Edwards, America's History for the AP® Course 10e - Chapter 12

Mexican cession

Mexican cession

Lands taken by the United States in the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848).

Wilmot Proviso

The 1846 proposal by Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania to ban slavery in territory acquired from the U.S.-Mexico War.

"slave power" conspiracy

The political argument, made by abolitionists, free soilers, and Republicans in the pre-Civil War years, that southern slaveholders were using their unfair representative advantage under the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, as well as their clout within the Democratic Party, to demand extreme federal proslavery policies (such as annexation of Cuba) that the majority of American voters would not support.

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.

Foreign Miner's Tax

A discriminatory tax, adopted in 1850 in California Territory, that forced Chinese and Latin American immigrant miners to pay high taxes for the right to prospect for gold. The tax effectively drove these miners from the goldfields.

popular sovereignty

The principle that ultimate power lies in the hands of the electorate. Also a plan, first promoted by Democratic candidate Senator Lewis Cass as "squatter sovereignty," then revised as "popular sovereignty" by fellow Democratic presidential aspirant Stephen Douglas, under which Congress would allow settlers in each territory to determine its status as free or slave.

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 a new Fugitive Slave Act.

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

A federal law that set up special federal courts to facilitate capture of anyone accused of being a runaway slave. These courts could consider a slaveowner's sworn affidavit as proof, but defendants could not testify or receive a jury trial. The controversial law led to armed conflict between U.S. marshals and abolitionists.

personal liberty laws

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

Treaty of Kanagawa

An 1854 treaty in which, after a show of military force by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, leaders of Japan agreed to permit American ships to refuel at two Japanese ports.

filibustering

Private paramilitary campaigns, mounted particularly by southern proslavery advocates in the 1850s, to seize additional territory in the Caribbean or Latin America in order to establish control by U.S.-born leaders, with an expectation of eventual annexation by the United States.

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.

chain migration

A pattern by which immigrants find housing and work and learn to navigate a new environment, and then assist other immigrants from their family or home area to settle in the same location.

nativism

Opposition to immigration and to full citizenship for recent immigrants or to immigrants of a particular ethnic or national background, as expressed, for example, by anti-Irish discrimination in the 1850s and Asian exclusion laws between the 1880s and 1940s.

American, or Know-Nothing, Party

An anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political party formed in 1851 that arose in response to mass immigration in the 1840s, especially from Ireland and Germany. In 1854, the party gained control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

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. Far from clarifying the status of slavery in the territories, the act led to violent conflict in "Bleeding Kansas."

Dred Scott decision

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.