Period 5 Part I (Chapters 1-6)

Question 1

Manifest Destiny

Answer 1

The popular belief that the United States had a divine mission to extend its power and civilization across the breadth of North America.

Question 2

Great American Desert

Answer 2

The arid region between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Coast was popularly known in the 1850s and 1860s as the Great American Desert.

Question 3

Gold Rush

Answer 3

Migrations to mineral-rich mountains of the West in the 1800s, occurring in Colorado, Nevada, the Black Hills of the Dakotas, and other western territories.

Question 4

54-40 or Fight!

Answer 4

The Democratic slogan for James K. Polk’s campaign regarding the “reoccupation” of the Oregon Territory all the way to the border with Russian Alaska at latitude 54°40’.

Question 5

Mexican-American War

Answer 5

A war that resulted from territorial conflicts regarding Texas and California. When James K. Polk sent an army to the Rio Grande, where he claimed Texas’ southern border was, and his army was attacked by Mexican soldiers, he persuaded Congress to declare war.

Question 6

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Answer 6

The treaty negotiated by diplomat Nicholas Trist with Mexico that consisted of terms favorable to the United States:
1. Mexico recognized the Rio Grande as the southern border of Texas.
2. The United States took possession of the former Mexican provinces of California and New Mexico - the Mexican Cession. For these territories, the United States paid $15 million and assumed responsibility for any claims of American citizens against Mexico.

Question 7

Mexican Cession

Answer 7

The United States took possession of the former Mexican provinces of California and New Mexico. For these territories, the United States paid $15 million and assumed responsibility for any claims of American citizens against Mexico.

Question 8

Wilmot Proviso

Answer 8

An appropriations bill proposed by David Wilmot that would forbid slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico.

Question 9

Ostend Manifesto

Answer 9

President Franklin Pierce adopted pro-Southern policies and dispatched three American diplomats to Ostend Belgium, where they secretly negotiated to buy Cuba from Spain in an agreement, called the Ostend Manifesto, that was leaked to the press in the United States. Antislavery members of Congress reacted angrily and forced President Pierce to drop the scheme.

Question 10

Gadsden Purchase

Answer 10

President Pierce purchased a small strip of land from Mexico in 1853 for $10 million. Though the land was semidesert, it lay on the best route for a railroad through the region and presently forms the southern sections of New Mexico and Arizona.

Question 11

Free-Soil Party

Answer 11

Northerners who opposed allowing slavery in the territories organized this party, which adopted the slogan “free soil, free labor, and free men.” In addition to its chief objective, preventing the extension of slavery, the new party advocated free homesteads (public land grants to small farmers) and internal improvements such as roads and harbors.

Question 12

Popular Sovereignty

Answer 12

Also known as squatter sovereignty, this refers to (in this time period specifically) Democratic senator Lewis Cass’ proposed compromise solution to slavery in which, instead of Congress determining whether to allow slavery in a new western territory or state, the matter would be determined by a vote of the people who settled a territory.

Question 13

Compromise of 1850

Answer 13

Henry Clay’s compromise to solve the political crisis regarding free vs. slave states and Southern secession:
1. Admit California to the Union as a free state.
2. Divide the remainder of the Mexican Cession into two territories, Utah and New Mexico, and allow the settlers in these territories to decide the slavery issue by majority vote, or popular sovereignty.
3. Give the land in dispute between Texas and the New Mexico territory to the new territories in return for the federal government assuming Texas public debt of $10 million.
4. Ban the slave trade in the District of Columbia but permit Whites to own enslaved people there as before.
5. Adopt a new Fugitive Slave Law and enforce it rigorously.

Question 14

Tammany Hall

Answer 14

New York City’s Democratic organization from which the Irish were initially excluded. By the 1850s, however, the Irish had secured jobs and influence, and by the 1880s they controlled Tammany Hall.

Question 15

Nativism

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Fugitive Slave Law

Answer 16

Removed fugitive slave cases from state courts and made them the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government and authorized special U.S. commissioners to issue warrants to arrest fugitives. A captured person who claimed to be free and not someone who had just escaped slavery was denied the right of trial by jury. State and local law enforcement officers were required to help enforce the federal law.

Question 17

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Answer 17

A novel about the conflict between an enslaved man, Tom, and the brutal White slave owner, Simon Legree. Its publication by the Northern writer Harriet Beecher Stow moved a generation of Northerners and many Europeans to regard all slave owners as cruel and inhuman.

Question 18

Impending Crisis of the South

Answer 18

Hinton R. Helper’s nonfiction book that attacked slavery from another angle, using statistics to demonstrate to fellow Southerners that slavery weakened the South’s economy.

Question 19

Pottawatomie Creek

Answer 19

John Brown, a stern abolitionist, retaliated to the proslavery attack in Lawrence; he and his sons attacked a proslavery farm settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, killing five.

Question 20

Lecompton Constitution

Answer 20

A proslavery state constitution for Kansas submitted by the Southern legislature at Lecompton, which did not have majority support.

Question 21

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Answer 21

An act that divided the Nebraska Territory into two parts, the Kansas and Nebraska territories, and allowed settlers in each territory or decide whether to allow slavery.

Question 22

Dred Scott v. Sandford

Answer 22

A man named Dred Scott had been held in slavery in Missouri and then taken to the free territory of Wisconsin, where he lived for two years before returning to Missouri. Arguing that his residence on free soil made him a free citizen, Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri in 1846. A majority of the Court decided against Scott and gave these reasons:
1. Dred Scott had no right to sue in a federal court because the Framers of the Constitution did not intend African Americans to be U.S. citizens.
2. Congress did not have the power to deprive any person of property without due process of law. if slaves were a form of property, then Congress could not exclude slavery from any federal territory.
3. The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional because it excluded slavery from Wisconsin and other Northern territories.

Question 23

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Answer 23

In seven campaign debates in different Illinois towns, Abraham Lincoln shared the platform with his famous opponent, Stephen Douglas. Douglas won his campaign for reelection to the U.S. Senate. In the long run, however, he lost ground in his own party by alienating Southern Democrats with his Freeport Doctrine. Lincoln, on the other hand, emerged from the debates as a national figure and a leading contender for the Republican nomination for president in 1860.

Question 24

Know-Nothing Party

Answer 24

A nativist party whose policies targeted immigrants. With the support of new members, they won a few local and state elections in the mid-1850s. However, as the expansion of slavery became the paramount political issue, the significance of immigration declined, and along with it, the Know-Nothing Party.

Question 25

Republican Party

Answer 25

Former Whigs who opposed slavery expansion formed the core of this party, founded in Wisconsin in 1854 as a reaction to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Composed of Free-Soilers and antislavery Whigs and Democrats, its purpose was to oppose the spread of slavery in the territories, not to end slavery itself. It’s first platform called for the repeal of both the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. It was a strictly Northern, or sectional, party.

Question 26

Sumner-Brooks Incident

Answer 26

In 1856, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner attacked the Democratic administration in a vitriolic speech, “The Crime Against Kansas.” His remarks included personal charges against South Carolina senator Andrew Butler. Butler’s nephew, Congressmen Preston Brooks, defended his uncle’s honor by walking into the Senate chamber and beating Sumner over the head repeatedly with a cane. Sumner never fully recovered from the attack. The action by Brooks outraged the North, and the House voted to censure him while Southerners applauded the deed.