Unit 5 Vocab Flashcards
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
Manifest Destiny
Democratic candidate Governor James K. Polk’s slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country
“Fifty-four forty or fight!”
Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories.
Compromise of 1850
A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.
Bleeding Kansas
The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Governor of Tennessee, Expansionist, and 11th President of the United States
James K. Polk
A plan proposed by Senator John J. Crittenden for a constitutional amendment to protect slavery from federal interference in any state where it already existed and for the westward extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the California border.
Crittenden Compromise
A form of warfare that mobilizes all of a society’s resources — economic, political, and cultural — in support of the military effort.
Total War
A legal writ forcing government authorities to justify their arrest and detention of an individual.
Habeas Corpus
President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, that legally abolished slavery in all states that remained out of the Union.
Emancipation Proclamation
Military campaign from September through December 1864 in which Union forces under General Sherman marched from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coast at Savannah.
March to the sea
16th president of the United States and deliverer of the Emancipation Proclamation
Abraham Lincoln
Confederate General, after turning down opportunity to lead Union
Robert E. Lee
Union general, one of the most prolific leaders of the Civil War, and 18th US President
Ulysses S. Grant
Laws passed by southern states after the Civil War that denied ex-slaves the civil rights enjoyed by whites, punished vague crimes such as “vagrancy” or failing to have a labor contract, and tried to force African Americans back to plantation labor systems that closely mirrored those in slavery times.
Black Codes
Government organization created in March 1865 to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees.
Freedmen’s Bureau
Constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 that made all native-born or naturalized persons U.S. citizens and prohibited states from abridging the rights of national citizens, thus giving primacy to national rather than state citizenship.
14th Amendment
Constitutional amendment ratified in 1869 that forbade states to deny citizens the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or “previous condition of servitude.”
15th Amendment
A women’s suffrage organization led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others who remained loyal to the Republican Party, despite its failure to include women’s voting rights in the Reconstruction Amendments.
American Women’s Suffrage Association
The labor system by which landowners and impoverished southern farmworkers, particularly African Americans, divided the proceeds from crops harvested on the landowner’s property.
Sharecropping
A derisive name given by ex-Confederates to northerners who, motivated by idealism or the search for personal opportunity or profit, moved to the South during Reconstruction.
Carpetbaggers
A law that required “full and equal” access to jury service and to transportation and public accommodations, irrespective of race.
Civil Rights Act of 1875
A sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit.
Crédit Mobilier
