Unit 5 Vocab

Question 1

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

Answer 1

Manifest Destiny

Question 2

Democratic candidate Governor James K. Polk’s slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country

Answer 2

“Fifty-four forty or fight!”

Question 3

Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories.

Answer 3

Compromise of 1850

Question 4

A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.

Answer 4

Kansas-Nebraska Act

Question 5

Bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.

Answer 5

Bleeding Kansas

Question 6

The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.

Answer 6

Dred Scott v. Sandford

Question 7

Governor of Tennessee, Expansionist, and 11th President of the United States

Answer 7

James K. Polk

Question 8

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.

Answer 8

Crittenden Compromise

Question 9

A form of warfare that mobilizes all of a society’s resources — economic, political, and cultural — in support of the military effort.

Answer 9

Total War

Question 10

A legal writ forcing government authorities to justify their arrest and detention of an individual.

Answer 10

Habeas Corpus

Question 11

President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation issued on January 1, 1863, that legally abolished slavery in all states that remained out of the Union.

Answer 11

Emancipation Proclamation

Question 12

Military campaign from September through December 1864 in which Union forces under General Sherman marched from Atlanta, Georgia, to the coast at Savannah.

Answer 12

March to the sea

Question 13

16th president of the United States and deliverer of the Emancipation Proclamation

Answer 13

Abraham Lincoln

Question 14

Confederate General, after turning down opportunity to lead Union

Answer 14

Robert E. Lee

Question 15

Union general, one of the most prolific leaders of the Civil War, and 18th US President

Answer 15

Ulysses S. Grant

Question 16

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.

Answer 16

Black Codes

Question 17

Government organization created in March 1865 to aid displaced blacks and other war refugees.

Answer 17

Freedmen’s Bureau

Question 18

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.

Answer 18

14th Amendment

Question 19

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.”

Answer 19

15th Amendment

Question 20

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.

Answer 20

American Women’s Suffrage Association

Question 21

The labor system by which landowners and impoverished southern farmworkers, particularly African Americans, divided the proceeds from crops harvested on the landowner’s property.

Answer 21

Sharecropping

Question 22

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.

Answer 22

Carpetbaggers

Question 23

A law that required “full and equal” access to jury service and to transportation and public accommodations, irrespective of race.

Answer 23

Civil Rights Act of 1875

Question 24

A sham corporation set up by shareholders in the Union Pacific Railroad to secure government grants at an enormous profit.

Answer 24

Crédit Mobilier

Question 25

Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans in the South after the Civil War but was reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.

Answer 25

Ku Klux Klan

Question 26

The 1862 act that gave 160 acres of free western land to any applicant who occupied and improved the property.

Answer 26

Homestead Act

Question 27

The railway line completed on May 10, 1869, that connected the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines, enabling goods to move by railway from the eastern United States all the way to California.

Answer 27

Transcontinental Railroad

Question 28

Immense silver ore deposit discovered in 1859 in Nevada that touched off a mining rush, bringing a diverse population into the region and leading to the establishment of boomtowns.

Answer 28

Comstock Lode

Question 29

The November 29, 1864, massacre of more than a hundred peaceful Cheyennes, largely women and children, by John M. Chivington’s Colorado militia.

Answer 29

Sand Creek Massacre

Question 30

The 1876 battle begun when American cavalry under George Armstrong Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Indians who resisted removal to a reservation.

Answer 30

Battle of Little Big Horn

Question 31

The 1890 massacre of Sioux Indians by American cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.

Answer 31

Wounded Knee