Unit 5 APUSH

1. Black belt: stretched through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where the rich dark soil nurtured cotton cultivation. Region of the Deep South with the highest concentration of slaves. The “black belt” emerged in the nineteenth century as cotton production became more profitable and slavery expanded south and west.

2. Breakers: Strong-willed slaves sent to it. Slave drivers who employed the lash to brutally “break” the souls of strong-willed slaves.

3. Denmark Vesey: A free black who led an ill-fated rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822.

4. Nat Turner: A semiliterate visionary black preacher who led an uprising that slaughtered about sixty white Virginians, mostly women and children.

5. Amistad: Spanish slave ship on which slaves rebelled. Spanish slave ship dramatically seized off the coast of Cuba by the enslaved Africans aboard. The ship was driven ashore in Long Island and the slaves argued their case before the Supreme Court, securing their eventual release.

6. American Colonization Society: Founded for the purpose of antislavery efforts forced on transporting blacks bodily back to Africa. Reflecting the focus of early abolitionists on transporting freed blacks back to Africa, the organization established Liberia, a West African settlement intended as a haven for emancipated slaves.

7. Liberia: On the fever-stricken West African coast. West African nation was founded in 1822, as a haven for freed blacks, fifteen thousand of whom made their way back across the Atlantic by the 1860s.

8. David Walker’s An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World: Walker ran a used clothing store and used his pamphlet to denounce slavery as sinful and to call upon his fellow African Americans to resist. Incendiary abolitionist tract advocating the violent overthrow of slavery. Published by David Walker, a southern-born free black.

9. William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator: The first issue of his militantly antislavery newspaper triggered a thirty-year war of words and in a sense fired on of the opening barrages of the Civil War. Antislavery newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison, who called fo the immediate emancipation of all slaves.

10. American Anti-Slavery Society: Founded in 1833. An abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison, who advocated the immediate abolition of slavery. By 1838, the organization had more than 250,000 members across 1,350 chapters.

11. Sojourner Truth: A freed black woman in New York who fought tirelessly for black emancipation and women’s rights.

12. Frederick Douglass: The greatest of the black abolitionists. Escaped from bondage in 1838, he was “discovered” by the abolitionists in 1841 after giving a speech at an antislavery meeting in Massachusetts. wrote 13.)

13. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Classic autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Depicted his origins as the son of a black slave woman and a white father, his struggle to learn to read and write, and his eventual escape to the North. Vivid autobiography of the escaped slave and renowned abolitionist Fredrick Douglass.

14. Liberty Party (1840): Backed by Douglass along with other abolitionists to end the blight of slavery.

15. Free Soil Party (1848): Backed by Douglass along with other abolitionists to end the blight of slavery.

16. Mason-Dixon Line: Originally the southern boundary of colonial Pennsylvania. Originally drawn by surveyors to resolve the boundaries between Marland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in the 1760s, it came to symbolize the North-South divide over slavery.

17. Gag Resolution: Required that all antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate. Prohibited debate or action on antislavery appeals. Driven through the house by proslavery Southerners, the Gag Resolution passed every year for eight years and was eventually overturned with the help of John Quincy Adams.

18. Slave Narratives: Vivid written accounts of suffering on the plantation and daring escape allowed black men and women to expose the cruelty of slavery and introduce themselves to a skeptical Northern audience as articulated human beings. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century accounts of slavery written by former slaves, most of whom had escaped from bondage, During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration recorded oral histories with former slaves, which added to the body of personal testimonies about slavery by the enslaved.

Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave: A slave narrative that provided Northerners who had never left their home states with a rare glimpse into the violence and degradation of the South’s slave labor system.

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin): Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in an effort to awaken the North to the wickedness of slavery by laying bare its terrible inhumanity, especially the cruel splitting of families. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely read novel that dramatized the horrors of slavery. It heightened northern support for abolition and escalated the sectional conflict.

2. The Impending Crisis of the South: Written by Hinton R. Helper who hated both slavery and blacks, he attempted to prove by an array of statistics that indirectly the nonslaveholding whites were the ones who suffered most from the millstone of slavery. Antislavery tract, written by white southerner Hinton R. Helper, arguing that non-slaveholding whites actually suffered most in a slave economy.

3. New England Emigrant Aid Company: Sent about two thousand people to the troubled area to forestall the South—and also to make a profit. Organization created to facilitate the migration of free laborers to Kansas in order to prevent the establishment of slavery in the territory.

4. Beecher’s Bibles: Nickname for the deadly new breech-loading Sharps rifles carried by the members of the New England Emigrant Aid Company.  Based on the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother), who had helped raise money for their purchase.

5. Border Ruffians: Proslaveriers who poured into Kansas from Missouri during the 1855 election of members of the first territorial legislature to vote early and often.

6. John Brown: Fanatical figure who was obsessively dedicated to the abolitionist cause.

7. Lecompton Constitution: Could either be voted with or without slavery. If voted against slavery, the slave owners already in Kansas would be exempt. Proposed Kansas constitution, whose ratification was unfairly rigged so as to guarantee slavery in the territory. Initially ratified by pro-slavery forces, it was later voted down when Congress required that the entire Constitution be put up for a vote. 

8. Sumner-Brooks Caning: Brooks approached Sumner, one of the most disliked members of the senate who had referred insultingly to South Carolina, who was then sitting at his Senate desk, and pounded the orator with an eleven-ounce cane until it broke. Sumner had to vacate his seat and seek 3 ½ years of treatment in England. Brooks resigned but was reelected into office. The clash and the ensuing reactions revealed how dangerously inflamed passions were becoming, North and South.

9. Know Nothing Party: aka The American Party. Organized by anti-foreign “nativists.” In 1856 they nominated the lackluster ex-president Millard Fillmore.

10. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857):  Abruptly ended the two-day presidential honeymoon of newly inaugurated James Buchanan. The pronouncement was one of the opening paper-gun blasts of the Civil War. Dred Scott, a black slave, had lived with his master for five years in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory, backed by interested abolitionists, Scott sued for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil. 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.

11. Roger Taney: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott v. Sandford trial. From the slave state of Maryland.

12. Panic of 1857: Financially not as bad as the panic of 1837, by psychologically it was probably the worst of the nineteenth century. Caused by inpouring California gold played its part by helping to inflate the currency, the demands of the Crimean War in Russia had overstimulated the growing of grain, while frenzied speculation in land and railroads had further ripped the economic fabric. Financial crash brought on by gold-fueled inflation, over-speculation, and excess grain production. Raised calls in the North for higher tariffs and for free homesteads on western public lands.

13. Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858): Debates between Douglas and Lincoln for the Senate seat. Series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Douglass won the election, but Lincoln gained national prominence and emerged as the leading candidate for the 1860 Republican nomination.

14. Freeport Doctrine: Douglas’s reply to Lincoln’s question on slavery. Declared that since slavery could not exist without laws to protect it, territorial legislature, not the Supreme Court, would have the final say on the slavery question. First argued by Stephen Douglas in 1858 in response to Abraham Linconln’s “Freeport question”

15. Harpers Ferry: Where John Brown seized the federal arsenal in October 1859, incidentally killing seven innocent people, injuring a free black, and injuring ten or so more. Federal arsenal in Virginia seized by abolitionist John Bron in 1859. Though Brown was later captured and executed, his raid alarmed Southerners, who believed that Northerners shared in Brown’s extremism.

16. John C. Breckenridge: Selected leader of the angered southern Democrats. Had moderate views from the border state of Kentucky.

17. Constitutional Union Party: Organized by a group fearing for the Union. Sneered at as the “Do Nothing” or Old Gentleman’s” party. Consisted of mainly former Whigs and Know-Nothings, a veritable “gathering of graybeards.” Formed by moderate Whigs and Know-Nothings in an effort to elect a compromise candidate and avert a sectional crisis.

18. Confederate States of America: Government formed by the first seven seceding states. Government established after seven southern states seceded from the Union. Later joined by four more states from the upper South.

Jefferson Davis: The chosen president of the Confederate States of America. He was a West pointer and a former cabinet member with wide military and administrative experience; but he suffered from chronic ill health, as well as from a frustrated ambition to be a Napoleonic strategist.

• Confederate Constitution: Established in 1861, it emphasized states' rights and limited the central government's power, reflecting the South's commitment to a decentralized government.