Unit 5: Period 5: 1844 to 1877

22 terms. Say what each one means, then open the card to check.

• Manifest destiny

  The belief, popular in the 1840s, that the United States was meant by Providence to spread across North America, a phrase coined by the journalist John L. O'Sullivan in 1845.

  Example. Supporters used the idea to argue for annexing Texas and taking all of Oregon.

• Mexican Cession

  The land Mexico gave the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), including California and most of today's Southwest.

  Example. Whether slavery could spread into this land, such as the future New Mexico and Utah territories, set off the sectional fights of the 1850s.

• Wilmot Proviso

  An 1846 proposal to ban slavery in any land won from Mexico; it passed the House more than once but never the Senate.

  Example. House votes on it split mostly by section, with Northern Democrats and Whigs voting against Southern members of their own parties.

• Free Soil Party

  A party formed in 1848 to keep slavery out of the western territories, often to protect land and jobs for free white farmers and workers.

  Example. Its 1848 presidential candidate was former President Martin Van Buren.

• Compromise of 1850

  A set of laws that admitted California as a free state, let popular sovereignty decide slavery in Utah and New Mexico, ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and passed a stronger Fugitive Slave Act.

  Example. Southern leaders accepted a free California partly in return for the new Fugitive Slave Act.

• Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

  A federal law that required citizens to help capture people who had escaped slavery and denied the accused a jury trial.

  Example. In 1854 federal troops marched Anthony Burns through Boston to a ship returning him to Virginia while crowds protested.

• Popular sovereignty

  The idea that the settlers of a territory, not Congress, should decide whether to allow slavery there.

  Example. Senator Stephen Douglas built the Kansas-Nebraska Act on this idea.

• Kansas-Nebraska Act

  The 1854 law that organized Kansas and Nebraska under popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of 36°30′.

  Example. Proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed into Kansas, and violence there earned it the name Bleeding Kansas.

• Republican Party

  A Northern party founded in 1854 to stop slavery from spreading into the western territories.

  Example. In 1860 its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency without carrying a single slave state.

• Dred Scott v. Sandford

  The 1857 Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.

  Example. The ruling made the Republican plan to bar slavery from the territories look unconstitutional.

• Secession

  A state's claim to leave the Union; eleven Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America.

  Example. South Carolina seceded in December 1860, weeks after Lincoln's election and months before he took office.

• Emancipation Proclamation

  Lincoln's 1863 war order declaring free the enslaved people in areas still in rebellion and allowing Black men to join the Union army and navy.

  Example. It did not apply in loyal slave states such as Kentucky and Maryland.

• U.S. Colored Troops

  Units of Black soldiers in the Union army; about 180,000 Black men served in the army by the war's end.

  Example. Many recruits had escaped slavery in the Confederate states and returned as soldiers.

• Total war

  Warfare that targets an enemy's resources and will to fight, not only its armies.

  Example. In late 1864 Sherman's troops burned railroads, mills and stores of food on their march across Georgia.

• Thirteenth Amendment

  The 1865 amendment that abolished slavery everywhere in the United States, except as punishment for a crime.

  Example. Enslaved people in Kentucky and Delaware, who were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation, were freed when it was ratified.

• Black Codes

  Laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 that limited freed people's rights and forced them into labor contracts.

  Example. Mississippi made Black workers who left a job before their contract ended liable to arrest.

• Freedmen's Bureau

  A federal agency created in 1865 to help formerly enslaved people with food, schools, labor contracts and legal disputes.

  Example. It helped found schools for freed people across the South, including what became Howard University.

• Radical Republicans

  Republicans in Congress who pushed for strong federal protection of freed people's rights and stricter terms for the former Confederate states.

  Example. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania called for giving land taken from planters to freed families.

• Fourteenth Amendment

  The 1868 amendment that made everyone born in the United States a citizen and barred states from denying due process or equal protection of the laws.

  Example. It reversed the part of the Dred Scott ruling that denied Black Americans citizenship.

• Fifteenth Amendment

  The 1870 amendment that barred denying the vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

  Example. Women's rights leaders split over it because it did not also protect women's right to vote.

• Sharecropping

  A system in which landless farmers worked a plot of someone else's land in return for a share of the crop, often falling into debt.

  Example. A family might give half its cotton to the landowner and still owe the local store for seed and food.

• Compromise of 1877

  The deal that settled the disputed 1876 election for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, after which federal troops stopped propping up the last Republican governments in the South.

  Example. Within months, Democrats had taken over the state governments of Louisiana and South Carolina.