History vocab unit 1

Missouri Compromise

The legislative decision to admit Missouri as a slave state while prohibiting slavery in the area west of the Mississippi River and north of the parallel 36*30.

Compromise of 1850

A package of five bills presented to congress by Henry Clay intended to avoid succession or civil war by reducing tensions between North and South over the status of slavery.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Controversial legislation that created two new territories taken from Indigenous Americans, Kansas and Nebraska, where resident males would decide whether slavery would be allowed (popular sovereignty).

Bleeding Kansas

Journalist’ names for a series of violent conflicts in the Kansas Territory between anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions over the state of slavery.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.

Election of 1860

The critical 19th quadrennial U.S. presidential election in which Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln defeated a divided Democratic Party and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.

Secession

The formal withdrawal of a state or territory from a larger political union, specifically referring to the departure of eleven Southern slave states from the U.S. between December 1860-May 1861 from the Confederate states of America.

For Sumter

A federal fort located in the harbor of Charleston, SC where the first military engagement of the American Civil War took place on April 12-13, 1861.

Emancipation Proclamation

The military order issued by President Abraham Lincoln that freed enslaved people in areas still controlled by the Confederacy.

Battle of Gettysburg

A monumental three-day battle in southern Pennsylvania, widely considered a turning point in the Civil War, in which Union forces defeated Lee’s Confederate army and forced it back into Virginia.

Sherman’s March to the Sea

The Union army’s devastating march through Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah led by General William T. Sherman, intended to demoralize civilians and destroy the resources the Confederate army needed to fight.

13th Amendment

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution that ended slavery and freed all enslaved people in the United States.

14th Amendment

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law to all the U.S. citizens, including formerly enslaved people.

15th Amendment

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids states to deny any male citizen the right to vote on grounds of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Freedmen’s Bureau

A federal Reconstruction agency established to protect the legal rights of formerly enslaved people and to assist with their education, jobs, health care, and land ownership.

Radical Reconstruction

The period from 1861-1877 during which Radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction policy from President Andrew Johnson, enforcing military rule in the South and expanding civil and political rights for newly freed Black Americans.

Ku Klux Klan

A secret terrorist organization founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 targeting formerly enslaved people who voted and held political offices, as well as people the KKK labeled as carpetbaggers and scalawags.

Compromise of 1877

A secret deal forged by congressional leaders to resolve the disputed election of 1876; Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for his pledge to remove federal troops from the south, marking the end of Reconstruction.