Antebellum America and Reform Movements

Vocabulary flashcards covering key political figures, court cases, events, and reform movements in 19th-century United States history.

John C. Calhoun

South Carolina politician and Andrew Jackson's vice president (1782-1850) who secretly wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest (1828), arguing that states could nullify federal laws, and became the South's leading defender of states' rights and slavery.

Henry Clay

Kentucky senator known as the "Great Compromiser" who brokered the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise Tariff of 1833 and helped found the Whig Party.

Nullification Crisis

An 1832-1833 conflict sparked when South Carolina declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 void; Jackson responded with the Force Bill, and Henry Clay's Compromise Tariff of 1833 ended the standoff.

Martin Van Buren

Andrew Jackson's handpicked successor and a key organizer of the Democratic Party who became president in 1837 just as the Panic of 1837 hit, earning him the nickname "Martin Van Ruin."

Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842)

An 1842 Massachusetts Supreme Court case that ruled labor unions were not illegal conspiracies as long as they used peaceful, lawful methods.

Tariff of Abominations

The name Southerners gave to the high protective tariff of 1828 because it aided Northern manufacturers while increasing the cost of goods for the agricultural South.

Worcester v. Georgia (1832)

An 1832 Supreme Court case in which Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct community where Georgia law had no force, though President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling.

Indian Removal Act (1830)

An 1830 law signed by Andrew Jackson that authorized the president to exchange Native American lands east of the Mississippi River for lands in the West (Indian Territory).

Black Hawk War

An 1832 conflict that erupted when Sauk and Fox leader Black Hawk led his people back into Illinois to reclaim ancestral lands, resulting in their defeat by U.S. troops and militia at the Bad Axe River.

Trail of Tears

The brutal 1838-1839 forced relocation in which U.S. troops compelled approximately 16,000 Cherokee people to march west to Indian Territory, leading to roughly 4,000 deaths along the journey.

Whig Party

A political party formed in the 1830s by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other opponents of "King Andrew" Jackson that favored the American System and a strong Congress over executive power.

Panic of 1837

A severe economic depression during Martin Van Buren's presidency triggered partly by Andrew Jackson's Specie Circular and the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States.

Know-Nothing Party

A 1850s nativist political organization (the American Party) that opposed immigration, particularly by Irish and German Catholics, named after members' practice of stating they "knew nothing" about the group.

Cult of Domesticity

A 19th-century societal ideal holding that a middle-class woman's proper domain was the home, where she was expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and dedicated to raising virtuous children.

Nat Turner's Rebellion

An 1831 uprising led by an enslaved preacher in Southampton County, Virginia, resulting in the deaths of about 55 to 60 white people and prompting Southern states to enforce harsher slave codes.

Transcendentalism

A 19th-century philosophical and literary movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that emphasized intuition, nature, individualism, and self-reliance.

Free Soil Party

A political party established in 1848 that opposed the expansion of slavery into western territories and nominated former president Martin Van Buren as its presidential candidate.

Second Great Awakening

An early 19th-century Protestant religious revival characterized by camp meetings and emotive preaching, which stimulated various reform movements including abolition and temperance.

Charles Finney

A prominent revivalist known as the "father of modern revivalism" who led impassioned religious gatherings in upstate New York's "Burned-Over District" during the Second Great Awakening.

Horace Mann

The first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education who spearheaded the common school movement advocating for free, tax-funded public schooling.

Temperance Crusade

A reform movement targeting alcohol abuse; supported by organizations such as the American Temperance Society (1826), it led Maine to enact the first statewide prohibition law in 1851.

Dorothea Dix

A social reformer who advocated before state legislatures to establish specialized hospitals for the mentally ill rather than confining them in jails and poorhouses.

Seneca Falls Convention

The inaugural women's rights convention organized in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, which produced the Declaration of Sentiments.

William Lloyd Garrison

A radical abolitionist who launched the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and called for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all enslaved people.

Sojourner Truth

A formerly enslaved orator and advocate for abolition and women's rights, celebrated for delivering the 1851 speech "Ain't I a Woman?"

Frederick Douglass

An escaped enslaved person who authored a famous 1845 autobiography, published the abolitionist paper The North Star, and emerged as the preeminent Black abolitionist leader.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel detailing the cruelties of slavery that galvanized Northern public sentiment against the institution.