APUSH Period 5 Vocab (1848-1877)

Manifest Destiny

A term coined by John L. O'Sullivan in 1845 to express the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

John Tyler

A Southern Whig who ascended to the Presidency following the death of William Henry Harrison.

"Fifty-four forty or fight!"

Democratic candidate James K. Polk's slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country, stretching from California to Russian-occupied Alaska and presently shared with Great Britain.

Stephen Austin

Established one of the first legal settlements of Americans in Texas.

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

The President and military dictator of Mexico.

Battle of the Alamo

The 1836 defeat by the Mexican army of the Texan garrison defending a former Spanish mission in San Antonio. This event led Americans to flock to Texas to join the rebel forces.

Sam Houston

Politician and military leader who fought to gain independence for Texas from Mexico and to make it a part of the United States; first President of the Republic of Texas; commander of the Texas army; former governor of Tennessee

Battle of San Jacinto

Sam Houston defeated and captured Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna effectively winning Texas independence.

Webster-Ashburton Treaty

An 1842 agreement between Britain and the United States that resolved the Aroostook War by settling the border between the United States and Canada.

Matthew C. Perry

U.S. Naval Commodore who opened trade relations with Japan in 1854.

Kanagawa Treaty

An 1854 treaty that, in the wake of a show of military force by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, allowed American ships to refuel at two ports in Japan.

Zachary Taylor

The commander of American forces during the Mexican-American War. He was elected President in the Election of 1848. His sudden death paved the way for the passage of the Compromise of 1850.

James K. Polk

A Democrat from Tennessee, he defeated Henry Clay in the Presidential Election of 1844. He advocated for Manifest Destiny through the acquisition of territory in Oregon and the Mexican American War.

Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo

(1848) Ended Mexican-American War; Mexico gave up all claims to land from Texas to California for $15 million

Wilmot Proviso

The 1846 proposal by a Representative from Pennsylvania to ban slavery in the territory acquired from the Mexican War.

Ostend Manifesto

A 1854 document that urged President Franklin Pierce to seize the slave-owning province of Cuba from Spain. Northern Democrats denounced this aggressive initiative, and the plan was scuttled.

Gadsden Purchase

A small slice of land (now part of Arizona and New Mexico) purchased by President Franklin Pierce in 1853 for the purpose of building a transcontinental rail line from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

Free Soil Movement

A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1848 they organized a political party, which depicted slavery as a threat to republicanism and to the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder society, arguments that won broad support among aspiring white farmers.

Popular Sovereignty

A plan promoted by Democratic candidates Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas under which Congress would allow settlers in each territory to determine its status as free or slave.

Forty-Niners

The more than 80,000 settlers who arrived in California in 1849 as part of that territory's gold rush.

Compromise of 1850

Laws passed that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the banning of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.

Nativism

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

Tammany Hall

The main political machine of New York city. They provided basic social services to the immigrant population in exchange for votes. At the same time, they defrauded the city of New York out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Know-Nothing Party

A political party formed in 1851 that drew on the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements of the 1840s. In 1854, the party gained control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

Fugitive Slave Law

An 1850 law passed by Congress to help owners track down runaway enslaved people who had escaped to a Northern state and return them to Southern owners. State and local law enforcement officials were required to help force the federal law.

Underground Railroad

A loose network of activists who helped enslaved people escape to freedom in the North or Canada.

Harriet Tubman

The most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who had escaped slavery. She made at least 19 trips into the South to help some 300 people escape.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

1852, an antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe which moved a generation of Northerners and many Europeans to regard all slave owners as cruel and inhumane.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

A leading abolitionists, she published Uncle Tom's Cabin.

William Lloyd Garrison

The founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He published the Liberator and was an outspoken critic of the American Colonization Society. He called for the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery.

Frederick Douglass

A former slave turned abolitionists. He published an anti-slavery newspaper entitled The North Star and wrote an autobiography of his life as a slave. During the Civil War he pushed President Lincoln to use black troops in combat and he served as U.S. Ambassador to Haiti following the Civil War.

Dorothea Dix

A female social reformer who led the asylum and penitentiary movements. During the Civil War she put in charge of all U.S. Army Nurses.

Chattel principle

a system of bondage in which a slave has the legal status of property and so can be bought and sold.

Benevolent masters

Slave owners who considered themselves committed to the welfare of their slaves.

Republican aristocracy

The Old South gentry that built impressive mansions, adopted the manners and values of the English landed gentry, and feared federal governemnt interference with their slave property.

"Positive good" argument

An argument in the 1830s that the institution for slavery was a "positive good" because it subsidized an elegant lifestyle for the white elite and provided tutelage for genetcially inferior Africans.

Gang-labor system

A system of work discipline used on southern cotton plantations in the mid-nineteenth century in which white overseers or black drivers supervised gangs of enslaved laborers to achieve greater productivity.

Task system

A system of labor common in the rice-growing regions of South Carolina in which a slave was assigned a daily task to complete and allowed to do as he wished up its completion.

"Slavery follows the flag"

The assertion by John C. Calhoun that planters could by right take their slave property into newly opened territories.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into two new territories, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.

Republican Party

A political party formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was made up of a combination of Free-Soilers, Anti-Slavery Whigs, and Anti-Slavery Democrats.

"Bleeding Kansas"

Term for the bloody struggle between pro-slavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.

Dredd Scott v. Sanford

The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against a slave, who claimed that travels with his master into free stats and territories made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.

Lincoln-Douglas Debate

A series of open air debates in the Illinois Senate race in 1858 that pitted free soil ideology against the idea of popular sovereignty.

Stephen Douglas

A U.S. Senator from Illinois. He was the leading advocate of popular sovereignty. He was responsible for the passage of the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He was the Northern Democratic nominee for President in the Election of 1860.

John Brown

An anti-slavery zealot, he massacred 5 men at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and later led a failed raid on a federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, VA. He was executed by the state of Virginia for treason.

Abraham Lincoln

Elected President from Illinois in the Election of 1860 as a member of the Republican Party. His election prompted South Carolina to secede from the Union.

Crittenden Compromise

In an effort to preserve the Union, a plan for a constitutional amendment to protect slavery from federal interference in any state where it already existed and for the westward extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the California border.

Fort Sumter

The first shots of the Civil War

Confederate States of America

A collection of eleven southern states that attempted to secede from the Union in 1861. They wrote a constitution modeled after the U.S. Constitution that explicitly protected slavery and states rights.

Jefferson Davis

This Senator from Mississippi helped to craft the Compromise of 1850. Following the secession of a number of southern states, he was elected President of the Confederate States of America.

Alexander Stephens

A former Senator from Georgia who served as the Vice President of the Confederacy. Southern Democrats attempts to reinstate him as a Senator during Reconstruction led to Radical Reconstruction.

1st Battle of Bull Run

The first significant battle of the Civil War. The heavy casualties in this Confederate victory convinced both sides that the Civil War would not be a quick war.

"Stonewall" Jackson

A Confederate General who earned his nickname and led the Army of Northern Virginia to victory in the 1st Battle of Bull Run. He was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.

Anaconda Plan

Union war strategy of General Winfield Scott which called for the U.S. Navy to blockade Southern ports, cutting off essential supplies from reaching the Confederacy.

George McClellan

He was removed from command of the Army of the Potomac by President Lincoln following the Battle of Antietam for his failure to capture Robert E. Lee's army. He was also the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1864.

Robert E. Lee

As a U.S. Army Colonel, he captured John Brown following Brown's failed raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Following the secession of Virginia he resigned his position in the U.S. Army and was put in command of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Battle of Antietam

Also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, it is the bloodiest single day in American history. Gen. McClellan defeated Gen. Lee but let him escape back to Virginia prompting Lincoln to fire McClellan for the 2nd and final time. This battle also prompted Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Battle of Shiloh

A 1862 Union victory of General Ulysses S. Grant in Tennessee. Both sides were shocked by the over 23,000 causalities.

Ulysses S. Grant

Following his Union victories in Shiloh and Vicksburg, he was put in charge of all Union armies on March 10, 1864. He served as President of the United States from 1869-1877.

Battle of Vicksburg

After 3 months of siege this city along the Mississippi River fell to Union forces led by U.S. Grant on July 4, 1863. The capture of this strategic city effectively cut the Confederacy in half.

Battle of Gettysburg

Taking place from July 1-3, 1863, this Union victory in Pennsylvania is considered to be the turning point of the war. Lee lost 1/3 of his army making a Confederate military victory impossible.

March to the Sea

Military campaign from September through December 1864 in which Union forces under General Sherman marched from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coast at Savannah. Carving a path of destruction as it progressed, Sherman's army aimed at destroying white southerners' will to continue the war.

William Tecumseh Sherman

The Union military officer responsible for the capture of Atlanta in 1864. Following the capture of Atlanta, his army conducted a "March to the Sea" by carving a path of destruction across the south from Atlanta to Savannah.

Battle of Appomattox Courthouse

April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Army of the Potomac. This event marked the end of hostilities in the American Civil War.

Trent Affair

An international diplomatic incident in 1861 in which Britain threatened war with the U.S. over the arrest of two Confederate diplomats who were aboard a British ship.

Draft (Conscription)

The system for selecting individuals for compulsory (mandatory) military service, first implemented during the Civil War.

Habeas corpus

A legal writ forcing government authorities to justify their arrest and detention of an individual. During the Civil War, it was suspended by Lincoln to stop protests against the draft and other anti-Union activities.

King Cotton

The Confederate belief during the Civil War that their cotton was so important to the British and French economies that those governments would recognize the South as an independent nation and supply it with loans and arms.

Greenbacks

Paper money issued by the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War to finance the war effort.

Confiscation Acts

Two laws passed in 1861 and 1862 that gave the Union army the power to seize enemy property, including enslaved people, used to wage war against the U.S. The second law freed persons enslaved by any individual in rebellion against the United States.

Morrill Land Grant Act

A law passed in 1862 that encouraged states to use the sale of federal land to found and maintain agricultural and technical colleges. These school not only educated farmers, engineers, and scientists, but they also became centers of research and innovation.

Homestead Act

The 1862 act that gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property. This policy led to the rapid development of the American West after the Civil War; facing arid conditions in the West, however, many found themselves unable to live on their land.

Emancipation Proclamation

President Abraham Lincoln's proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, that legally abolished slavery in all states that remained out of the Union. While it did not immediately free a single slave, it signaled an end to the institution of slavery.

Radical Republicans

The members of the Republican Party who were bitterly opposed to slavery and to southern slave owners since the mid-1850s. With the Confiscation Act in 1861, they began to use wartime legislation to destroy slavery.

Copperheads

Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War.

Gettysburg Address

A speech delivered by President Lincoln at a cemetery dedication. Lincoln described the Civil War as a struggle to preserve a nation that was dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal" and that was ruled by a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Thirteenth Amendment

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

54th Massachusetts Regiment

An all black unit led by Col. Robert Gould Shaw. They led the Union attack on Ft. Wagner in South Carolina. They were the first all black regiment to see heavy combat in the Civil War.

Scorched-earth campaign

A campaign in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia by Union general Philip H. Sheridan's troops. The troops destroyed grain, barns, and other useful resources to punish farmers who had aided Confederate raiders.

Ten Percent Plan

A plan proposed by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, but never implemented, that would have granted amnesty to most ex-Confederates and allowed each rebellious state to return to the Union as soon as 10 percent of its voters had taken a loyalty oath and the state had approved the Thirteenth Amendment.

Wade-Davis Bill

A bill proposed by Congress in July 1864 that required an oath of allegiance by a majority of each state's adult white men, new governments formed only by those who had never taken up arms against the Union, and permanent disenfranchisement of Confederate leaders. The plan was passed but pocket vetoed by President Abraham Lincoln.

14th Amendment

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

15th Amendment

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Civil Rights Act of 1875

A law that required "full and equal" access to jury service and to transportation and public accommodations, irrespective of race.

Credit Mobilier

A sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit. Organizers of the scheme protected it from investigation by providing gifts of its stock to powerful members of Congress.

William Tweed

The most infamous political boss in American history. He was the leader of the Tammany Ring until he was brought down in 1871 by flagrant overpricing of contracts for a lavish city courthouse. He was partially exposed by the political cartoons of Thomas Nast.

Panic of 1873

A worldwide depression that was triggered in the United States by the bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad. This depression uncut Republican Reconstruction efforts.

Andrew Johnson

From Tennessee, he became President of the United States following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His restoration plan angered Radical Republicans and he was eventually impeached for violation of the Tenure of Office Act.

Freedmen's Bureau

Government organization created in March 1865 to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees. Active until the early 1870s, it was the first federal agency in history that provided direct payments to assist those in poverty and to foster social welfare.

Charles Sumner

The leading Radical Republican in the U.S. Senate. He was a fiery abolitionist from Massachusetts who in 1856 had been nearly beaten to death by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks.

Thaddeus Stephens

The leading Radical Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. From Pennsylvania, he was a passionate advocate of the freedmen's political and economic rights.

Tenure of Office Act

A law that prohibited the president from removing a federal official or military commander without Senate approval. President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violation of this law.

Scalawags

Southern whites who supported Republican Reconstruction and were ridiculed by ex-Confederates as worthless traitors.

Carpetbaggers

A derisive name given by ex-Confederates to northerners who, motivated by idealism or the search for personal opportunity or profit, moved to the South during Reconstruction.

Hiram Revels

One of the 1st African Americans elected to the United States Senate. He was elected in 1870 to the Mississippi Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis.

Black Codes

Laws passed by southern states after the Civil War that denied ex-slaves the civil rights enjoyed by whites, punished vague crimes such as "vagrancy" or failing to have a labor contract, and tried to force African Americans back to plantation labor system that closely mirrored those in slavery times.

sharecropping

The labor system by which landowners and impoverished southern farm workers, particularly African Americans, divided the proceeds from crops harvested on the landowner's property. With local merchants providing supplies-in exchange for a lien on the crop-it pushed farmers into cash-crop production and often trapped them in long-term debt.

Convict leasing

Notorious system, begun during Reconstruction, whereby southern state officials allowed private companies to hire out prisoners to labor under brutal conditions in mines and other industries.

Redeemers

A term used to describe southern Democrats who were in favor of the overthrow of elected governments and the end of Reconstruction in many parts of the South. They terrorized Republicans, especially in the districts with large proportions of black voters, and killed and intimidated their opponents to regain power.