Studied by 22 people
Steamboat
Paddlewheelers that could travel both up- and down-river in deep or shallow waters; they became commercially viable early in the nineteenth century and soon developed into America’s first inland freight and passenger service network.
Erie Canal
Most important and profitable of the canals of the 1820s and 1830s; stretched from Buffalo to Albany, New York, connecting the Great Lakes to the East Coast and making New York City the nation’s largest port.
Cotton Kingdom
Cotton-producing region, relying predominantly on slave labor, that spanned from North Carolina west to Louisiana and reached as far north as southern Illinois.
Porkopolis
Nickname of Cincinnati, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, after its numerous slaughter houses.
Mill girls
Women who worked at textile mills during the Industrial Revolution who enjoyed new freedoms and independence not seen before.
nativism
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feeling especially prominent from the 1830s through the 1850s; the largest group of its proponents was New York’s Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, which expanded into the American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854.
Manifest destiny
Phrase first used in 1845 to urge annexation of Texas; used thereafter to encourage American settlement of European colonial and Indian lands in the Great Plains and the West and, more generally, as a justification for American empire.
Transcendalists
Philosophy of a small group of mid-nineteenth-century New England writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller; they stressed personal and intellectual self-reliance.
Second Great Awakening
Religious revival movement of the early decades of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the growth of secularism and rationalist religion; began the predominance of the Baptist and Methodist Churches.
Cult of Domesticity
The nineteenth-century ideology of “virtue” and “modesty” as the qualities that were essential to proper womanhood.
The Dorr War
A movement in Rhode Island against property qualifications for voting. The movement formed an extralegal constitutional convention for the state and elected Thomas Dorr as a governor, but was quashed by federal troops dispatched by President John Tyler.
Democracy in America
Two works, published in 1835 and 1840, by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville on the subject of American democracy. Tocqueville stressed the cultural nature of American democracy, and the importance and prevalence of equality in American life.
American System
Program of internal improvements and protective tariffs promoted by Speaker of the House Henry Clay in his presidential campaign of 1824; his proposals formed the core of Whig ideology in the 1830s and 1840s.
tariff of 1816
First true protective tariff, intended to protect certain American goods against foreign competition.
Panic of 1819
Financial collapse brought on by sharply falling cotton prices, declining demand for American exports, and reckless western land speculation.
Era of Good Feelings
Contemporary characterization of the administration of popular Republican president James Monroe, 1817–1825.
Missouri Compromise
Deal proposed by Kentucky senator Henry Clay in 1820 to resolve the slave/free imbalance in Congress that would result from Missouri’s admission as a slave state; Maine’s admission as a free state offset Missouri, and slavery was prohibited in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory north of the southern border of Missouri.
Monroe Doctrine
President James Monroe’s declaration to Congress on December 2, 1823, that the American continents would be thenceforth closed to European colonization, and that the United States would not interfere in European affairs.
spoils system
The term meaning the filling of federal government jobs with persons loyal to the party of the president; originated in Andrew Jackson’s first term.
Tariff of Abominations
Tariff passed in 1828 by Parliament that taxed imported goods at a very high rate; aroused strong opposition in the South.
Exposition and Protest
Document written in 1828 by Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina to protest the so-called Tariff of Abominations, which seemed to favor northern industry; introduced the concept of state interposition and became the basis for South Carolina’s Nullification Doctrine of 1833.
Webster-Hayne debate
U.S. Senate debate of January 1830 between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina over nullification and states’ rights.
Force Act
1833 legislation, sparked by the nullification crisis in South Carolina, that authorized the president’s use of the army to compel states to comply with federal law.
Indian Removal Act
1830 law signed by President Andrew Jackson that permitted the negotiation of treaties to obtain the Indians’ lands in exchange for their relocation to what would become Oklahoma.
Bank War
Political struggle in the early 1830s between President Jackson and financier Nicholas Biddle over the renewing of the Second Bank’s charter.
The "peculiar institution"
A phrase used by whites in the antebellum South to refer to slavery without using the word “slavery.”
"Cotton is King"
Phrase from Senator James Henry Hammond’s speech extolling the virtues of cotton, and, implicitly, the slave system of production that led to its bounty for the South. “King Cotton” became a shorthand for Southern political and economic power.
Underground Railroad
Operating in the decades before the Civil War, a clandestine system of routes and safehouses through which slaves were led to freedom in the North.
The Amistad
Ship that transported slaves from one port in Cuba to another, seized by the slaves in 1839. They made their way northward to the United States, where the status of the slaves became the subject of a celebrated court case; eventually most were able to return to Africa.
Nat Turner's Rebellion
Most important slave uprising in nineteenth-century America, led by a slave preacher who, with his followers, killed about sixty white persons in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
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