APUSH - Chapter 13 Key Terms

Manifest Destiny

A term coined by John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 to express the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Californios

The elite Mexican ranchers in the province of California.

“FIfty-four forty or fight!”

Democratic candidate Governor James K. Polk’s slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country, stretching from California to Russian-occupied Alaska and presently shared with Great Britain.

Conscience Whigs

Whig politicians who opposed the Mexican War (1846–1848) on moral grounds, maintaining that the purpose of the war was to expand and perpetuate control of the national government.

Wilmot Proviso

The 1846 proposal by Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania to ban slavery in territory acquired from the Mexican War.

Free-Soil Movement

A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1848 the free-soilers organized the Free-Soil Party, which depicted slavery as a threat to republicanism and to the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder society, arguments that won broad support among aspiring white farmers.

Squatter Sovereignty

A plan promoted by Democratic candidate Senator Lewis Cass under which Congress would allow settlers in each territory to determine its status as free or slave.

Forty-Niners

The more than 80,000 settlers who arrived in California in 1849 as part of that territory’s gold rush.

“slavery follows the flag”

The assertion by John C. Calhoun that planters could by right take their slave property into newly opened territories.

Compromise of 1850

Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act.

Personal-Liberty Laws

Laws enacted in many northern states that guaranteed to all residents, including alleged fugitives, the right to a jury trial.

Gadsden Purchase

A small slice of land (now part of Arizona and New Mexico) purchased by President Franklin Pierce in 1853 for the purpose of building a transcontinental rail line from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

Ostend Manifesto

An 1854 manifesto that urged President Franklin Pierce to seize the slave-owning province of Cuba from Spain. Northern Democrats denounced this aggressive initiative, and the plan was scuttled.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.

American, or Know Nothing, Party

A political party formed in 1851 that drew on the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements of the 1840s. In 1854, the party gained control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Bleeding Kansas

Term for the bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed that travels with his master into free states and territories made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.

Freeport Doctrine

The argument presented by Senator Stephen A. Douglas that a territory’s residents could exclude slavery by not adopting laws to protect it.

James K. Polk

The 11th president of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849. A protégé of Andrew Jackson and a member of the Democratic Party, he was an advocate of Jacksonian democracy and American expansionism.

Frederick Douglass

An American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.

Zachary Taylor

An American military officer and politician who was the 12th president of the United States, serving from 1849 until his death in 1850.

Lewis Cass

A United States Army officer and politician. He represented Michigan in the United States Senate and served in the Cabinets of two U.S. Presidents, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan. He was also the 1848 Democratic presidential nominee.

Stephen Douglas

An American politician and lawyer from Illinois. As a U.S. senator, he was one of two nominees of the badly split Democratic Party to run for president in the 1860 presidential election, which was won by Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

An American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans.

John Brown

An American abolitionist in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, he was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

Abraham Lincoln

The 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defeating the Confederate States and playing a major role in the abolition of slavery.