chapter 18 key terms and people

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read novel that dramatized the horrors of slavery. It heightened northern support for abolition and escalated the sectional conflict.

The Impending Crisis of the South

Antislavery tract, written by white southerner Hinton R. Helper, arguing that nonslaveholding whites actually suffered most in a slave economy.

New England Emigrant Aid Company

Organization created to facilitate the migration of free laborers to Kansas in order to prevent the establishment of slavery in the territory.

Lecompton Constitution

Proposed Kansas constitution, whose ratification was unfairly rigged so as to guarantee slavery in the territory. Initially ratified by proslavery forces, it was later voted down when Congress required that the entire constitution be put up for a vote.

Bleeding Kansas

Civil war in Kansas over the issue of slavery in the territory, fought intermittently until 1861, when it merged with the wider national Civil War.

Dred Scott v. Stanford

Supreme Court decision that extended federal protection to slavery by ruling that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any territory. Also declared that slaves, as property, were not citizens of the United States.

panic of 1857

Financial crash brought on by gold-fueled inflation, overspeculation, and excess grain production. Raised calls in the North for higher tariffs and for free homesteads on western public lands.

Tariff of 1857

Lowered duties on imports in response to a high Treasury surplus and pressure from southern farmers.

Lincoln-Douglas debates

Series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Douglas won the election, but Lincoln gained national prominence and emerged as the leading candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination.

Freeport question

Raised during one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates by Abraham Lincoln, who asked whether the Court or the people should decide the future of slavery in the territories.

Harpers Ferry

Federal arsenal in Virginia seized by abolitionist John Brown in 1859. Though Brown was later captured and executed, his raid alarmed southerners, who believed that northerners shared in Brown’s extremism.

Constitutional Union party

Formed by moderate Whigs and Know-Nothings in an effort to elect a compromise candidate and avert a sectional crisis.

Crittenden amendments

Failed constitutional amendments that would have given federal protection for slavery in all territories south of 36° 30' where slavery was supported by popular sovereignty. Proposed in an attempt to appease the South.

Confederate States of America

Government established after seven southern states seceded from the Union. Later joined by four more states from the upper South.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896) Connecticut-born abolitionist and author of the best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that awakened millions of northerners to the cruelty of slavery.

Henry Ward Beecher

(1813-1887) Preacher, reformer, and abolitionist, was the son of famed evangelist Lyman Beecher and brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the 1850s, he helped raise money to support the New England Emigrant Aid Company in its efforts to keep slavery out of Kansas Territory. After the Civil War, Beecher emerged as perhaps the best-known Protestant minister, in part because of his ability to adapt Christianity to fit the times, emphasizing the compatibility of religion, science, and modernity.

James Buchanan

(1791-1868) Fifteenth president of the United States, Buchanan, a Pennsylvania-born Democrat, sympathized with the South and opposed any federal interference with its "peculiar institution." As president, he supported Kansas’s Lecompton Constitution and opposed the Homestead Act, antagonizing northern Democrats and hopelessly splitting the Democratic party.

Charles Sumner

(1811-1874) Massachusetts senator and abolitionist, opposed the extension of slavery, speaking out passionately on the civil war in Kansas. is best known for the caning he received at the hands of Preston Brooks on the Senate floor in 1856. After his recovery, he returned to the Senate and led the radical Republican coalition against Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction.

Preston S. Brooks

(1819-1857) Fiery South Carolina congressman who senselessly caned Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856. His violent temper flared in response to Sumner’s "Crime Against Kansas" speech, in which the Massachusetts senator threw bitter insults at the southern slaveocracy, singling out Brooks’s South Carolina colleague, Senator Andrew Butler.

Dred Scott

(1800-1858) Black slave who sued his master for freedom, triggering the landmark Supreme Court decision that extended federal protection for slavery in the territories. Backed by abolitionists, he based his case on the five years he spent with his master in free-soil Illinois and Wisconsin.

Roger B. Taney

(1777-1864) Chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864, overturned Marshall’s strict emphasis on contract rights, ruling in favor of community interest in the famous Charles River Bridge case in 1837. Maryland-born Taney also presided over the landmark Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in the territories.

Stephen A. Douglas

(1813-1861) U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, played a key role in passing the Compromise of 1850, though he inadvertently reignited sectional tensions in 1854 by proposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1858, Douglas famously sparred with Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, defeating Lincoln in the Senate race that year but losing to the Illinois Republican in the presidential election of 1860.

Abraham Lincoln

(1809-1865) Sixteenth president of the United States. An Illinois lawyer and politician, Lincoln briefly served in Congress from 1847 to 1848, when he introduced the famous "spot" resolutions on the Mexican War. He gained national prominence in 1858 during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the Illinois senate race and emerged as the leading contender for the Republican nomination in 1860. Lincoln’s election in 1860 drove South Carolina from the Union, eventually leading to the Civil War.

John Brown

(1800-1859) Radical abolitionist who launched an attack on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to lead slaves in a violent uprising against their owners. Brown, who first took up arms against slavery during the Kansas civil war, was captured shortly after he launched his ill-conceived raid on the armory and was sentenced to hang.

John C. Breckinridge

(1821-1875) Vice president under James Buchanan, ran as the candidate of the southern wing of the Democratic party in 1860 and lost the election to Abraham Lincoln. A Kentucky slave owner, Breckinridge acknowledged the South’s right to secede but worked tirelessly to hammer out a compromise in the weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration. Once the Civil War began, he served as a Confederate general, briefly serving as Jefferson Davis’s secretary of war in 1865.

John Jordan Crittenden

(1787-1863) U.S. senator from Kentucky who introduced a compromise in 1860 in an effort to avoid a civil war. proposed to amend the Constitution to prohibit slavery in territories north of 36° 30’ but to extend federal protection for slavery in territories to the south.

Freeport question

Raised during one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates by Abraham Lincoln, who asked whether the Court or the people should decide the future of slavery in the territories.