Antebellum Slavery, Abolitionism, and Nineteenth-Century Reform Movements

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering major antebellum concepts, key historical figures, reform movements, and abolitionist literature based on the lecture notes.

Peculiar institution

A phrase used by whites in the antebellum South to refer to slavery without using the word "slavery."

Second Middle Passage

The massive domestic trade of enslaved people from the Upper South (Virginia and the Chesapeake) to the Lower South (the Gulf states) that took place between 1820 and 1860.

“Cotton is King”

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 phrase for southern political and economic power.

Paternalism

A moral position developed during the first half of the nineteenth century claiming that slaves were deprived of liberty for their own "good," a rationalization adopted by some slaveowners to justify slavery.

Proslavery argument

The racist belief that Black people were inherently inferior to white people, as well as the belief that slavery, in creating a permanent underclass of laborers, made freedom possible for whites, with other elements including biblical citations.

Fugitive slaves

People who escaped from slavery.

Underground Railroad

A clandestine system of routes and safehouses operating in the decades before the Civil War through which people escaping slavery were led to freedom in the North.

Harriet Tubman

An abolitionist born into slavery who escaped to the North and subsequently returned to the South nineteen times, guiding 300 people out of slavery to freedom.

Amistad

A ship transporting slaves from one Cuban port to another that was seized by the slaves in 1839; after making their way north to the United States, their status was decided in a celebrated court case, allowing most to return to Africa.

Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy

An 1833 failed slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, purported to have been led by free Black man Denmark Vesey, who used documents such as the Declaration of Independence, Supreme Court cases, and the Bible to argue against slavery.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

An 1831 insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, led by an enslaved preacher that resulted in the deaths of about sixty white persons (mostly women and children), prompting panic, severe retribution, and tighter legislative controls on slavery.

Utopian communities

Ideal communities arising from religious conviction or secular desires to counter the market revolution, seeking salvation and reorganizing society cooperatively to restore harmony and narrow the rich-poor divide.

Dorothea Dix

A reformer who increased public awareness of the plight of the mentally ill; following a two-year investigation in Massachusetts, she won support from reformers and convinced twenty states to reform their treatment of the mentally ill.

Shakers

A religious sect (the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) founded by Mother Ann Lee in England that settled in Watervliet, New York, in 1774, eventually establishing eighteen additional communes across the Northeast, Indiana, and Kentucky.

Oneida

A utopian perfectionist religious community founded in 1848 under leader John Humphrey Noyes, known for practicing "complex marriage."

Brook Farm

A Transcendentalist commune in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, populated from 1841 to 1847 principally by intellectuals and writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Communitarianism

A nineteenth-century social reform movement centered on establishing small communities with common ownership of property to foster a less competitive and less individualistic society.

New Harmony

A short-lived community founded in Indiana in 1825 by British industrialist Robert Owen; one of the few nineteenth-century communal experiments not based on religious ideology.

Perfectionism

The idea, popularized by nineteenth-century religious revivalism, that social ills previously deemed incurable could actually be eliminated.

Temperance movement

A widespread reform movement spearheaded by militant Christians that concentrated on reducing alcoholic beverage consumption.

Common school

Tax-supported state schools established in the early nineteenth century that were open to all children.

American Colonization Society

An organization founded in 1816 to encourage the emigration of free Black Americans to Africa, which established the West African nation of Liberia in 1822 as a homeland.

American Anti-Slavery Society

An organization founded in 1833 that demanded immediate abolition and equality for Black Americans; it split in 1840 over disputes regarding the role of women and other matters.

Moral Suasion

An abolitionist strategy focused on peacefully ending slavery by convincing both slaveowners and complicit Northerners of the institution's immorality through Christian values, speeches, publications, and art.

“Gentlemen of property and standing”

Affluent merchants with southern commercial connections who opposed abolitionism and at times incited violent acts against abolitionist advocates.

Gag rule

A rule adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1836 prohibiting the consideration of antislavery petitions, which was eventually repealed in 1844 under the leadership of John Quincy Adams.

Women’s suffrage

A movement advocating for women's constitutional right to vote, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's National Woman Suffrage Association (often termed "woman suffrage").

Feminism

The movement aimed at attaining full equality for women across political, social, and personal spheres of life.

Liberty Party

An abolitionist political party that nominated James G. Birney for the presidency in 1840 and 1844 before merging into the Free Soil Party in 1848.

“Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World”

An 1829 radical pamphlet written by free African American David Walker that denounced slavery and racial prejudice and circulated widely throughout free and enslaved Black communities.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

An 1852 antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe that popularized the abolitionist cause.