase.  This made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and opened the possibility for slavery anywhere in the United States.

Lecompton Constitution

pro slavery constitution for Kansas. It was written around the same time that an antislavery constitution was written and illustrated the division in Kansas.

Abraham Lincoln

former Whig US Representative from Illinois, loser in an 1856 Senate race against Stephen Douglas, early member of the Republican party, and winner of the 1860 presidential election. He led the US through the American Civil War.

Election of 1860

presidential election which saw a split Democratic ticket with Stephen Douglas as a Northern Democrat and John C. Breckinridge as a Southern Democrat. John C. Bell ran as the Constitutional Union Party candidate, and Abraham Lincoln as the Republican. Lincoln won without winning a single southern state.

Secede/Secession

the idea or practice where a state would leave a country. An example would be one of the 11 southern states which left the Union during the Civil War.

Civil War

war between the Union and Confederacy from 1861 through 1865.

Confederate States of America (Confederacy)

group of 11 states which left the United States to form a new government and fought against the Union during the American Civil War. It was led by President Jefferson Davis from Mississippi.

Crittenden Compromise

a failed, last minute compromise to try to avoid the Civil War. It was proposed by a Kentucky Senator and included several proposals such as the current line of slavery in the US, guaranteeing the southern right to slavery, and outlawing slavery in DC. It was ultimately struck down by Republicans who sought to stop the spread of slavery.

Fort Sumter

first battle of the Civil War in South Carolina, where the Confederates tried to block the Union resupply of this fort in Charleston Harbor.

Border States

slave states that stayed with the Union during the Civil War.  They included Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. 

Union

northern states and border states that fought to preserve the United States of America and thought no state had the right to secede.

Homestead Act

1862 law passed by the Republican led Congress to sell western lands to citizens for a small fee in exchange for living there for a set period of time and cultivating the land. It encouraged Westward Expansion.

Transcontinental Railroad/Pacific Railway Act

law or project that Congress and Lincoln signed into law in 1862. It was a large infrastructure project, partially funded by the US government.

Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg)

1862 Battle in Maryland which gave the Union a needed victory after many losses early in the war. It helped enable Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation because he could do so after a Union victory, as to not make the proclamation look like a desperate effort in a losing war.