Unit 5

Question 1

Santa Fé Trail

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Oregon Trail

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Tejanos

Answer 3

Persons of Spanish or Mexican descent born in Texas.

Question 4

Empresarios

Answer 4

Agents who received a land grant from the Spanish or Mexican government in return for organizing settlements.

Question 5

Alamo

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Mexican-American War

Answer 6

War fought between Mexico and the United States between 1846 and 1848 over control of territory in southwest North America.

Question 7

49ers

Answer 7

Prospectors in the 1849 California Gold Rush.

Question 8

Wilmot’s 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 nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.”

Question 9

Popular sovereignty

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Lincoln-Douglass debates

Answer 10

Series of debates in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign during which Douglas and Lincoln staked out their differing opinions on the issue of slavery.

Question 11

Compromise of 1850

Answer 11

The four-step compromise which admitted California as a free state, allowed residents of the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide the slavery issue for themselves, ended the slave trade in theDistrict 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 12

Fugitive Slave Law

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Know-Nothings

Answer 14

Name given to the anti immigrant party formed from the wreckage of the Whig Party and some disaffected northern Democrats in 1854.

Question 15

Republican Party

Answer 15

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 16

Bleeding Kansas

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Dred Scott v. Sanford

Answer 17

Supreme Court ruling, in a lawsuit brought by Dred Scott, a slave demanding his freedom based on his residence in a free state, that slaves could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress had no jurisdiction over slavery in the territories.

Question 18

Lecompton Constitution

Answer 18

Proslavery draft written in 1857 by Kansas territorial delegates elected under questionable circumstances; it was rejected by two governors, supported by President Buchanan, and decisively defeated by Congress.

Question 19

Panic of 1857

Answer 19

Banking crisis that caused a credit crunch in the North; it was less severe in the South, where high cotton prices spurred a quick recovery.

Question 20

John Brown’s raid

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Constitutional Union Party

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Confederate States of America

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Legal Tender Act

Answer 23

Act creating a national currency in February 1862.

Question 24

National Bank Act

Answer 24

Act prohibiting state banks from issuing their own notes and forcing them to apply for federal charters.

Question 25

Morill Tariff Act

Answer 25

Act that raised tariffs to more than double their prewar rate.

Question 26

Homestead Act of 1862

Answer 26

Law passed by Congress in May 1862 providing homesteads with 160 acres of free land in exchange for improving the land within five years of the grant.

Question 27

Morill Land Grant Act

Answer 27

Law passed by Congress in July 1862 awarding proceeds from the sale of public lands to the states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges.

Question 28

Emancipation Proclamation

Answer 28

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 29

13th, 14th, and 15th amendments

Answer 29

Known collectively as the Civil War Amendments, these amendments sought to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves.

Question 30

Copperheads

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Radical Republicans

Answer 31

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 32

Freedmen’s Bureau

Answer 32

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 33

Civil Rights Act of 1866

Answer 33

Gave full citizenship to African Americans.

Question 34

Congressional Reconstruction

Answer 34

Name given to the period 1867-1870 when the Republican-dominated Congress controlled Reconstruction-era policy.

Question 35

Reconstruction Act

Answer 35

1877 act that divided the South into five military districts subject to martial law.

Question 36

Tenure of Office Act

Answer 36

Act stipulating that any officeholder appointed by the president with the Senate’s advice and consent could not be removed until the Senate had approved a successor.

Question 37

Ku Klux Klan

Answer 37

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

Question 38

Sharecropping

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Carpetbaggers

Answer 39

Northern transplants to the South, many of whom were Union soldiers who state in the South after the war.

Question 40

Scalawags

Answer 40

Southern whites, mainly small landowning farmers and well-off merchants and planters, who supported the southern Republican Party during Reconstruction.

Question 41

Slaughterhouse cases

Answer 41

Group of cases resulting in one sweeping decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873 that contradicted the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment by decreeing that most citizenship rights remained under state, not federal, control.

Question 42

Compromise of 1877

Answer 42

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.