Final

Frederick Douglass

(1817-1895) American abolitionist and writer, he escaped slavery and became a leading African American spokesman and writer. He published his biography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and founded the abolitionist newspaper, the North Star.

John Brown

An abolitionist who attempted to lead a slave revolt by capturing Armories in southern territory and giving weapons to slaves, was hung in Harpers Ferry after capturing an Armory; responsible for Bleeding Kansas

James Polk

11th President of the United States from Tennessee; committed to westward expansion; led the country during the Mexican War; U.S. annexed Texas and took over Oregon during his administration

Abraham Lincoln

16th president of the United States; helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederacy; an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery.

Ulysses S. Grant

an American general and the eighteenth President of the United States (1869-1877). He achieved international fame as the leading Union general in the American Civil War.

Andrew Johnson

17th President of the United States, A Southerner form Tennessee, as V.P. when Lincoln was killed, he became president. He opposed radical Republicans who passed Reconstruction Acts over his veto. The first U.S. president to be impeached, he survived the Senate removal by only one vote. He was a very weak president.

Martin Van Buren

(1837-1841) Advocated lower tariffs and free trade, and by doing so maintained support of the south for the Democratic party. He succeeded in setting up a system of bonds for the national debt.

Joseph Smith

Founded Mormonism in New York in 1830 with the guidance of an angel. 1843, Smith's announcement that God sanctioned polygamy split the Mormons and let to an uprising against Mormons in 1844; translated the Book of Mormon and died a martyr.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A prominent advocate of women's rights, Stanton organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention with Lucretia Mott

Nat Turner

Leader of a slave rebellion in 1831 in Virginia. Revolt led to the deaths of 20 whites and 40 blacks and led to the "gag rule' outlawing any discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives

Harriet Tubman

American abolitionist. Born a slave on a Maryland plantation, she escaped to the North in 1849 and became the most renowned conductor on the Underground Railroad, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom.

William Lloyd Garrison

1805-1879. Prominent American abolitionist, journalist and social reformer. Editor of radical abolitionist newspaper "The Liberator", and one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896) American author and daughter of Lyman Beecher, she was an abolitionist and author of the famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

William Henry Harrison

(1841), was an American military leader, politician, the ninth President of the United States, and the first President to die in office. His death created a brief Constitutional crisis, but ultimately resolved many questions about presidential succession left unanswered by the Constitution until passage of the 25th Amendment. Led US forces in the Battle of Tippecanoe.

John Tyler

elected Vice President and became the 10th President of the United States when Harrison died 1841-1845, President responsible for annexation of Mexico after receiving mandate from Polk, opposed many parts of the Whig program for economic recovery

Sam Houston

Commander of the Texas army at the battle of San Jacinto; later elected president of the Republic of Texas

Winfield Scott

"Old Fuss and Feathers," whose conquest of Mexico City brought U.S. victory in the Mexican War

Zachary Taylor

(1849-1850), Whig president who was a Southern slave holder, and war hero (Mexican-American War). Won the 1848 election. Surprisingly did not address the issue of slavery at all on his platform. He died during his term and his Vice President was Millard Fillmore.

Lewis Cass

Democratic senator who proposed popular sovereignty to settle the slavery question in the territories; he lost the presidential election in 1848 against Zachary Taylor but continued to advocate his solution to the slavery issue throughout the 1850s.

Henry David Thoreau

American transcendentalist who was against a government that supported slavery. He wrote down his beliefs in Walden. He started the movement of civil-disobedience when he refused to pay the toll-tax to support him Mexican War.

Millard Fillmore

13th President; signed Fugitive Slave Law; kept America from civil war for more than a decade

Stephen Douglas

A moderate, who introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and popularized the idea of popular sovereignty.

Dred Scott

A black slave, had lived with his master for 5 years in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Backed by interested abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil. The ruling on the case was that He was a black slave and not a citizen, so he had no rights.

Franklin Pierce

14th President; signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act

James Buchanan

The 15th President of the United States (1857-1861). He tried to maintain a balance between proslavery and antislavery factions, but his moderate views angered radicals in both North and South, and he was unable to forestall the secession of South Carolina on December 20, 1860.

John Fremont

an American military officer, explorer, the first candidate of the Republican Party for the office of President of the United States, and the first presidential candidate of a major party to run on a platform in opposition to slavery.

Jefferson Davis

An American statesman and politician who served as President of the Confederate States of America for its entire history from 1861 to 1865

Robert E. Lee

Confederate general who had opposed secession but did not believe the Union should be held together by force

Stonewall Jackson

Brave commander of the Confederate Army that led troops at Bull Run. He died in the confusion at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

George McClellan

A general for northern command of the Army of the Potomac in 1861; nicknamed "Tardy George" because of his failure to move troops to Richmond; lost battle vs. General Lee near the Chesapeake Bay; Lincoln fired him twice.

William T. Sherman

general whose march to sea caused destruction to the south, union general, led march to destroy all supplies and resources, beginning of total warfare

Clara Barton

Nurse during the Civil War; founder of the American Red Cross

John Wilkes Booth

was an American stage actor who, as part of a conspiracy plot, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865.

Mexican-American War (1846-1848)

On May 13, 1846, the United States Congress declared war on Mexico after a request from President James K. Polk. Then, on May 26, 1848, both sides ratified the peace treaty that ended the conflict.

The conflict centered on the independent Republic of Texas, which opted to join the United States after establishing its independence from Mexico a decade earlier.

The new U.S. president, James K. Polk, also wanted Texas as part of the United States, and his predecessor, John Tyler, had a late change of heart and started the admission process before he left office. Polk and others saw the acquisition of Texas, California, Oregon, and other territories as part of the nation's Manifest Destiny to spread democracy over the continent.

The U.S. also tried to buy Texas and what was called "Mexican California" from Mexico, which was seen as an insult by Mexico, before war broke out.

Mexico considered the annexation of Texas as an act of war. After a series of border skirmishes, President Polk asked Congress for the war declaration because, under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, only Congress could declare war.

In the fighting that followed, the mostly-volunteer United States military secured control of Mexico after a series of battles, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848.

It was the first large-scale success of a United States military force on foreign soil.

The pact set a border between Texas and Mexico and ceded California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to the United States. Their transfer to the United States' control also cut the territorial size of Mexico in half.

On the surface, the war's outcome seemed like a bonanza for the United States. But the acquisition of so much territory with the issue of slavery unresolved lit the fuse that eventually set off the Civil War in 1861. But the underlying issue was how adding new states and territories would alter the balance between free and slave states was critical.

On the battlefield, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Stonewall Jackson were among those who served in the war against Mexico who would later gain prominence in the American Civil War.

Civil War (1861-1865)

The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world.

The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. Claiming this United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened fire on the federal garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this "insurrection." Four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly a million armed men confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri. Several battles had already taken place--near Manassas Junction in Virginia, in the mountains of western Virginia where Union victories paved the way for creation of the new state of West Virginia, at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and at Port Royal in South Carolina where the Union navy established a base for a blockade to shut off the Confederacy's access to the outside world.

But the real fighting began in 1862. Huge battles like Shiloh in Tennessee, Gaines' Mill, Second Manassas, and Fredericksburg in Virginia, and Antietam in Maryland foreshadowed even bigger campaigns and battles in subsequent years, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to Vicksburg on the Mississippi to Chickamauga and Atlanta in Georgia. By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore the Union had given way to a new strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery and to give the restored Union a "new birth of freedom," as President Lincoln put it in his address at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle there.

For three long years, from 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in 1864. After bloody battles at places with names like The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Grant finally brought Lee to bay at Appomattox in April 1865. In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals. In 1864-1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville.

By the spring of 1865 all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, 1865, resistance collapsed and the war ended. The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery began.

Reconstruction (1863-1877)

Period after the Civil War in the US when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union; struggle over status of former Confederate states & political, social, economic position of freedmen

Comprommise of 1850

Led by Whig leaders Henry Clay and Daniel Webster along with Democrat Stephen A Douglas to keep the country together.

1. Admit California as a free state

2. Divided the Mexico cession into New Mexico and Utah territories- slavery decided by popular sovereignty

3. Settle border of Texas and New Mexico in New Mexicos favor

4. Compensate Texas by fed gov paying off states debt

5. Allow slavery in DC but ban trading of slaves there

6. Pass and enforce tough fugitive slave law.

Why did the South secede?

The South believed Lincoln was an abolitionist. It became a race war (unites all whites).

They wanted to fight for their Southern honor and protect their Home and Hearth.

-Repression of Southern unionists

-Slavery as a central issue

Lincolns two key points in his 1st inaugural address

In his inaugural address, Lincoln promised not to interfere with the institution of slavery where it existed, and pledged to suspend the activities of the federal government temporarily in areas of hostility.

How many slaves were in the United States in 1860

4 million

How many Civil War deaths?

620,000

How many African Americans served in the Union army?

200,000

Emacipation Proclamation

Presidential proclamation issued by Lincoln that declared all slaves in areas of rebellion free of slavery

Second Great Awakening

A series of religious revivals starting in 1801, based on Methodism and Baptism. Stressed a religious philosophy of salvation through good deeds and tolerance for all Protestant sects. The revivals attracted women, Blacks, and Native Americans.

Reform Movements

Work to change society for the better. Focused on improving conditions for the poor, enslaved, imprisoned, women, and disabled.

Seneca Falls Convention

the first national women's rights convention at which the Declaration of Sentiments was written

What percent of northerners were abolitionists?

5%

Irish and German Immigration

Irish: arriving in immense waves in the 1800's, they were extremely poor peasants who later became the manpower for canal and railroad construction. Facilitated by potato famine

German: also came because of economic distress, German immigration had a large impact on America, shaping many of its morals. Both groups of immigrants were heavy drinkers and supplied the labor force for the early industrial era.

Mormons

Church founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 with headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, religious group that emphasized moderation, saving, hard work, and risk-taking; moved from IL to UT

Tippacanoe and Tyler too

No real Whig Platform -- appealed to public because Harrison was a general who had won at Tippecanoe, and his VP candidate was John Tyler

Manifest Destiny

A notion held by a nineteenth-century Americans that the United States was destined to rule the continent, from the Atlantic the Pacific (a some pole to pole)

54' 40 or Fight

In the election of 1844, Polk used this as a campaign slogan, implying that the he would declare war if Britain did not give the United States all the Oregon territory up to its northern boundary.

Battle of the Alamo

February 24- March 6, 1836

*During Texas's revolution against Mexico, Fort Alamo was attacked by the Mexican Army and 187 members of the Texas Garrison were killed

*Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, a Mexican military and political leader, was victorious

*"Remember the Alamo" was the garrison's battle cry in its fight for independence

Spot Resolutions

Congressman Abraham Lincoln supported a proposition to find the exact spot where American troops were fired upon, suspecting that they had illegally crossed into Mexican territory.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Treaty that ended the Mexican War, granting the U.S. control of Texas, New Mexico, and California in exchange for around $15 million

Wilmot Proviso

1846 proposal that outlawed slavery in any territory gained from the War with Mexico

Popular Sovereignty

A belief that ultimate power resides in the people; people have the choice whether to permit slavery in their state.

Sutter's Mill

Where gold was first discovered in 1848; marked the beginning of the Gold Rush

49ers

People who rushed to California in 1849 for gold.

Fugitive Slave Law

Enacted by Congress in 1793 and 1850, these laws provided for the return of escaped slaves to their owners. The North was lax about enforcing the 1793 law, with irritated the South no end. The 1850 law was tougher and was aimed at eliminating the underground railroad.

Jumping the broom

Happened at the end of a marriage ceremony between slaves who were not permitted towed legally

Uncle Tom's Cabin

a novel published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 which portrayed slavery as brutal and immoral