AP Unit 4: Sectionalism, Civil War & Reconstruction

Brigham Young

a leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the second President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death in 1877.

Cotton Gin

a machine for separating cotton lint from its seeds.

John C. Calhoun

a prominent U.S. statesman and spokesman for the slave-plantation system of the antebellum South. Represented South Carolina.

John Deere

developed the first commercially successful, self-scouring steel plow, which allowed for the settlement and agricultural development of the Midwestern United States.

Mormons

a religious and cultural group, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement, which began with Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s.

Shakers

a Christian sect founded in the 18th century in England and settled the colonies. They practice a celibate and communal lifestyle, pacifism, and their model of equality of the sexes, which peaked in the mid-1800s.

Stephen Douglas

a politician, leader of the Democratic Party, and orator who espoused the cause of popular sovereignty in relation to the issue of slavery in the territories before the American Civil War (1861-65). He was reelected senator from Illinois in 1858 after a series of eloquent debates with the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who defeated him in the presidential race two years later.

Transcendentalism

an idealistic philosophical and social movement that developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living.

American Party

also known as the Know Nothing Party, were against immigration and the Catholic Church. It started in the 1840's and peaked in the 1850s'.

Andrew Johnson

became president with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat, the new president favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. His plans did not give protection to the former slaves, and he came into conflict with the Republican-dominated Congress, culminating in an impeachment trial.

Black Codes

were laws passed by Southern states during Reconstruction. These laws had the intent of stopping African Americans' from exerting their newly given freedoms.

Charles Sumner

a Senator from Massachusetts who was against slavery. Famous for being caned by Representative Preston Brooks of S.C. after he gave an anti-slavery speech.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

granted citizenship to all people born in the U.S., regardless of race.

Crittenden Compromise

an unsuccessful proposal introduced by United States Senator John J. Crittenden (Constitutional Unionist of Kentucky) on December 18, 1860. It aimed to resolve the secession crisis of 1860-1861 by addressing the fears and grievances about slavery but was unsuccessful.

Dred Scott v. Sanford

a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court which established that no African American is a citizen and slaves could be taken to non-slave territories due to the "right to property."

Election of 1864

election in which Republican Pres. Abraham Lincoln, running for re-election, defeated Democrat George B. McClellan, the former Union general.

Free Soiler Party

political party leadership consisted of anti-slavery former members of the Whig Party and the Democratic Party. Its main purpose was to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing for free men working free soil.

Freedmen's Bureau

was established in 1865 by Congress to help former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-65). The organization provided food, housing and medical aid, established schools and offered legal assistance.

Fugitive Slave Law

passed by the United States Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850 and allowed plantation owners to reclaim runaway slaves without a large burden of proof. Also, the law forced the north to enforce slavery.

Henry Clay

After serving three terms as Speaker of the House of Representatives (KY), he served as Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams. Clay ran for the presidency five times (1824-1848). Though he was unsuccessful in all of his attempts, Clay was an important national figure and was known as the "Great Compromiser" because he created the legislative compromises that held off the American Civil War.

John Wilkes Booth

an actor, southern sympathizer and assassin, who murdered President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865.

Nullification

the formal suspension by a state of a federal law within its borders.

Popular sovereignty

the principle that the authority of the government is created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their elected representatives (Rule by the People), who are the source of all political power.

Radical Republicans

a faction of American politicians who push through many laws which gave African Americans many freedoms (with the help of Northern Moderates) during Reconstruction.

Reconstruction Amendments

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws for all persons. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibits discrimination in voting rights of citizens based on race.

Republican Party

commonly referred to as the GOP (Grand Old Party), is one of the two major contemporary political parties. Started in 1854.

Spoils system

the practice of a successful political party giving public office to its supporters. Created by Andrew Jackson but combated by Progressive thinkers.

Underground Railroad

a network of secret routes and safe houses established during the early-to-mid 19th century, and used by slaves to escape into free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause.

William Seward

a determined opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War. He was the Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869 and began early imperial actions by the U.S.

"Forty Acres and a Mule"

refers to a promise made which favored agrarian reform for former slaves (during early Reconstruction), by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Carpetbaggers

a person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction.

Panic of 1873

a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879, and even longer in some countries.

Sharecropping

a form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land.

Abolitionists

a person who favors the abolition of a practice, a term used for people who opposed slavery.

Emancipation Proclamation

speech which declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

Frederick Douglass

famous abolitionist and runaway slave. He wrote a book about his experiences as a slave which became a best-seller. He also published the abolitionist newspaper called the North Star.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

wrote a best-selling anti-slavery novel called Uncle Tom's Cabin which exposed the horrors of slavery to the North and contributed to the tension which brought about the Civil War.

Horace Greenly

newspaper editor who is known especially for his vigorous articulation of the North's antislavery sentiments during the 1850s.

Lucretia Mott

was one of the leading voices of the abolitionist and feminist movements of her time. Raised in a Quaker community, she became a member of the society's ministry and adopted its anti-slavery views.

Seneca Falls Convention

the first women's rights convention. It was attended by famous people like: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The Liberator

was an abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp in 1831.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

novel which showed the stark reality of slavery and is generally regarded as one of the major causes of the Civil War. The novel was written in 1852 by author Harriet Beecher Stowe who was once greeted by Abraham Lincoln as the 'little lady who started a war.'

Compromise of 1850

was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which organized the land acquired after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

"54.40 or Fight"

a slogan popular in 1846, especially among Democrats, who asserted U.S. ownership of the entire Oregon country (which was also claimed by Great Britain).

Gadsden Purchase

a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico that the United States purchased from Mexico.

Homestead Act

encouraged Western migration by providing settlers 160 acres of public land. Started by Lincoln in 1862.

James K. Polk

elected president in 1844 and a member of the Democratic Party. During his presidency, the United States expanded significantly with the annexation of Republic of Texas, the Oregon Treaty, and the conclusion of the Mexican-American War.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

was passed in 1854. It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´.

Manifest Destiny

the 19th-century belief that God ordained the expansion of the US from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Realized with the Compromise of 1850.

Mexican Cession

refers to lands surrendered to the United States by Mexico at the end of the Mexican War. Terms of the transfer were part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. The land was organized under the Compromise of 1850.

Oregon Territory

was signed between the US & Britain to settle the boundary dispute. The British gained the land north of the 49th parallel, including the Vancouver Island and the United States received the territory south of the parallel.

Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo

ended the Mexican-American War and gave the Mexican Cession land to the U.S. which is now the American Southwest.

Wilmot Proviso

proposal during the debate over the Mexican Cession. The proposal would have ban slavery (and all African Americans) from any territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War.

Battle of Antietam

resulted in not only the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, but the bloodiest single day in all of American history. Fought in 1862.

"Bleeding Kansas"

a series of violent political confrontations in the United States involving anti-slavery "Free-Staters" and pro-slavery "Border Ruffians", or "southern" elements in Kansas.

Ku Klux Klan

hate organization that have employed terror in pursuit of their white supremacist agenda. The group was founded after the Civil War then waned by the 1870s. Then, revitalized in 1915 and has continued to the present.

Mexican American War

war stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim).

Appomattox Courthouse

the location on which Robert E. Lee, the Southern army, surrendered to U.S. Grant, the Northern army commander.

Nativism

the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants.

Scalawags

a white Southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction. Term was used derisively by white Southern Democrats who opposed Reconstruction legislation.

The “New South”

Idea that the south should industrialize after the Civil War. Despite calls for industrialization, sharecropping and tenant farming persisted in the South.