Chapter 13: Vocab and Reading Questions Flashcards
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.
Californios
The elite Mexican ranchers in the province of California.
“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight”
Democratic candidate Governor 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.
Conscience Whigs
Whig politicians who opposed the Mexican War (1846-1848) on moral grounds, maintaining that the purpose of the war was to expand and perpetuate control of the national government.
Free-Soil Movement
A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1848 the free-soilers organized the Free-Soil 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.
Squatter Sovereignty
A plan prompted by Democratic candidate Senator Lewis Cass 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 in 1850 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 and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Personal Liberty Laws
Laws enacted in many northern states that guaranteed to all residents, including alleged fugitives, the right to a jury trial.
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.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.
American/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.
“Bleeding Kansas”
Term for the bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed that travels with his master into free states 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.
Freeport Doctrine
The argument presented by Senator Stephen A. Douglas that a territory’s residents could exclude slavery by not adopting laws to protect it.
