19th-Century American History: Economy, Slavery, and Reform

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the Market Revolution, plantation slavery, and antebellum reform movements from Chapters 10, 11, and 12.

Nativism

A movement favoring native-born Americans over immigrants, especially Irish and German Catholics, during the 1830s-1850s due to fears regarding jobs, religion, and culture.

Factory system

An economic system originating in the early to mid-1800s where workers and machinery were assembled in factories to mass-produce goods.

Lowell System of Labor

A labor system in textile factories during the 1820s-1840s that employed young women from rural families, providing wages while enforcing long hours and strict rules.

Erie Canal

A canal completed in 1825 that lowered transportation costs, accelerated trade, and linked the East Coast to the West.

Machine tools

Machines developed from the 1700s to the early 1800s used to fabricate or shape parts for other machinery, boosting manufacturing and production efficiency.

Cult of Domesticity

A mid-1800s ideology asserting that women should center their lives around the home and family as wives and mothers while men participated in public life.

Corporation

A business structure developed in the 1800s recognized by law as distinct from its owners, facilitating capital accumulation from investors and business expansion.

Interchangeable Parts

Standardized, identical machine-made components produced in the 1700s-1800s that could easily replace broken pieces, speeding up manufacturing and repair while lowering costs.

Slave Codes

A body of laws enacted from the 1600s through the 1800s restricting the movement, education, rights, and freedom of enslaved people to sustain slavery.

Gabriel Presser

An enslaved blacksmith who planned a major slave uprising near Richmond in 1800; the conspiracy was exposed before execution, resulting in his hanging.

Denmark Vesey

A free Black man executed in 1822 after being accused of organizing a planned slave rebellion that was discovered before it began.

Nat Turner

An enslaved preacher who led a major 1831 slave rebellion; its suppression prompted Southern states to enact harsher legal restrictions on enslaved and free Black people.

Yeoman farmers

Small independent farmers in the 1800s who owned limited land, cultivated food mainly for family subsistence, and rarely owned large plantations or many enslaved people.

Upper South

A Southern region in the 1800s that grew tobacco and other crops before gradually shifting toward food production and selling enslaved people to the Lower South.

Lower South

A region in the early to mid-1800s characterized by an economy centered on cotton and other cash crops, heavily dependent on enslaved labor.

Short-Staple Cotton

A cotton variety grown in the late 1700s and 1800s with seeds that were difficult to separate by hand until Eli Whitney's cotton gin simplified processing, driving demand for enslaved labor.

2nd middle Passage

The forced domestic migration and sale of enslaved people across state lines within the United States during the early to mid-1800s, especially to Deep South cotton plantations.

Planter Class

The wealthy plantation-owning elite of the 1800s who held extensive landholdings and enslaved large numbers of laborers, yielding dominant political and economic power.

Hudson River School

An American artistic movement active between the 1820s and 1870s that celebrated the beauty of nature and the American wilderness through landscape painting.

Transcendentalists

A philosophical and literary group of the 1830s-1840s that emphasized intuition, individualism, self-reliance, and the spiritual value of nature.

Brock farm

A utopian communal experiment established from 1841 to 1847 seeking to create an egalitarian society through collaborative labor and education.

Oneida Community

A utopian religious community founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes that engaged in communal living and shared property.

Shakers

A religious sect active from the 1700s to 1900s that adhered to communal living, celibacy, and strict equality between men and women.

Mormons

A religious movement founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; following persecution, members migrated west to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young.

Temperance Movement

An antebellum reform movement from the 1820s-1850s urging individuals to abstain from or curb alcohol consumption to resolve related social and domestic problems.

Seneca Falls Declaration

An 1848 foundational document adopted at the first major women's rights convention in the United States asserting full equal rights for women, including suffrage.

American Colonization Society

An organization founded in 1816 advocating the resettlement of free Black Americans in Africa, supported by an assortment of anti-slavery reformers and racial separationists.

Prigg v. Pennslyvania

An 1842 Supreme Court decision strengthening the legal prerogative of slaveholders to recover fugitive enslaved people while curbing state authority to enforce protective statutes.

Joseph Smith

The founder (1805-1844) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as the Mormon Church.

Personal liberty laws

Statutes passed by Northern states between the late 1700s and 1800s designed to safeguard free Black individuals and restrict state cooperation with Southern slave recapture efforts.

Free Soil

A political faction active in the 1840s-1850s that fought the geographic expansion of slavery into western territories to secure land and jobs for free white laborers and farmers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A prominent Transcendentalist author and lecturer (1803-1882) who championed individualism, self-reliance, and spiritual communion with nature.

Henry David Thoreau

A Transcendentalist writer (1817-1862) recognized for promoting simplicity in living and advocating civil disobedience against immoral government policies.

Brigham Young

The Mormon leader (1801-1877) who directed church members on their westward trek to Utah following the death of Joseph Smith and oversaw their settlement.

Horace Mann

An educational reformer of the 1830s-1840s who advocated for standardized schooling, public funding for non-sectarian education, and enhanced teacher preparation.

Dorothea Dix

An antebellum activist (1840s-1850s) who investigated the mistreatment of individuals with mental illnesses and campaigned to establish dedicated public asylums.

Sarah and Angelina Grim ke

Sisters born to a Southern slaveholding family who became prominent abolitionist speakers and early champions of women's rights during the 1830s-1850s.

William Loyd Garrison

A radical abolitionist editor active from the 1830s to 1870s who founded The Liberator and called for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all enslaved people.

David Walker

A Black abolitionist (1796-1830) whose 1829 publication, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, offered an uncompromising moral and political critique of slavery and racism.

Sojourner Truth

A formerly enslaved woman (1797-1883) who became an influential traveling orator for both abolitionism and women's rights.

Frederick Douglass

A prominent orator, author, and formerly enslaved abolitionist (1818-1895) who agitated against slavery and championed equal political and civil rights for all.