US history unit 4 vocab

VOCAB STUDY

Manifest Destiny

The 19th-century cultural belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean.

Fugitive Slave Act

A strict 1850 federal statute requiring the seizure and return of escaped enslaved individuals, penalizing anyone who offered assistance or refused to aid in their capture.

Confederacy

The separate government formed by eleven southern slaveholding states that attempted to withdraw from the United States between 1860 and 1865.

Compromise 1850

A legislative package of five bills designed to ease regional tensions by admitting California as a free state, organizing Utah and New Mexico under popular sovereignty, abolishing the slave trade in D.C., and enacting a harsher fugitive slave statute.

Sectionalism

An intense loyalty to the regional interests, economy, and culture of one part of a country rather than to the nation as a whole.

13th Amendment

The 1865 constitutional provision that officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude across the entire nation, except as legal punishment for a crime.

14th Amendment

The 1868 constitutional addition that established birthright citizenship and guaranteed all citizens equal protection and due process under the law.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

An 1854 law that established two new territories, overturned the Missouri Compromise latitude restriction, and allowed local settlers to vote on the legality of slavery.

Secession

The formal withdrawal of a member state or territory from a sovereign federal political entity.

Popular Sovereignty

The political doctrine asserting that territorial residents should determine through voting whether slavery would be legally permitted within their borders.

Union

The sovereign federal government of the United States and the northern and border states that defended it during the Civil War.

15th Amendment

The 1870 constitutional amendment that prohibited denying citizens the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Border States

Slaveholding states—including Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—that chose not to join the Confederacy and remained allied with the federal government.

Battle of Gettysburg

A momentous July 1863 three-day clash in Pennsylvania that turned back the southern invasion of the North and produced the highest casualties of the conflict.

Wilmington Coup (NC)

An 1898 armed insurrection in North Carolina where white supremacists violently overthrew a democratically elected, multiracial municipal government.

Battle of Fort Sumter

An April 1861 Confederate artillery attack on a federal garrison in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, marking the military start of the Civil War.

Bleeding Kansas

A period of bloody guerrilla conflicts between 1854 and 1859 sparked by rival anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions battling for control of a newly opened territory.

Mexican-American War

A conflict from 1846 to 1848 arising after the annexation of Texas, ending in an American victory and the acquisition of the vast Southwest through the Mexican Cession.

Dred Scott Decision

The landmark 1857 Supreme Court ruling holding that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no constitutional right to outlaw slavery in federal territories.

Emancipation Proclamation

A military order issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, declaring all enslaved persons living within rebellious Confederate-controlled areas to be legally free.

Appomattox Court House

The site in Virginia where General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865.

Lincoln Assassination

The murder of the 16th U.S. President by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, shortly after the Confederacy's military collapse.

Reconstruction

The post-Civil War era (1865–1877) focused on rebuilding the South, readmitting former Confederate states into the federal system, and protecting the legal rights of newly freed people.