Chapter 12
John Brown
(1800-1859) anti-slavery advocate who believed that God had called upon him to abolish slavery. May or may not have been mentally unstable. Devoted over 20 years to fighting slavery, due to misunderstanding, in revenge he and his followers (his sons and others) killed five men in the pro slavery settlement of Pottawatomie Creek. Triggered dozens of incidents throughout Kansas some 200 people were killed. Was executed, still debated over whether he is a saint or killer.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
(1811-1896) American author and daughter of Lyman Beecher, she was an abolitionist and author of the famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Abraham Lincoln
16th president of the United States; helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederacy; an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery. Assassinated by Booth (1809-1865)
In the election of 1860, what proportion of the popular vote did Abraham Lincoln win?
40 percent
Kansas-Nebraska Act
A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty. Far from clarifying the status of slavery in the territories, the act led to violent conflict in "Bleeding Kansas."
Foreign Miners Tax
A discriminatory tax, adopted in 1850 in California Territory, that forced Chinese and Latin American immigrant miners to pay high taxes for the right to prospect for gold. The tax effectively drove these miners from the goldfields.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
A federal law that set up special federal courts to facilitate capture of anyone accused of being a runaway slave. These courts could consider a slave owner's sworn affidavit as proof, but defendants could not testify or receive a jury trial. The controversial law led to armed conflict between U.S. marshals and abolitionists.
Chain Migration
A pattern by which immigrants find housing and work and learn to navigate a new environment, and then assist other immigrants from their family or home area to settle in the same location.
Free Soil Movement
A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1848, the free soilers organized the Free Soil Party, which depicted slavery as a threat to republicanism and to the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder society, arguments that won broad support among aspiring white farmers.
Why did Irish immigrants arrive in mass numbers to the United States in the 1850s?
A potato blight in Ireland limited their primary food source.
William Walker
A proslavery American adventurer from the South, he led an expedition to seize control on Nicaragua in 1855. He wanted to petition for annexation it as a new slave state but failed when several Latin American countries sent troops to oust him before the offer was made.
Lincoln's ambition propelled him into politics after having been raised by what kind of father?
A struggling yeoman farmer
The election of which president in 1860 caused a secessionist fervor to sweep through the Deep South?
Abraham Lincoln
Ostend Manifesto
An 1854 manifesto that urged President Franklin Pierce to seize the slave-owning province of Cuba from Spain. Northern Democrats denounced this aggressive initiative, and the plan was scuttled.
Treaty of Kanagawa
An 1854 treaty in which, after a show of military force by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, leaders of Japan agreed to permit American ships to refuel at two Japanese ports.
American or Know-Nothing Party
An anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political party formed in 1851 that arose in response to mass immigration in the 1840s, especially from Ireland and Germany. In 1854, the party gained control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
How was the 1844 U.S. presidential election similar to the 1848 U.S. presidential election?
Antislavery voters took enough votes in New York to sway the election.
How did Abraham Lincoln view secession?
As an illegal act that constituted an insurrection against the Union
How did Senator John C. Crittenden think that his compromise plan would solve the secession crisis of 1861?
By allowing the extension of slavery but limiting its spread, it had something for both the South and North.
The admission of what state prompted the Compromise of 1850?
California
Why did the discovery of gold in California affect the national debate on slavery?
California sought statehood as a free state in 1850, which would have blocked slavery in the West.
Justice Roger B. Taney
Chief Justice from the slave state of Maryland. Decided that extended federal protection to slavery by ruling that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any territory. Also declared that slaves,as property,were not citizens of the U.S.
Instead of agreeing to President Franklin Pierce's offer to buy more Mexican territory, Mexican officials agreed to sell a small amount of land earmarked by James Gadsden that would be used for what purpose?
Construction of a transcontinental railroad
What assessment correctly describes the election of 1848?
Democrat Lewis Cass dominated the trans-Appalachian west, whereas Zachary Taylor dominated the Northeast.
Lewis Cass
Democratic senator who proposed popular sovereignty to settle the slavery question in the territories; he lost the presidential election in 1848 against Zachary Taylor but continued to advocate his solution to the slavery issue throughout the 1850s.
What action by President Lincoln encouraged Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government to seize Fort Sumter?
Dispatching a ship to resupply the fort's garrison
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 brought trials of potential fugitive slaves to what types of courts?
Federal
Where was the federal arsenal that abolitionist John Brown attacked in 1859?
Harpers Ferry, Virginia
Why did John C. Calhoun, secretary of war under President James K. Polk, oppose the annexation of large swaths of Mexican territory south of the Rio Grande?
He feared that such an annexation would mean the addition of racially inferior people.
How did Abraham Lincoln respond to the secession of six states before he became president?
He stood firm in his commitment to the Union and left little room for negotiation with the secessionists.
What statement describes Abraham Lincoln's politics in 1854?
He was a Republican and former Whig who supported a gradualist view on abolition.
Why was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin so successful with readers?
It highlighted the cruelty of slavery with heartrending power.
Who was the first presidential candidate of the Republican Party?
John C. Frémont
Which senator backed a last-ditch effort to forge a compromise between the North and the South in early 1861?
John J. Crittenden
Mexican Cession
Lands taken by the United States in the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848).
Personal Liberty Laws
Laws enacted in many northern states that guaranteed to all residents, including alleged fugitives, the right to a jury trial.
Compromise of 1850
Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state and a new Fugitive Slave Act.
How did cotton figure into Confederate hopes to secede from the United States and successfully form a new nation?
Leaders felt that cotton would give them extraordinary economic and political leverage, eliciting likely aid from Britain and France.
The American (Know-Nothing) Party in 1854 won control of the state governments of Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts.
Which country did filibusterer William Walker take over briefly in the 1850s to expand slavery?
Nicaragua
Why did the border states where slavery was legal—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—not join other southern states in seceding in the months before Abraham Lincoln took office?
Nonslaveholding yeomen had more political strength there.
Approximately what portion of Mexico's territory was turned over to the United States per the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
One-third
How was John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry similar to the 1856 beating of Charles Sumner?
Onlookers' reactions divided the nation even more than the acts.
Nativism
Opposition to immigration and to full citizenship for recent immigrants or to immigrants of a particular ethnic or national background, as expressed, for example, by anti-Irish discrimination in the 1850s and Asian exclusion laws between the 1880s and 1940s.
Filibustering
Private paramilitary campaigns, mounted particularly by southern proslavery advocates in the 1850s, to seize additional territory in the Caribbean or Latin America in order to establish control by U.S.-born leaders, with an expectation of eventual annexation by the United States.
Which lists the 1850s expansionist attempts in correct chronological order, from earliest to latest?
Quitman's expedition; Treaty of Kanagawa; William Walker in Nicaragua
What book did Harriet Beecher Stowe write that increased northern sentiment against slavery?
Uncle Tom's Cabin
By 1870, what was the major agricultural product of California?
Wheat
In his famous 1861 "cornerstone" speech, what did Alexander Stephens claim was the basis of the Confederacy's way of life?
White supremacy
Before ceding lands to the federal government in 1850, Texas originally contained parts of the present-day states of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and
Wyoming
The miners who arrived in California to seek fortunes from discovering gold were known as
forty-niners.
The 1846 Wilmot Proviso had the effect of dividing Congress along
sectional lines.
How did the Compromise of 1850 affect the nation's capital, Washington, D.C.?
The slave trade was abolished in the city.
Which part of the Compromise of 1850 was the most controversial after passage?
The terms of the Fugitive Slave Act
Why were opponents of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act given cause to assume corruption on the part of U.S. marshals in apprehending potential fugitive slaves?
The verdict determined marshal's pay.
Why did most Californios who had lived in California before the gold rush lose their land?
Their land claims were ignored or illegally reduced.
Why did James Buchanan and other Democrats advocate a separate state in southern California in 1850?
They wanted to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean.
Why did a few of the proslavery northern senators vote along with the southern senators to kill the Wilmot Proviso?
They were afraid that southern voters would heed calls for secession.
Secession came earliest in which states?
Those with the highest concentration of slaves
Why did President Franklin Pierce want to buy the land from Mexico that became the Gadsden Purchase?
To build a transcontinental railroad
Stephen Douglas
Senator from Illinois who ran for president against Abraham Lincoln. Wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Freeport Doctrine. Popularized the idea of popular sovereignty.
What state was the first to secede from the Union?
South Carolina
Though born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln moved to what town in the 1830s, from which he made his legal career and his political name?
Springfield, Illinois
Though he had served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives previously, Abraham Lincoln became a national name by debating whom seven times in 1858?
Stephen Douglas
Who was the champion of the concept termed "popular sovereignty" in the 1850s?
Stephen Douglas
Wilmot Proviso
The 1846 proposal by Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania to ban slavery in territory acquired from the U.S.-Mexico War.
While successful at dislodging foreigners and Native peoples, why did California miners find it difficult to take the land of Mexicans and Californios?
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo protected their rights.
How did Irish immigrants to the United States of the 1820s differ from Irish immigrants to the United States in the 1850s?
The 1850s immigrants came as family units.
Dred Scott Decision
The 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against slave Dred Scott, who claimed that travels with his master into free states and territories made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.
Popular Sovereignty
The principle that ultimate power lies in the hands of the electorate. Also a plan, first promoted by Democratic candidate Senator Lewis Cass as "squatter sovereignty," then revised as "popular sovereignty" by fellow Democratic presidential aspirant Stephen Douglas, under which Congress would allow settlers in each territory to determine its status as free or slave.
After losing reelection to the House of Representatives and withdrawing from politics, opposition to what event led Abraham Lincoln to return to politics?
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
What event proved to be the last nail in the coffin of the Second Party System and contributed directly to the emergence of the Republican Party?
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
What was the ruling in the Ableman v. Booth court case?
The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the rights of Wisconsin's citizens.
How did Abraham Lincoln conceive of the federal government's power over slavery in the 1850s, before becoming president?
The general government could abolish slavery in the territories only.
"Slave Power" conspiracy
The political argument, made by abolitionists, free soilers, and Republicans in the pre-Civil War years, that southern slaveholders were using their unfair representative advantage under the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution, as well as their clout within the Democratic Party, to demand extreme federal proslavery policies (such as annexation of Cuba) that the majority of American voters would not support.