History Chapter 12

Popular sovereignty

Popular sovereignty or the sovereignty of the people is the principle that the authority of the government is created and sustained by the consent of its people, through their elected representatives (Rule by the People), who are the source of all political power.

Preston Brooks

Preston Smith Brooks was a Democratic Representative from South Carolina, serving from 1853 until his resignation in July, 1856, and again from August, 1856 until his death. Brooks was a fervent advocate of slavery and states' rights.

Sojourner truth

Sojourner Truth was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826.

Border states

States that could not decide to join the confederacy or the union.

Stephen Douglas

Stephen Arnold Douglas was an American politician from Brandon, Vermont and the designer of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Roger Taney

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney made the pro-slavery ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott Case that deemed blacks weren't citizens of the United States.

American Colonization Society

The American Colonization Society established in 1816 by Robert Finley of New Jersey,an attempt to satisfy two groups in America

Border Ruffian

The Border Ruffians were pro-slavery activists from the slave state of Missouri, who in 1854 to 1860 crossed the state border into Kansas Territory, to force the acceptance of slavery there. The name was applied by Free-State settlers in Kansas and abolitionists throughout the North.

The compromise of 1850

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, which defused a four-year political confrontation between slave and free states regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

Confederate States of America

The Confederate States of America, commonly referred to as the Confederacy, was an unrecognized confederation of secessionist American states existing from 1861 to 1865.

Kansas Nebraska Act

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through popular sovereignty whether they would allow ...

Lincoln-Douglas debates

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Illinois, and Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate.

Missouri Compromise

The Missouri Compromise was a federal statute in the United States that regulated slavery in the country's western territories. The compromise, devised by Henry Clay, was agreed to by the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress and passed as a law in 1820.

Pottawatomie Massacre

The Pottawatomie massacre occurred during the night of May 24 and the morning of May 25, 1856. In reaction to the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces, John Brown and a band of abolitionist settlers—some of them members of the Pottawatomie Rifles—killed five settlers north of Pottawatomie Creek in Franklin County, Kansas

Republican Party

The Republican Party, commonly referred to as the GOP (abbreviation for Grand Old Party), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, the other being its historic rival the Democratic Party.

Secret Six

The Secret Six, or the Secret Committee of Six, was a group of men who secretly funded the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry by abolitionist John Brown

Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century enslaved people of African descent in the United States in efforts to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause.

Wilmot Proviso

The Wilmot Proviso, one of the major events leading to the American Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War; or, in the future, including the area later known as the Mexican Cession (which some proponents construed to also include the disputed lands in south ...

Fugitive Slave act

This was one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a "slave power conspiracy". It required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law.

Uncle Toms Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852,

William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison (December 12, 1805 - May 24, 1879) was a prominent American abolitionist, journalist, suffragist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, which he founded with Isaac Knapp in 1831 and published in Massachusetts until slavery was abolished by Constitutional amendment after the American Civil War.

Abolitionist

a person who favors the abolition of a practice or institution, especially capital punishment or (formerly) slavery.

Martyr

a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs.

Sectionalism

restriction of interest to a narrow sphere; undue concern with local interests or petty distinctions at the expense of general well-being.

Secession

to break away from an orginazation or country

Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States involving anti-slavery Free-Staters and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian" elements, that took place in the Kansas Territory and the neighboring towns of the state of Missouri between 1854 and 1861.

Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner was an American politician and senator from Massachusetts. As an academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the antislavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of .

Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter is a Third System masonry sea fort located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The fort is best known as the site upon which the shots that started the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States. Pierce was a northern Democrat who saw the abolitionist movement as a fundamental threat to the unity of the nation.

Fredrick Douglas

Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist orator, writer, and statesman.

Free soil party

Free-Soil Party, (1848-54), minor but influential political party in the pre-Civil War period of American history that opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories.Jul 28, 2013

Harpers Ferry Virginia

Harpers Ferry is a historic town in Jefferson County

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play,

Hariet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and during the American Civil War, a Union spy.

Henry Clay

Henry Clay, Sr. (April 12, 1777 - June 29, 1852) was an American lawyer, politician, and skilled orator who represented Kentucky in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives.

James Buchanan

James Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States, serving immediately prior to the American Civil War.

Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Finis Davis was an American soldier and politician who was the President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

John Brown

John Brown was a white American abolitionist who believed armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States.

John C. Calhoun

John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 - March 31, 1850) was a leading American politician and political theorist during the first half of the 19th century

Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore was the 13th President of the United States, the last Whig president, and the last president not to be affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican parties.

Nullification

Nullification, in United States constitutional history, is a legal theory that a state has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal law which that state has deemed unconstitutional. The theory of nullification has never been legally upheld by federal courts.

abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.

The election of 1860

Abraham lincoln won the election of 1860

Sarah/ Angleina Grimke

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American political activist, abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. While she was raised a southerner, she spent her entire adult life living in the North.

Dred Scott

Dred Scott (circa 1799 - September 17, 1858) was an enslaved African American man in the United States who unsuccessfully sued for his freedom and that of his wife and their two daughters in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857

Freeport doctrine

FREEPORT DOCTRINE was Stephen Douglas's doctrine that, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, slavery could be excluded from territories of the United States by local legislation.