U.S. History Vocabulary: Revolution to Reconstruction

A complete set of vocabulary practice flashcards based on technical terms from the lecture notes covering U.S. history from post-revolutionary uprisings to the Reconstruction Era.

Shays’ Rebellion

A 1786–1787 uprising by indebted Massachusetts farmers and veterans that exposed tensions between revolutionary liberty, taxation, debt, and elite fears of disorder.

Constitutional Convention

The 1787 meeting in Philadelphia that replaced the Articles of Confederation with a stronger federal system and raised major questions about representation, democracy, slavery, and national authority.

Three-Fifths Clause

The constitutional provision that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation and taxation, increasing the political power of slaveholding states without recognizing enslaved people as citizens.

Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, which protected certain liberties against federal power but did not challenge slavery, racial hierarchy, women’s exclusion, or Native dispossession.

Whiskey Rebellion

A 1790s uprising against a federal excise tax that Washington’s administration suppressed by force, demonstrating the new federal government’s willingness to defend law, order, and fiscal authority.

Hamilton’s financial system

Alexander Hamilton’s program of debt assumption, national banking, and public credit that strengthened federal power and tied wealthy investors to the new national state.

Alien and Sedition Acts

Federalist laws passed under John Adams that targeted immigrants and political dissent, exposing the fragility of free speech and partisan toleration in the early republic.

Election of 1800

The contested presidential election in which Jefferson defeated Adams, producing a peaceful transfer of power that Republicans called a “bloodless revolution.”

Louisiana Purchase

The 1803 acquisition of vast western territory from France that doubled the size of the United States and intensified questions about expansion, Native dispossession, slavery, and federal constitutional power.

Embargo Act

Jefferson’s 1807 attempt to pressure Britain and France by restricting American trade, which damaged the U.S. economy and showed that even limited-government Republicans could use coercive federal power.

Gabriel’s planned uprising

An attempted 1800 slave rebellion in Virginia that revealed Black resistance to slavery, white fear, and the revolutionary implications of liberty in a slaveholding republic.

Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa

Shawnee leaders who helped organize a broad Indigenous resistance movement against U.S. expansion in the early nineteenth century.

War of 1812

A conflict between the United States and Britain shaped by trade disputes, impressment, national honor, western expansion, and Native resistance.

Treaty of Ghent

The 1814 treaty that ended the War of 1812 without major territorial change but allowed Americans to celebrate the conflict as a national triumph.

Slave Power

A political concept describing the national power of slaveholders and their allies, especially their influence over federal policy, territorial expansion, and the protection of slave property.

Missouri Compromise

The 1820 agreement that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while drawing the $36^\circ 30'$ line, temporarily managing but not resolving the crisis over slavery’s expansion.

American System

Henry Clay’s program of tariffs, a national bank, and internal improvements, designed to use federal power to promote economic development.

Jacksonian democracy

The expansion of mass political participation for white men during Andrew Jackson’s era, accompanied by racial exclusion, Native dispossession, and stronger party organization.

Indian Removal Act

The 1830 law that authorized the forced removal of Native nations from southeastern homelands to lands west of the Mississippi.

Worcester v. Georgia

The 1832 Supreme Court case that recognized Cherokee political rights against Georgia, though removal still proceeded despite the ruling.

Trail of Tears

The forced removal of Cherokee people and other Native nations westward, during which thousands suffered and died as U.S. expansion depended on Native dispossession.

Nullification crisis

The confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government over tariffs in the early 1830s, revealing deeper anxieties about federal power and slavery.

Bank War

Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Second Bank of the United States, which Democrats portrayed as a struggle against monopoly and elite privilege.

Panic of 1837

A major economic crisis following speculative expansion, banking instability, cotton-price collapse, and Jacksonian financial policies.

Second Great Awakening

A wave of evangelical revivalism that reshaped public life and encouraged reform movements including temperance, abolitionism, and women’s activism.

Seneca Falls Convention

The 1848 women’s rights convention that called for expanded rights and suffrage, showing how reform culture could generate demands for political equality.

AME Church

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Richard Allen in 1816, which became a major institution for Black religious, educational, abolitionist, and political life.

Abolitionism

The movement to end slavery, especially after 1830, which included Black and white activists and increasingly challenged the political compromise regime.

Monroe Doctrine

The 1823 declaration opposing renewed European colonization in the Americas, which also expressed growing U.S. hemispheric ambition.

Manifest Destiny

The ideology that justified U.S. continental expansion as natural, providential, or inevitable, while obscuring conquest, slavery expansion, and Native dispossession.

Mexican War

The 1846–1848 war through which the United States seized vast territory from Mexico, reopening the national conflict over slavery’s western future.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

The 1848 treaty that ended the Mexican War and transferred large areas of Mexican territory to the United States.

Wilmot Proviso

A failed proposal to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico, revealing how expansion turned slavery into an unavoidable national political issue.

Compromise of 1850

A package of measures that admitted California as a free state, organized Utah and New Mexico through popular sovereignty, ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and strengthened fugitive slave enforcement.

Fugitive Slave Act

The 1850 law that strengthened federal enforcement of slaveholders’ claims to escaped enslaved people, making slavery’s power visible even in free states.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

The 1854 law that created the Kansas and Nebraska territories, replaced the Missouri Compromise line with popular sovereignty, and helped destroy the old party system.

Popular sovereignty

The idea that settlers in a territory should decide whether slavery would be permitted there, a policy that intensified rather than settled the conflict over slavery.

Republican Party

A new party formed in the 1850s that opposed the spread of slavery into the West and sought to break Slave Power’s control of federal policy.

Free labor ideology

The Republican belief that western land, wage labor, small property ownership, schools, infrastructure, and social mobility should be protected from slaveholding expansion.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

The 1857 Supreme Court decision that denied Black citizenship and declared that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, effectively nationalizing slaveholders’ constitutional claims.

John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry

The failed 1859 attack on a federal arsenal intended to spark a war against slavery, which made Brown a martyr to many antislavery northerners and terrified white southerners.

Secession

The withdrawal of southern slaveholding states from the Union after Lincoln’s election, undertaken to protect slavery and resist the loss of Slave Power’s control over federal policy.

Fort Sumter

The federal fort in Charleston Harbor attacked by Confederate forces in April 1861, opening the Civil War and allowing Lincoln to frame the conflict as rebellion.

Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln’s 1863 war measure declaring enslaved people free in areas still in rebellion, transforming the Union war effort by making emancipation a central military and political aim.

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments

The Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery, created national birthright citizenship and equal protection, and prohibited denying voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.