APUSH Chapters 11 and 12 Test

When was the Antebellum period?

1820-1860

Oneida Community

a redefinition of gender roles was crucial to one of the most enduring utopian colonies of the nineteenth century. The Oneida Community was established in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes. It was a place where the community carefully monitored sexual behavior; where women were to be protected from unwanted childbearing; in which children were raised communally, often seeing little of their own parents.

Feminism

a reform movement that called for women's rights. The transformation of family and the creation of separate spheres restricted women. Women began to look on such restrictions with rising resentment.

Burn Over District

a region prone to religious awakenings. This region of New York was experiencing a major economic transformation as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal. Along with the economic changes were profound social changes.

Second Great Awakening

a religious revival that was caused by a lack of religious conviction in America. The main focus of the Second Great Awakening was mankind's need for God in their everyday lives. It started in the early 1800s with the Protestant revivalism and later evolved into a powerful force for reform movements.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

a resident of Brook Farm. He expressed his disillusionment with the experiment and, to some extent, with transcendentalism in a series of notable novels. In Blithedale Romance, he wrote scathingly of Brook Farm itself, portraying the disastrous consequences of the experiment of the individuals who had submitted to it.

Walt Whitman

a self-proclaimed poet of American democracy. Whitman went to Huntington, New York, to found his own paper, the Long Islander, and served as its publisher, editor, pressman, and distributor and even provided home delivery. In 1855, he hired a printer and published his first volume of work: Leaves of Grass.

American Colonization Society

a society organized by a group of prominent white Virginians in 1817. They worked carefully to challenge slavery without challenging property rights or offending southerners. The ACS proposed a gradual freeing of slaves. Their masters would receive compensation through funds raised by private charities or from the state governments.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

a transcendentalist leader and most eloquent voice was Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Unitarian minister in 1832 to devote himself entirely to writing and teaching the elements of transcendentalism. He wrote "Nature." Emerson was also a committed nationalist, an ardent proponent of American cultural independence.

Church of Latter Day Saints

among the most important effects to create a new and more ordered society within the old was that of the Mormons. The Book of Mormon told the story of an ancient and successful civilization in America, peopled by one of the lost tribes of Israel who had found their way to the New World centuries before Columbus. Its members waited patiently for the appearance of the Messiah, and they were rewarded when Jesus came to America after his resurrection.

Brigham Young

he was Smith's successor. He led the Mormons across the desert in one of the largest group migration in American history to Salt Lake City, Utah. The Mormons were able to create a lasting settlement there.

William Lloyd Garrison

he was against slavery. He was tired of his boss, Benjamin Lundy, having a mild tone about opposition to slavery. He created his own paper called the Liberator.

Charles Grandison Finney

he was an evangelistic Presbyterian minister who became the most influential revival leader of the 1820s and 1830s. He believed that Calvinist doctrines of predestination and human helplessness were both irrelevant and destructive. He preached that each person contained within themselves the ability to experience spiritual rebirth and achieve salvation.

Henry David Thoreau

he was another leading transcendentalist. Living simply, Thoreau believed, was a desirable alternative to the rapidly modernizing world around him. A world, he believed, that the disruptive and intrusive railroad unhappily symbolized. He wrote Walden.

David Walker

he was one of the most militant abolitionists. He was a free black from Boston who wrote a pamphlet titled Walker's Appeal...to the Colored Citizens. He declared that slaves should kill or be killed.

Frederick Douglass

he was the greatest African American abolitionist of all. After he escaped from slavery in Maryland, he went to England. On his return to the United States in 1847, Douglass purchased his freedom from his Maryland slave owner. He then founded an antislavery newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York. He also wrote an autobiography titled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which he presented his experience as a slave.

Horace Mann

he was the greatest educational reformer. He was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. He reorganized the Massachusetts school system, lengthened the academic year, doubled teachers' salaries, enriched the curriculum, and introduced new methods of professional training for teachers.

Joseph Smith

he was the leader of the Mormons. Smith claimed the Book of Mormon was a translation of a set of golden tablets he had found in the hills of New York that was revealed to him by an angel of God. In 1844, Joseph Smith was arrested, charged with treason, and imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois. There an angry mob attacked the jail, forced Smith from his cell, and shot and killed him.

Southern Romanticism

southern novelists of the 1830s produced historical romances or romantic eulogies of the plantation system of the upper South. In the 1840s, the southern literary capital moved to Charleston, home of the most distinguished of the region's men of letters: William Gilmore Simms. For a time, Simm's work expressed a broad nationalism that transcended his regional background; but by the 1840s he too had become a strong defender of southern institutions-especially slavery-against the encroachments of the North.

Compare and contrast the task system of slavery with the gang system used in slavery.

Large planters generally used one of two methods of assigning slave labor. One was the task system which was most common in rice culture. Under the task system slaves were assigned a particular task in the morning and after completing the job they were free for the rest of the day. The other system was the gang system. The gang system was far more common. Under the gang system, slaves were simply divided into groups. Each group was directed by a driver and compelled to work for as many hours as the overseer considered a reasonable workday.

Prigg vs Pennsylvania 1842

Margaret Morgan was given virtually full freedom by her master. However, her master's heirs wanted to have her as their slave. After she had already moved to Pennsylvania as a free black woman, they wanted Edward Prigg to capture her and bring her back to Maryland. The Supreme Court ruling stated that the Pennsylvania law of not returning runaway slaves superseded the Federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. Therefore, the Supreme Court ruling said that states should not aid in enforcing the 1793 law requiring the return of fugitives slaves to their owners.

New Harmony

Owen founded an experimental community in Indiana in 1825, which he named New Harmony. It was to be a "Village of Cooperation," in which every resident worked and lived in total equality. The community was an economic failure, but the vision that had inspired it continued to enchant Americans.

Seneca Falls Convention

a convention in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the question of women's rights. Out of the meeting emerged the "Declaration of Sentiments" which stated that men and women should both have certain unalienable rights. The most prominent demand was for women's suffrage.

Declaration of Sentiments

a document modeled after the Declaration of Independence. It stated that both men and women should have certain unalienable rights. The most prominent demand was for women's suffrage. One of the most important things this document did was reject separate spheres for men and women.

Benevolent Empire

a great network of charitable activities formed from new institutions that helped the handicapped. Among them was the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, the first such school in America. The Benevolent Empire embodied the belief that even the handicapped could find inner strength and wisdom.

Romanticism

a movement in art and literature emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and individualism. The most important and popular American paintings of the first half of the nineteenth century set out to evoke the wonder of the nation's landscape. Unlike their European counterparts, American painters did not favor gentle scenes of carefully cultivated countrysides.

Anti-Abolitionist

a movement of whites mostly in the South to contradict the abolitionist movement. Many stated that the abolition crusade was a dangerous and frightening threat to the existing social system. They feared that abolitionism would create a terrible war and that it would lead to an influx of free blacks in the North.

Liberty Party

a political party with underlying antislavery sentiment established in 1840. They chose the Kentucky antislavery leader James G. Birney as their presidential candidate. They never campaigned for outright abolition. They stood instead for "free soil", for keeping slavery out of the territories.

Underground Railroad

A network of secret routes and safe houses, mostly lead by Garrisonians, to help runaway slaves find refuge in the North or in Canada. Harriet Tubman was the main leader of the underground railroad. She escorted over 300 slaves to freedom.

Utopian Societies

Although transcendentalism was above all an individualistic philosophy, it helped spawn the most famous of all nineteenth-century experiments in communal living. Brook Farm, in which the Boston transcendentalist George Ripley established as an experimental community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. There individuals would create a new form of social organization.

Abolitionist

An abolitionist is a person who favors the ending of a practice or institution. During the mid-1800s abolitionists were those who wanted to abolish slavery. Many abolitionists viewed slavery as a moral issue that should not take place in the United States.

Prison Reform

Asylums were an attempt to reform and rehabilitate the inmates. Solitary confinement and forced silence on work crews were implemented to give prisoners opportunities to meditate on their wrongdoings. Some reformers argued that the discipline of the asylum could serve as a model for other environments like schools and factories.

Identify the major characteristics of the slave family in the south.

Black women generally began bearing children at younger ages than most white women, often as early as age fourteen or fifteen. Slave communities did not condemn premarital pregnancy in the way white society did, and African American couples would often begin living together before marrying. It was customary, however, for couples to marry-in a ceremony involving formal vows-soon after conceiving a child. Often, marriages occurred between slaves living on neighboring plantations. Husbands and wives sometimes visited each other with the permission of their masters, but often such visits had to be in secret, at night. Family ties were no less strong than those of whites, and many slave marriages lasted throughout the course of long lifetimes. When marriages did not survive, it was often because of circumstances over which blacks had no control.

Brook Farm

Brook Farm, in which the Boston transcendentalist George Ripley established as an experimental community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. There individuals would create a new form of social organization. All residents would share equally in the labor of the community that all could share too in the leisure because leisure was the first necessity for cultivation of the self.

Analyze the impact of King Cotton and short staple cotton on the development of slavery in the south.

During this time period, there was a major decline in many of the cash crop industries. This is because some were extremely difficult to grow and others exhausted land. Most notably was the decline of the tobacco economy. Soon a new cash crop was introduced. It was short-staple cotton. Short-staple cotton was a hardier and coarser strain of cotton that could grow successfully in a variety of climates and in a variety of soils. It was harder to process than the long-staple variety; its seeds were more difficult to remove from the fiber. But the 1793 invention of the cotton gin had largely solved that problem. Demand for cotton was growing rapidly due to the textile industry in the North. It was little wonder that southern politicians now proclaimed: "Cotton is king!". Cotton production dominated the more recently settled areas of what came to be known as the "lower South". Many people began to call this region the "Cotton Kingdom". Between 1840 and 1860, according to some estimates, 410,000 slaves moved from the upper South to the cotton states-either accompanying masters who were themselves migrating to the Southwest or sold to planters already there. Indeed, the sale of slaves to the Southwest became an important economic activity in the upper South and helped the troubled planters of that region compensate for the declining value of their crops.

Identify the different types of resistance to slavery. Identify the major slave revolts and there leaders that took place in the south. What were the results of the revolts?

In 1839, a group of fifty-three slaves in Cuba took charge of the ship Amistad that was transporting them to another part of Cuba. Their goal was to sail back to their homeland in Africa. The slaves had no experience with sailing, and they tried to compel the crew to steer them across the Atlantic. Instead, the ship sailed up the Atlantic coast until it was captured by a ship of the United States Revenue Service. Many Americans, including President Van Buren, thought the slaves should be returned to Cuba. But at the request of a group of abolitionists, former president John Quincy Adams went before the Supreme Court to argue that they should be freed. Adams argued that the foreign slave trade was illegal and thus the Amistad rebels could not be returned to slavery. Two years later, in 1841, another group of slaves revolted on board a ship and took control of it-this time an American vessel bound from Norfolk, Virginia, to New Orleans-and steered it to the British Bahamas, where slavery was illegal and the slaves were given sanctuary. In 1800, Gabriel Prosser gathered 1,000 rebellious slaves outside Richmond; but two Africans gave the plot away, and the Virginia militia stymied the uprising before it could begin. Prosser and thirty-five others were executed. In 1822, Charleston free black Denmark Vesey and his followers-rumored to total 9,000-made preparations for revolt; but again word leaked out, and suppression and retribution followed. In 1831, Nat Turner, a slave preacher, led a band of African Americans who armed themselves with guns and axes and, on a summer night, went from house to house in Southampton County, Virginia. They killed sixty white men, women, and children before being overpowered by state and federal troops. More than a hundred blacks were executed in the aftermath. Nat Turner's was the only large-scale slave insurrection in the nineteenth-century South, but fear of slave conspiracies and renewed violence pervaded the section as long as slavery lasted.

Discuss the development of the slave culture in music, song, dance, language and religion.

In many areas, slaves retained a language of their own, sometimes incorporating African speech patterns into English. Having arrived in America speaking many different African languages, the first generations of slaves had as much difficulty communicating with one another as they did with white people. To overcome these barriers, they learned a simple, common language (known to linguists as "pidgin"). It retained some African words, but it drew primarily, if selectively, from English. Field workers often used songs to pass the time in the fields; since they sang them in the presence of whites, they usually attached relatively innocuous words to them. But African Americans also created emotionally rich and politically challenging music in the relative privacy of their religious services. Almost all African Americans were Christians by the early nineteenth century.

Explain why slavery in the South was referred to as the Peculiar Institution.

In other countries, slavery existed but was not based solely on race. White southerners often referred to slavery as the "peculiar institution." By that they meant not that the institution was odd, but that it was distinctive, special. The description was apt, for American slavery was indeed distinctive. The South in the mid-nineteenth century was the only area in the Western world-except for Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico-where slavery still existed. Slavery, more than any other single factor, isolated the South from the rest of American society. As that isolation increased, so did the commitment of southerners to defend the institution.

What factors led to a male-dominated society in the South?

Small farmers, even more than great planters, were also committed to a traditional, male-dominated family structure. Their household-centered economies required the participation of all family members and, they believed, a stable system of gender relations to ensure order and stability. Men were the unquestioned masters of their home; women and children, who were both family and workforce, were firmly under the master's control. As the northern attack on slavery increased in the 1840s and 1850s, it was easy for such farmers to believe-and easy for ministers, politicians, and propagandists for slavery to persuade them- that an assault on one hierarchical system would open way to an assault on another such system.

Explain the cultural, political, social, and economic impact of slavery in the south. Address all four independently.

Slavery created different cultures in the South. The planter aristocracy had their own luxurious lifestyle. The hill people had their own isolated culture. The slave culture that developed was the most diverse. It even had its own language. Slavery designated slave owners as the political leaders in the South. Slavery also divided groups politically. Slavery changed the social structure in the South and made whites more socially powerful. Lastly, slavery caused the agricultural economy in the South to boom.

Explain how important slavery was to the national economy and the emergence of the United States as a world power.

Slavery provided a labor force in the South. This labor force was mainly used to work on cotton plantations. This led to an increase in cotton production. The cotton grown in the South was then sent to the North and helped grow the textile industry there. Not only did the textile industry boom in America, but also in England and other countries. In fact, the American textile industry was a trade competitor with other countries.

Who were the Hill People? How did they differ from the Plain Folk?

Some nonslaveowning whites did oppose the planter elite, but for the most part in limited ways and in a relatively few, isolated areas. These were southern highlanders, the "hill people," who lived in the Appalachian ranges east of the Mississippi, in the Ozarks to the west of the river, and in other "hill country" or backcountry" areas cut off from the commercial world of the plantation system. Of all southern whites, they were the most isolated from the mainstream of the region's life. They practiced a simple form of subsistence agriculture, owned practically no slave, and had a proud sense of seclusion. They were, in most respects, unconnected to the new commercial economy that dominated the great cotton-planting region of the the South. They produced almost no surplus for the market, had little access to money, and often bartered for the goods they could not grow themselves. To such men and women, slavery was unattractive because it threatened their sense of their own independence.

Discuss the role and characteristics of Southern women during the period. Compare and contrast the Southern women with her counterpart in the North.

Southern women were expected to stay at home, house clean, and take care of their children. It was frowned upon for Southern women to hold jobs. In the North, motherhood was also held in high regard. However, women in the workforce were seen as much more acceptable. Northern women often worked in factories or had caregiving careers. Southern white women also had less access to education than their northern counterparts.

Distinguish the geographic, economic and demographic differences between the Upper South, the Lower South, and the Border South.

The 15 slave states are usually divided into the lower south, the upper south and the border south. The lower south included Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The upper south included North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The border south included Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. In the lower south slavery was more concentrated on the large cotton plantations. In the upper south, farming was more diverse and included many different crops. Also, slaves in the upper south were often hired as artisans or laborers. In the upper south and border south, slaves were often sold to traders in the Southwest. The upper south had the highest slave population. The border south had the lowest slave population. Those in the upper south and the border south were also more tolerant of free blacks.

Explain the factors that hindered industrial and commercial growth in the southern states.

The South had a weak manufacturing sector. The South had only a very rudimentary financial system. The South also had an inadequate regional transportation system.

Explain why the South developed an agricultural based economy rather than develop industry.

The South had fertile land and a good climate for growing crops. Due to the profitable cash crops, few southerners saw a need for industrial development. The factors that prevented the industrial and commercial growth of the Southern states, a weak manufacturing sector, a rudimentary financial system, and inadequate regional transportations, also help explain why the South developed and agricultural economy and not an industrial one.

Compare and contrast the slavery in the cities with slavery on southern farms

The conditions of slavery in the cities differed significantly from those in the countryside. On relatively isolated plantations, slaves had little contact with free blacks and lower-class whites, and masters maintained direct and effective control; a deep and seemingly unbridgeable chasm yawned between slavery and freedom. In the city, however, a master often could not supervise his slaves closely and at the same time use them profitably. Even if they slept at night in carefully watched backyard barracks, slaves moved about during the day alone, performing errands of various kinds. Thus urban slaves gained numerous opportunities to mingle with free blacks and with whites. In the cities, the line between slavery and freedom became increasingly indistinct. There was a considerable market in the South for common laborers, particularly since, unlike in the North, there were few European immigrants to perform menial chores.

Compare and contrast the economic development of the North and the South in the period from 1840 - 1860.

The economy of the North was based on manufacturing. The economy of the South was based on agriculture. Many immigrants began working in factories in the North. Cotton, tobacco, indigo, and rice were grown in the South. Factories in the North participated in the textile industry which used cotton grown in the South. Cotton had become the most important crop after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney. Slavery became essential to provide a labor force to the cotton plantations in the South. Both the southern and northern economies relied on transportation and it was transportation that connected them.

Compare and contrast the economic, political and social status of Free Blacks in both the North and South. Why were free blacks unpopular in both the north and south?

The new laws made it more and more difficult, and in some cases practically impossible, for owners to set free their slaves; all southern states forbade free African Americans from entering. Arkansas even forced the freed slaves living there to leave. A few free blacks attained wealth and prominence. Some owned slaves themselves, usually relatives whom they had bought in order to ensure their ultimate emancipation. In a few cities-New Orleans, Natchez, Charleston-free black communities managed to flourish relatively unmolested by whites and with some economic stability. Most free blacks, however, lived in abject poverty, under conditions worse than those of African Americans in the North. Law or custom closed many occupations to them, forbade them to assemble without white supervision, and placed numerous other restraints on them.

Explain the combination of factors that led to the large and expanding domestic slave trade that developed in America from 1800 - 1860. Describe the working of the domestic slave trade in the antebellum south.

The transfer of enslaved people from one part of the South to another was one of the most important and terrible consequences of slavery. The transfer occurred through the efforts of professional slave traders. For shorter journeys slaves traveled on foot, trudging in coffles of hundreds along dusty highways. For transfers over long distances, the traders conveyed slaves via river or ocean steamers. This transfer happened due to the development of slave markets. The domestic slave trade, essential to the growth and prosperity of the system, was one of its most horrible aspects. The trade dehumanized all who were involved in it.

Who were the Plain Folk? List the major characteristics of the Plain Folk. Why did they continue to support slavery?

The typical white southerner was not a great planter and slaveholder, but a modest yeoman farmer. Some of these "plain folk," as they had become known, owned a few slaves, with whom they worked and lived far more closely than did the larger planters. Most owned not slaves. The plain folk often had limited educational opportunities. Many plain folk had close relations with the plantation aristocracy and supported slavery. The plain folk's commitment to paternalism also fueled their support of slavery. Lastly, plain folk did not oppose slavery because they wished for limited class conflict.

Civil Disobedience

Thoreau's rejection of what he considered the artificial constraints of society extended as well to his relationship with government. In 1846, he went to jail rather than agree to pay a poll tax. He would not, he insisted, give financial support to a government that permitted the existence of slavery. The proper response was "civil disobedience" or "passive resistance".

List the major characteristics of the Planter Class. Why were they compared to the aristocrats of Europe? List the characteristics of the Southern Lady as a part of the Planter Class.

Wealthy planters in the South soon began to form a planter aristocracy. The wealthiest planters maintained homes in towns or cities and spent several months of the year there, engaged in glittering social lives. Others traveled widely, especially to Europe, as an antidote to the isolation of plantation life. Many also used their plantations to host opulent social events. Just like the aristocrats of Europe, the planter aristocracy held political, social, and economic power. The Southern Lady was an idea of women having lives which were less important and completely separate from the men. Southern women were expected to stay at home, house clean, and take care of their children. Southern white women also had less access to education than their northern counterparts.

Transcendentalist

every person's goal should be liberation from the confines of "understanding" and the cultivation of "reason." Each individual should strive to "transcend" the limits of the intellect and allow the emotions, the "soul," to create an "original relation to the Universe." Transcendentalist philosophy emerged first among a small group of intellectuals in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Shakers

founded by "Mother" Ann Lee in the 1770s, the society of Shakers survived throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. But the Shakers attracted a particularly large following in the antebellum period and established more than twenty communities throughout the Northeast and Northwest in the 1840s. They derived their name from a unique religious ritual, a sort of ecstatic dance, in which members of the congregation would "shake" themselves free of sin while performing a loud chant.

John Brown

he led bloody uprisings in Kansas and Virginia. It was called the Bleeding Kansas Crisis of 1856. He believed armed insurrection as the only way to overthrow slavery.

Edgar Allen Poe

in the course of his short and unhappy life, Poe produced stories and poems that were primarily sad and macabre. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, received little recognition. But later works, including his most famous poem, "The Raven", established him as a major literary figure.

Asylum Movement

institutions established for criminals and the mentally ill. The asylums were an attempt to reform and rehabilitate inmates. The asylums were also an attempt to improve the treatment and rehabilitation of the mentally ill.

Phrenology

it developed in Germany and became popular in the United States in the 1830s when Orson and Lorenzo Fowler published The Phrenology Almanac. Phrenologists argued that the shape of an individual's skull was an indicator of his or her character or intelligence. They argued that different parts of the brain controlled a specific kind of intelligence or behavior.

Liberator

it was a weekly newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison stated that opponents to slavery should look at it from a black man's point of view. He believed reformers should talk about slavery's harm to African Americans.

The Temperance Crusade

it was the crusade against drunkenness. Many reformers argued that drunkenness was responsible for crime, disorder, and alcohol. Women claimed that drunkenness placed a special burden on wives. These burdens included men spending money on alcohol instead of for family needs and drunken husbands abusing their families.

Genius of Universal Emancipation

it was the leading antislavery newspaper by Benjamin Lundy. It had a moderate tone and proposals for reform. It reflected Lundy's Quaker views.

Dorothea Dix

she was a social reformer in Massachusetts. She began a national movement for new methods of treating the mentally ill. Her efforts not only created new institutions and treatments for the mentally ill but also changed how others viewed them. She was also involved in the feminist movement.

Margaret Fuller

one of the most responsible for raising issues of gender. A leading transcendentalist and a close associate of Emerson, she suggested the important relationship between the discovery of the "self" that was so central to antebellum reform and the questioning of gender roles. She wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Industry in the South was in the

port cities

Lucretia Mott

she also was a feminist reformer who pressed against the boundaries of what behavior was acceptable for women of her day. She along with Stanton longed to elevate the status of women after they had been turned away from an antislavery convention. She also began to draw comparisons between the mistreatment of slaves and the mistreatment of women. In 1848, she helped organize a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women's rights. Out of the meeting emerged a "Declaration of Sentiments", which stated women should also have certain unalienable rights. Their most prominent demand was for women's suffrage. She was also a Quaker.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

she also was a feminist reformer who pressed against the boundaries of what behavior was acceptable for women of her day. She longed to elevate the status of women after being turned away from an antislavery convention. She also began to draw comparisons between the mistreatment of slaves and the mistreatment of women. In 1848, she helped organize a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women's rights.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

she was a feminist reformer who pressed against the boundaries of what behavior was acceptable for women of her day. She was also a Quaker. She was also the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Who were the two parties in the Two Party System?

the Democrats and the Whigs

American Antislavery Society

the New England Anti-Slavery Society was founded by Garrison and his followers throughout the North in 1832. It later evolved into the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1840, Garrison created a formal division within the American Anti-Slavery Society by insisting that women be permitted to participate in the movement in terms of full equality.

James Fenimore Cooper

the first great American novelist. The author of more than thirty novels in the space of three decades, Cooper was known to his contemporaries as a master of adventure and suspense. What most distinguished his work was its evocation of the American wilderness. He wrote The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, which explored the American frontiersman's experience with Indians, pioneers, violence, and the law.

Hudson River School

the first great school of American painters that emerged in New York. Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, and Asher Durand-known, along with others, as the Hudson River School-painted the spectacular vistas of the rugged and still largely unsettled Hudson Valley. Like Emerson and Thoreau, whom many of the painters read and admired, they considered nature-more than civilization-the best source of wisdom and spiritual fulfillment.

Herman Melville

the most important of his novels was Moby Dick, published in 1851. His portrayal of Ahab, the powerful, driven captain of a whaling vessel, was a story of courage and of the strength of individual will; but it was also a tragedy of pride and revenge. Ahab's maniacal search for Moby Dick, a great white whale, suggested how the search for personal fulfillment and triumph could not only liberate but destroy as well.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

the most powerful document of abolitionist propaganda. A work of fiction written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It appeared first as a serial in an antislavery weekly and then it was published as a book.

Indian Reservations

the new reform approach of the 1840s and 1850s to solve the problems of Native Americans. Reservations were attempts to assimilate the Natives. Native Americans on reservations, reformers argued, would learn the ways of civilization in a protected setting.

New Lights

they believed every human being is capable of salvation. They believed God had brought new light into their lives through emotional conversion experiences. The main principle that set them apart from the Old Lights was their disbelief in predestination.

Free Soilers

they stood for "free soil", for keeping slavery out of the territories. Some were concerned about the welfare of African-Americans, but others simply wanted to keep the West a country for whites. Garrison dismissed free-soilism as "white-manism."

Personal Liberty Laws

they were laws passed by abolitionists after Prigg v. Pennsylvania in several Northern states. These laws forbade state officials to assist in the capture and return of runaways. These laws were used to directly counter the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850.