D's Flashcards
Jefferson Davis
The U.S. senator from Mississippi who was elected president of the Confederate States of America
William Dawes
A dispatch rider who spread the news through the countryside of the movement of General Gage’s troops on their way to destroy a reported stockpile of colonial arms and ammunition in Concord
Hernando de Soto
A Spanish conquistador who led a 600-man expedition (1539-1541) through what is now the southeastern United States, penetrating as far west as Oklahoma and discovering the Mississippi River
Death Trap
A name given to Virginia because its indenture system was open to abuse, often resulting in the mistreatment of the indentured servants, and because of the harsh rule of its governors (appointed by the Virginia Company of London) who had dictatorial powers
Declaration of Independence
Primarily the work of Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and formally adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, a restatement of political ideas that were by then commonplace in America, explaining why the former colonists felt justified in separating from Great Britain
Declaratory Act
Passed by the British Parliament in 1776 at the same time that it repealed the Stamp Act, a law that claimed power to tax or make laws for the Americans “in all cases whatsoever”
Delaware
At first a part of Pennsylvania that was later granted by William Penn a separate legislature, but not a separate governor, until the American Revolution
“Democracy in America”
Written by Alexis de Tocqueville (a French civil servant who traveled to the United States in the early 1830s to study the American prison system) and published in 1835, a book about his observations that broadly reflected the entire spectrum of the American democratic process and the society in which it had developed
Department of the Navy
An executive department created by Congress following the American uproar against the XYZ Affair and the perception that war with France was imminent
Dominion of New England
A plan by the king of England in 1686 to establish a unified government for all of New England, New York, and New Jersey
Doughface President
A president who is a Northern man with Southern principles, President Franklin Pierce being the first
Frederick Douglass
A former slave who had escaped from his Maryland owner, became a fiery orator for the abolitionist movement, and published his own newspaper, “The North Star”
Francis Drake
An English sea captain who sailed around South America and raided Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast of Central America before continuing north to California, which he claimed for England
Dred Scott vs. Sandford
A case that made its way (1856) to the Supreme Court, which ruled, at the urging of President Buchanan, not only that Scott (a Missouri slave who had sued for his freedom after having lived for several years in the free state of Illinois and then in the free territory of Wisconsin) had no standing to sue in federal court, but also that temporary residence in a free state, even for several years, did not make a slave free, and that neither Congress nor territorial government shad the authority to exclude slavery from any territory whatsoever.
