AP U.S. History Unit 4: The Early Republic and the Market Revolution

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering political developments, the Market Revolution, Jacksonian democracy, social reform movements, and the antebellum South from AP U.S. History Unit 4.

Barbary Wars (1801–1805)

A naval conflict that began when President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay tribute and bribes to North African pirate states attacking American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea.

Louisiana Purchase (1803)

The acquisition of immense western territory from France that secured navigation rights along the Mississippi River, doubled the geographic size of the United States, and spurred westward expansion.

Embargo Act of 1807

Legislation enacted under Thomas Jefferson that closed all American ports to foreign commerce in an attempt to peacefully coerce Great Britain and France into respecting American neutrality.

Hartford Convention

A gathering of Federalist delegates during the War of 1812 to express opposition to federal policies and wartime measures; the party's perceived disloyalty led to its national collapse.

Marbury v. Madison (1803)

The landmark Supreme Court decision that established the principle of judicial review, granting the federal judiciary the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional.

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

A Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States under implied powers and established federal supremacy over state taxation.

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

A Supreme Court ruling that expanded federal power by determining that Congress possesses exclusive authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Era of Good Feelings

A period following the War of 1812 characterized by widespread national optimism, intensified patriotism, and a temporary absence of open partisan conflict.

American System

An economic program promoted by Henry Clay consisting of protective tariffs, a national bank, and federally funded internal improvements to unite regional economies.

Panic of 1819

A severe financial crisis caused by the Second Bank of the United States tightening credit to curb inflation, resulting in bank failures, debt defaults, unemployment, and land foreclosures in the West.

Missouri Compromise (1820)

Legislation engineered by Henry Clay that preserved the sectional balance by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, while establishing the $36^\circ 30'$ parallel as the dividing line for slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.

Anglo-American Convention of 1818

A diplomatic treaty between the United States and Great Britain that fixed the U.S.–Canadian border at the 49th parallel and agreed to a ten-year joint occupation of the Oregon Country.

Adams-Onís Treaty (1819)

A treaty by which Spain ceded Florida to the United States and defined the southwestern border of the Louisiana Purchase, accelerated by Andrew Jackson's military campaigns in Spanish Florida.

Monroe Doctrine (1823)

A foreign policy statement by President James Monroe declaring the Western Hemisphere closed to future European colonization and warning that foreign intervention would be treated as an act of hostility.

Market Revolution

The nineteenth-century economic transformation in which Northern manufacturing, Western agriculture, and Southern raw materials became commercially linked through advancements in transportation, industry, and farming technology.

Lowell System

A New England textile production model that recruited young unmarried farm women to work in factories and housed them in supervised company-run dormitories.

Patent Laws

Legal protections granting inventors exclusive property rights over their designs, which provided financial incentives for labor-saving technological innovations.

Nativism

A political and social movement fueled by hostility toward non-native-born inhabitants, marked by organized anti-immigrant prejudice and attacks directed primarily against Catholic and Jewish arrivals.

Cult of Domesticity

A nineteenth-century cultural value system asserting that a woman's primary sphere was in the private home fostering piety and domesticity, while the public economic sphere belonged strictly to men.

Universal Male Suffrage

The democratic trend during the early nineteenth century in which state governments eliminated property ownership requirements, expanding the right to vote to virtually all adult white men.

Corrupt Bargain of 1824

A controversial political outcome in which Speaker of the House Henry Clay endorsed John Quincy Adams for the presidency over Andrew Jackson and was subsequently appointed Secretary of State.

Whig Party

A political party led by Henry Clay that endorsed a strong central government, loose constitutional construction, protective tariffs, the national bank, and federally funded infrastructure projects.

Democratic Party (Jacksonian)

A political party led by Andrew Jackson that championed strict constructionism, state sovereignty, free trade, and limited federal power while opposing national banks and corporate monopolies.

Nullification

A constitutional doctrine articulated by John C. Calhoun asserting that sovereign states have the authority to void and declare unenforceable any federal statute they deem unconstitutional.

Indian Removal Act of 1830

A federal law passed under Andrew Jackson authorizing the forced relocation of southeastern Native American tribes to designated territories west of the Mississippi River in modern-day Oklahoma.

Worcester v. Georgia (1832)

A Supreme Court decision holding that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community under federal jurisdiction in which the laws of Georgia had no force, an outcome Andrew Jackson refused to enforce.

Trail of Tears

The forced overland migration of the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes to Oklahoma under federal military enforcement, causing widespread disease, malnutrition, and the deaths of thousands.

Romanticism

An early nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual movement emphasizing intuition, emotion, individual passion, and the power of nature over Enlightenment rationalism.

Hudson River School

An American artistic movement celebrated for depicting romanticized, pristine wilderness landscapes and presenting encroaching urban civilization as a disruptive, corrupting force.

Transcendentalism

A philosophical movement centered in New England that emphasized spiritual self-reliance, the transcendent divinity of the natural world, and the inherent perfectibility of human beings.

Second Great Awakening

A major Protestant revival movement beginning in the early nineteenth century characterized by emotional preaching, personal conversion, and the pursuit of moral perfection to attain salvation.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

A religious organization founded by Joseph Smith whose adherents migrated west toward Utah to escape religious ostracism and violent mob persecution.

American Temperance Society

A prominent reform organization, heavily supported by women, that worked to eliminate the consumption of alcoholic beverages to alleviate domestic abuse, poverty, and crime.

Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

The first national women's rights convention, organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which produced the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions calling for legal equality and suffrage.

Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831)

A deadly slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, that resulted in the deaths of approximately sixty white individuals and prompted southern legislatures to pass severe, repressive slave codes.

Slave Codes

A comprehensive series of state laws enacted across the South designed to regulate the behavior of enslaved African Americans by outlawing literacy, assembly, movement, and gun ownership.

Gag Resolution

A procedural rule adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1836 that automatically postponed and prevented the reading or discussion of any petition addressing the abolition of slavery.

Yeoman Farmers

Non-slaveholding, independent white southern farmers who practiced small-scale agriculture and comprised approximately three-quarters of the white demographic in the antebellum South.

Planter Aristocracy

The elite minority of wealthy plantation owners in the antebellum South who possessed substantial land and large numbers of enslaved people, exerting dominant control over southern politics and society.