Unit 4 Vocab

Question 1

Oregon Trail

Answer 1

Overland trail of more than two thousand miles that carried American settlers from the Midwest to new settlements in Oregon, California, and Utah

Question 2

claim clubs

Answer 2

Groups of local settlers on the nineteenth-century frontier who banded together to prevent the price of their land claims from being bid up by outsiders at public land auction

Question 3

Santa Fe Trail

Answer 3

The 900-mile trail opened by American merchants for trading purposes following Mexico’s liberalization of the formerly restrictive trading policies of Spain.

Question 4

Alamo

Answer 4

Franciscan mission at San Antonio, Texas, that was the site in 1836 of a siege and massacre of Texans by Mexican troops

Question 5

Mexican Cession of 1848

Answer 5

The addition of half a million square miles to the United States as a result of victory in the 1846 war between the United States and Mexico

Question 6

Manifest Destiny

Answer 6

Doctrine, first expressed in 1845, that the expansion of white Americans across the continent was inevitable and ordained by God.

Question 7

Compromise of 1850

Answer 7

The four step compromise that admitted California as a free state, allowed the residents of the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide the slavery issue for themselves, ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and passed a new fugitive slave law to enforce the constitutional provision stating that a slave escaping into a free state shall be delivered back to the owner

Question 8

Wilmot Proviso

Answer 8

The amendment offered by Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot in 1846 which stipulated that “as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico… neither slavery no involuntary servitude shall every exist in any part of said territory.”

Question 9

popular sovereignty

Answer 9

A solution to the slavery crisis suggested by Michigan senator Lewis Cass by which territorial residents, not Congress, would decide slavery’s fate

Question 10

Fugitive Slave Act

Answer 10

Law, part of the Compromise of 1850, that required authorities in the North to assist southern slave catchers and return runaway slaves to their owners

Question 11

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Answer 11

Law passed in 1854 creating the Kansas and Nebraska Territories but leaving the question of slavery open to residents, thereby repealing the Missouri Compromise

Question 12

“Bleeding Kansas”

Answer 12

Violence between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas Territory after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854

Question 13

Know-Nothing Party

Answer 13

Anti-immigrant party formed from the wreckage of the Whig Party and some disaffected northern Democrats in 1854

Question 14

Republican Party

Answer 14

Party that emerged in the 1850s in the aftermath of the bitter controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, consisting of former Whigs, some northern Democrats, and many Know-Nothings.

Question 15

Constitutional Union Party

Answer 15

National party formed in 1860, mainly by former Whigs, that emphasized allegiance to the Union and strict enforcement of all national legislation

Question 16

Lincoln-Douglas debates

Answer 16

Series of debates in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign during which Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Republican Abraham Lincoln staked out their differing opinions on the issue of slavery in the territories

Question 17

John Brown’s Raid

Answer 17

New England abolitionist John Brown’s ill-fated attempt to free Virginia’s slaves with a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859

Question 18

Confederate States of America

Answer 18

Nation proclaimed in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861 after the seven states of the Lower South seceded from the United States

Question 19

Emancipation Proclamation

Answer 19

Decree announced by President Abraham Lincoln in September 1862 and formally issued on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in all Confederate states still in rebellion

Question 20

First Confiscation Act

Answer 20

Law passed by Congress in August 1861, it liberated only those slaves who had directly assisted the Confederate war effort or whose masters were openly disloyal to the Union

Question 21

Second Confiscation Act

Answer 21

Law passed by Congress in July 1862 giving Union commanders the right to seize slave property as their armies marched through Confederate territory

Question 22

Copperheads

Answer 22

A term Republicans applied to northern war dissenters and those suspected of aiding the Confederate cause during the Civil War

Question 23

Radical Republicans

Answer 23

A shifting group of Republican congressmen, usually a substantial minority, who favored the abolition of slavery from the beginning of the Civil War and later advocated harsh treatment of the defeated South

Question 24

Thirteenth Amendment

Answer 24

Constitutional amendment ratified in 1863 that freed all slaves throughout the United States

Question 25

Lost Cause

Answer 25

The phrase many white southerners applied to their Civil War defeat. They viewed the war as a noble cause and their defeat as only a temporary setback in the South’s ultimate vindication

Question 26

Freedman’s Bureau

Answer 26

Agency established by Congress in March 1865 to provide social, educational, and economic services, advice, and protection to former slaves and destitute whites; lasted seven years

Question 27

Field order No. 15

Answer 27

Order by General William T. Sherman in January 1865 to set aside abandoned land along the southern Atlantic coast to 40-acre grants to freedmen; rescinded by President Andrew Johnson later that year

Question 28

Sharecropping

Answer 28

Labor system that evolved during and after Reconstruction whereby landowners furnished laborers with a house, farm animals, and tools that advanced credit in exchange for a share of the laborers’ crop.

Question 29

Black Codes

Answer 29

Laws passed by states and municipalities denying many rights of citizenship to free blacks before the Civil War. Also, during the Reconstruction era, laws passed by newly elected southern state legislatures to control black labor, mobility, and employment

Question 30

Fourteenth Amendment

Answer 30

Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in April 1866 incorporating some of the features of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It prohibited states from violating the civil rights of their citizens and offered states the choice of allowing black people to vote or losing representation in Congress

Question 31

Scalawags

Answer 31

Soutehrn whites, mainly small landowning farmers and well-off merchants and planters, who supported the southern Republican Party during Reconstruction for diverse reasons; a disparaging term

Question 31

Fifteenth Amendment

Answer 31

Passed by Congress in 1869, guaranteed the right of American men to vote, regardless of race

Question 32

Carpetbaggers

Answer 32

Pejorative term to describe northern transplants to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who stayed in the South after the war

Question 33

Ku Klux Klan

Answer 33

Perhaps the most prominent of the vigilante groups that terrorized black people in the South during the Reconstruction Era, founded by Confederate veterans in 1866

Question 34

Compromise of 1877

Answer 34

The congressional settling of the 1876 election that installed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and gave Democrats control of all state governments in the South

Question 35

Redeemers

Answer 35

Southern Democrats who wrested control of governments in the former Confederacy from Republicans, often through electoral fraud and violence, beginning in 1870.