Ch 12 Sectional Conflict and Crisis 1844-1861

Mexican Cession

Lands taken by the US in the Mexican-American War.

Wilmot Proviso

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

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 3/5 compromise, as well as their clout within the Democratic Party, to demand extreme federal proslavery polices that the majority of Americans voters would not support.

Free Soil Movement

A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. They 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.

Popular Sovereignty

The principle that ultimate power lies in the hands of the electorate. According to Stephen Douglas, 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 the Fugitive Slave Act.

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 that, in the wake of a show of military force by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, allowed American ships to refuel at two ports in Japan.

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 the US born leaders, with an expectation of eventual annexation by the US.

Ostend Manifesto

An 1854 announcement 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 areas 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 1850's and Asian exclusion laws between the 1880s and 1940s.

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.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

An 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. Led to the violent conflict in "bleeding Kansas."

Dred Scott v. Sanford

The 1857 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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

American author, she was an abolitionist and author of the famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Harper's Ferry Raid

Abolitionist John Brown's idea to use guns from the arsenal to arm VA slaves whom he expected to rise and revolt; federal troops under Robert E. Lee captured Brown and his band after a two-day siege; Brown and his followers were killed; a martyr to the North, a rebel and radical to the South.

George Fitzhugh

He was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that slavery ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized.

William Walker

A proslavery American adventurer from the South, he led an expedition to seize control on Nicaragua in 1855. He wanted to petition for annexation it as a new slave state but failed when several Latin American countries sent troops to oust him before the offer was made.

Hinton Helper

He was a Southern US critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book which he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South, it argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders, and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the South.