US History Midterm

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. This was one of the many bloody episodes in Kansas preceding the American Civil War, which came to be known collectively as Bleeding Kansas. Bleeding Kansas was largely brought about by the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Slave Power

A conspiracy theory that the South was trying to extend slavery throughout the region and trying to replace the openness of northern capitalism and replace it with the closed, aristocratic vision of the south.

Corrupt Bargain

After the votes were counted in the U.S. presidential election of 1824, no candidate had received a majority of the Presidential Electoral votes, thereby putting the outcome in the hands of the House of Representatives. There were four candidates on the ballot: John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and William H. Crawford. Following the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment, however, only the top three candidates in the electoral vote were admitted as candidates, leaving out Henry Clay. To the surprise of many, the House elected John Quincy Adams over rival Andrew Jackson. It was widely believed that Clay, the Speaker of the House at the time, convinced Congress to elect Adams, who then made Clay his Secretary of State. Jackson's supporters denounced this as a "corrupt bargain." The "corrupt bargain" that placed Adams in the White House and Clay in the State Department launched a four-year campaign of revenge by the friends of Andrew Jackson. Claiming the people had been cheated of their choice, Jacksonians attacked the Adams administration at every turn as illegitimate and tainted by aristocracy and corruption. Jackson's attack on the national blueprint put forward by Adams and Clay won support from Old Republicans and market liberals.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Lincoln used his Second Inaugural Address to touch on the question of Divine providence. He wondered what God's will might have been in allowing the war to come, and why it had assumed the terrible dimensions it had taken. He endeavored to address some of these dilemmas, using allusions taken from the Bible. Lincoln reiterates the cause of the war, slavery, in saying "slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war". Lincoln's phrase, "but let us judge not, that we be not judged," is an allusion to the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:1 which in the King James Version reads, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Lincoln suggests that the death and destruction wrought by the war was divine retribution to the U.S. for possessing slavery, saying that God may will that the war continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword", and that the war was the country's "woe due". The quotation "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether" is from Psalm 19:9. The closing paragraph contains two additional glosses from scripture "let us strive on to. . . bind up the nation's wounds" is a reworking of Psalm 147:3. Also, "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan" relies on James 1:27. Lincoln's point seems to be that God's purposes are not directly knowable to humans, and represents a theme that he had expressed earlier. After Lincoln's death, his secretaries found among his papers an undated manuscript now generally known as the "Meditations on the Divine Will." In that manuscript, Lincoln wrote: The will of God prevails—In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is somewhat different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect this. Lincoln's sense that the divine will was unknowable stood in marked contrast to sentiments popular at the time. In the popular mind, both sides of the Civil War assumed that they could read God's will and assumed His favor in their opposing causes. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" expressed sentiments common among the supporters of the Union cause, that the Union was waging a righteous war that served God's purposes. Similarly, the Confederacy chose Deo vindice as its motto, often translated as "God will vindicate us."[5] Lincoln, responding to compliments from Thurlow Weed on the speech, said that "... I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

Samuel F.B. Morse

Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.

Nathanial Bedford Forrest

Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 - October 29, 1877), called Bedford Forrest in his lifetime, was a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Before the war Forrest amassed a fortune as a planter, real estate investor, and slave trader. He was one of the few officers on either side to enlist as a private and be promoted to general officer and corps commander during the war. An expert cavalry leader, Forrest was given command of his own unit and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle".[3] Union General William Tecumseh Sherman called him "that devil Forrest" during wartime communications with Ulysses S. Grant and considered him "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side". Forrest is considered one of the Civil War's most brilliant tacticians. Without military education or training, he became the scourge of Grant, Sherman, and almost every other Union general who fought in Tennessee, Alabama, or Kentucky. Forrest fought by simple rules: he maintained that "war means fighting and fighting means killing" and that the way to win was "to get there first with the most men". His cavalry, which Sherman reported in disgust "could travel one hundred miles in less time it takes ours to travel ten", secured more Union guns, horses, and supplies than any other single Confederate unit. He played pivotal roles at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, the capture of Murfreesboro, the Franklin-Nashville campaign, Brice's Crossroads, and in the pursuit and capture of Colonel Abel Streight's Raiders.[4] His methods subsequently influenced many future generations of military strategists. After the war ended, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee both expressed their belief that the Confederate high command had failed to use Forrest's talents fully.[5] Forrest was accused of war crimes at the Battle of Fort Pillow in 1864 for allegedly allowing forces under his command to massacre hundreds of black Union Army and white Southern Unionist prisoners. However, Sherman investigated the allegations and did not charge Forrest with any improprieties. Park Ranger Matt Atkinson stated in a lecture that there were no orders found in the chain of command that had explicitly ordered the massacre of the garrison,[6] but historians[who?] continue to debate Forrest's degree of responsibility. Following the war, Forrest pursued new business ventures but met with less success. He was sworn in as one of the earliest members of the Ku Klux Klan. He became disillusioned, after a year or so, by the more radical ambitions and ungovernable membership of the rest of the Klan. In January 1869, Forrest issued General Order Number One, which decreed that "the masks and costumes of this Order be forever destroyed". In the last years of his life, he publicly denounced the violence and racism practiced by the Klan.

Clara Barton

On April 19, 1861, the Baltimore Riot resulted in the first bloodshed of the American Civil War. Victims within the Massachusetts regiment were transported to Washington D.C. after the violence, which happened to be Clara Barton's home at the time. Wanting to serve her country, Barton went to the railroad station when the victims arrived and nursed 40 men.[11] Barton provided crucial, personal assistance to the men in uniform, many of whom were wounded, hungry and without any supplies besides what they carried on their backs. She began helping them by personally taking supplies to the unfinished Capitol Building where the young men of the 6th Massachusetts Militia, who had been attacked in Baltimore, Maryland, were housed. Barton quickly recognized them, as she had grown up with some of them, and some she had even taught. Barton, along with several other women, personally provided clothing, food, and supplies for the sick and wounded soldiers. She learned how to store and distribute medical supplies and offered emotional support to the soldiers by keeping their spirits high. She would read books to them, write letters to their families for them, talk to them, and support them.[12] It was on that day that she identified herself with army work and began her efforts towards collecting medical supplies for the Union soldiers. Prior to distributing provisions directly onto the battlefield and gaining further support, Barton used her own living quarters as a storeroom and distributed supplies with the help of a few friends in early 1862, despite opposition in the War Department and among field surgeons.[2] Ladies' Aid societies helped in sending bandages, food, and clothing that would later be distributed during the Civil War. In August 1862, Barton finally gained permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to work on the front lines. She gained support from other people who believed in her cause. These people became her patrons, her most supportive being Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.[13] After the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton placed an ad in a Massachusetts newspaper for supplies; the response was a profound influx of supplies.[14] She worked to distribute stores, clean field hospitals, apply dressings, and serve food to wounded soldiers in close proximity to several battles, including Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.[15] Barton helped both Union and Confederate soldiers.[14] Supplies were not always readily available though. At the battle of Antietam, for example, Barton used corn-husks in place of bandages [16] In 1863 she began a romantic relationship with an officer, Colonel John J. Elwell.[17] In 1864, she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending. She was known as the "American Nightingale." She was also known as the "Angel of the Battlefield[12]" after she came to the aid of the overwhelmed surgeon on duty following the battle of Cedar Mountain in Northern Virginia in August 1862. She arrived at a field hospital at midnight with a large amount of supplies to help the severely wounded soldiers.

Union Party

The National Union Party was the temporary name used by the Republican Party for the national ticket in the 1864 presidential election, held during the Civil War. State Republican parties, for the most part, did not change their name.[1] The temporary name was used to attract War Democrats and Border State Unionists who would not vote for the Republican Party. The party nominated incumbent President Abraham Lincoln and for Vice President, Democrat Andrew Johnson, who were elected in an electoral landslide.

Whig Party

The Whig Party was a political party active in the middle of the 19th century in the United States. Four US presidents belonged to the party while in office. It emerged in the 1830s as the leading opponent of Jacksonians, pulling together former members of the National Republican (one of the successors of the Democratic-Republican Party) and Anti-Masonic Parties. It had distant links to the upscale traditions of the Federalist Party. Along with the rival Democratic Party, it was central to the Second Party System from the early 1840s to the mid-1860s. It originally formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829-37) and his Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of the US Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization, banking, and economic protectionism to stimulate manufacturing. It appealed to entrepreneurs, planters, reformers and the emerging urban middle class, but had little appeal to farmers or unskilled workers. It included many active Protestants, and voiced a moralistic opposition to the Jacksonian Indian removal. Party founders chose the "Whig" name to echo the American Whigs of the 18th century who fought for independence. The underlying political philosophy of the American Whig Party was not directly related to the British Whig party. Democrats stood for the 'sovereignty of the people' as expressed in popular demonstrations, constitutional conventions, and majority rule as a general principle of governing, whereas Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, and protections for minority interests against majority tyranny. The Whig Party nominated several presidential candidates in 1836. General William Henry Harrison of Ohio was nominated in 1840, former Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky in 1844, and General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana in 1848. Another war hero, General Winfield Scott of New Jersey was the Whig Party's last presidential nominee, in 1852. In its two decades of existence, the Whig Party had two of its candidates, Harrison and Taylor, elected president. Both died in office. John Tyler succeeded to the presidency after Harrison's death in 1841, but was expelled from the party later that year. Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor's death in 1850, was the last Whig president. The party fell apart because of the internal tension over the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination for a full term of its own incumbent, President Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Scott. Most Whig Party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter base mostly gravitated to the new Republican Party. In the South, most joined the Know Nothing Party, which unsuccessfully ran Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election, by which time the Whig Party had become virtually defunct. Some former Whigs became Democrats.

Davy Crockett

David "Davy" Crockett (August 17, 1786 - March 6, 1836) was a 19th-century American folk hero, frontiersman, soldier, and politician. He is commonly referred to in popular culture by the epithet "King of the Wild Frontier". He represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives and served in the Texas Revolution. Crockett grew up in East Tennessee, where he gained a reputation for hunting and storytelling. He was made a colonel in the militia of Lawrence County, Tennessee and was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1821. In 1827, he was elected to the U.S. Congress where he vehemently opposed many of the policies of President Andrew Jackson, especially the Indian Removal Act. Crockett's opposition to Jackson's policies led to his defeat in the 1831 elections. He was re-elected in 1833, then narrowly lost in 1835, prompting his angry departure to Texas (then the Mexican state of Tejas) shortly thereafter. In early 1836, he took part in the Texas Revolution and was killed at the Battle of the Alamo in March.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross; c. 1822[1] - March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist, humanitarian, and an armed scout and spy for the United States Army during the American Civil War. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved people, family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped abolitionist John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era was an active participant in the struggle for women's suffrage. Born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another slave and hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. She was a devout Christian and experienced strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North America, and helped newly freed slaves find work. When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 slaves. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. After she died in 1913, she became an icon of American courage and freedom.

Petticoat Affair

An 1829-1831 U.S. scandal responsible for facilitating Martin Van Buren's rise to the presidency, as well as Calhoun's transformation from a national political figure with presidential aspirations into a sectional leader of the slave-holding Southern states. It began when Peggy O'Neale married Senator John Eaton, with rumors that they had had an affair. Andrew Jackson appointed Eaton Secretary of War, but the other cabinet wives led by Floride Calhoun persuaded their husbands to ostracize the couple. The dispute was finally resolved when Van Buren offered to resign, giving Jackson the opportunity to reorganize his cabinet by asking for the resignations of the anti-Eaton cabinet members. By 1831, Jackson had chosen van Buren to succeed him in the White House, ending Calhoun's dreams of the presidency.

Free Soil Ideology

Assumptions about the proper structure of scoiety came to center on the belief in free soil and free labor. although abolitionists generated some support for their argument that slavery was a moral evil, most northerners came to believe that slavery was dangerous not about what it did to blacks, but what it did to whites. At the heart of American democracy was the right of all citizens to own property, to control their own labor, and to have access to opportunities for advancement.

Wilmot Proviso

August 1846 during the Mexican War, James Polk asks Congress for two million to fund peace. Rep. David Wilmo (Dem.) introduces amendment to appropriation bill prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. Passes house but fails Senate. Southern militants argue that Americans should have rights to own slaves in Mexico.

Charles Grandison Finney

Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) was an American Presbyterian minister and leader in the Second Great Awakening in the United States. He has been called The Father of Modern Revivalism. Finney was best known as an innovative revivalist during the period 1825-1835 in upstate New York and Manhattan, an opponent of Old School Presbyterian theology, an advocate of Christian perfectionism, and a religious writer. Together with several other evangelical leaders, his religious views led him to promote social reforms, such as abolition of slavery and equal education for women and African Americans. From 1835 he taught at Oberlin College of Ohio, which accepted all genders and races. He served as its second president from 1851 to 1866, during which its faculty and students were activists for abolition, the Underground Railroad, and universal education.

Ostend Manifesto

Franklin Pierce had been unsuccessful in attempts to buy Cuba from Spain. In 1854 however, a group from Ostend and Belgium sent private documents making the case for seizing Cuba by force. Their manifesto is leaked to public enraging many anti-slavery Northerners who charged the administration with conspiring to bring a new slave state into the union.

Lucretia Mott

Lucretia Mott (née Coffin; January 3, 1793 - November 11, 1880) was a U.S. Quaker, abolitionist, a women's rights activist, and a social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. In 1848 she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first meeting about women's rights. Mott helped write the Declaration of Sentiments during the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Her speaking abilities made her an important abolitionist, feminist, and reformer. When slavery was outlawed in 1865, she advocated giving former slaves who had been bound to slavery laws within the boundaries of the United States, whether male or female, the right to vote. She remained a central figure in the abolition and suffrage movement until her death in 1880. Mott was a Quaker preacher early in her adulthood.

Credit Mobilier

Crédit Mobilier Scandal, in U.S. history, illegal manipulation of contracts by a construction and finance company associated with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad (1865-69); the incident established Crédit Mobilier of America as a symbol of post-Civil War corruption. Although its operations were more or less typical of 19th-century railroad building in a wide-open period of U.S. history often referred to as the "Great Barbecue," sensational newspaper exposures and congressional investigations focussed attention on the Crédit Mobilier. Experience had already taught veteran railroad organizers that more money could be made from construction contracts than from operating the completed road. This promised to be doubly true in the case of the Union Pacific, which was supported by federal loans and land grants but would be spanning the vast unpopulated region between Omaha, on the Missouri River, and Great Salt Lake—a territory unlikely to produce much immediate revenue. Crédit Mobilier was part of a complex arrangement whereby a few men contracted with themselves or assignees for the construction of the railroad. Along with certain trustees, the manipulators reaped enormous profits but impoverished the railroad in the process. When it was revealed that Oakes Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, was involved, the House of Representatives investigated the scandal and censured him and a colleague; several others, including Vice Pres. Schuyler Colfax, were absolved.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States (1853-57). Pierce was a northern Democrat who saw the abolitionist movement as a fundamental threat to the unity of the nation. His polarizing actions in championing and signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act alienated anti-slavery groups while failing to stem conflict between North and South setting the stage for Southern secession and the American Civil War. Historians and other scholars generally rank Pierce among the worst of U.S. Presidents. Born in New Hampshire, Pierce served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate until he resigned from the latter in 1842. His private law practice in his home state was a success; he was appointed U.S. Attorney for his state in 1845. Pierce took part in the Mexican-American War as a brigadier general in the Army. Seen by Democrats as a compromise candidate uniting northern and southern interests, he was nominated as the party's candidate for president on the 49th ballot at the 1852 Democratic National Convention. In the 1852 presidential election, Pierce and his running mate William R. King easily defeated the Whig Party ticket of Winfield Scott and William A. Graham. As president, Pierce simultaneously attempted to enforce neutral standards for civil service while also satisfying the diverse elements of the Democratic Party with patronage, an effort which largely failed and turned many in his party against him. Pierce was a Young America expansionist who signed the Gadsden Purchase of land from Mexico and led a failed attempt to acquire Cuba from Spain. He signed trade treaties with Britain and Japan, while his Cabinet reformed their departments and improved accountability, but these successes were overshadowed by political strife during his presidency. His popularity in the Northern states declined sharply after he supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, while many whites in the South continued to support him. Passage of the act led to violent conflict over the expansion of slavery in the American West. Pierce's administration was further damaged when several of his diplomats issued the Ostend Manifesto, calling for the annexation of Cuba, a document which was roundly criticized. Although Pierce fully expected to be renominated by the Democrats in the 1856 presidential election, he was abandoned by his party and his bid failed. His reputation in the North suffered further during the Civil War as he became a vocal critic of President Abraham Lincoln.

Greenbacks

Greenback movement, (c. 1868-88), in U.S. history, the campaign, largely by persons with agrarian interests, to maintain or increase the amount of paper money in circulation. Between 1862 and 1865, the U.S. government issued more than $450,000,000 in paper money not backed by gold (greenbacks) to help finance the Union cause in the American Civil War. After the war, fiscal conservatives demanded that the government retire the greenbacks, but farmers and others who wished to maintain high prices opposed that move. In 1868 the Democrats gave partial support to the Greenback movement by endorsing a plan that called for the redemption of certain war bonds by the issuance of new greenbacks. The Panic of 1873 and the subsequent depression polarized the nation on the issue of money, with farmers and others demanding the issuance of additional greenbacks or the unlimited coinage of silver. In 1874 champions of an expanded currency formed the Greenback-Labor Party, which drew most of its support from the Midwest; and after Congress, in 1875, passed the Resumption Act, which provided that greenbacks could be redeemed in gold beginning Jan. 1, 1879, the new party made repeal of that act its first objective. The 45th Congress (1877-79), which was almost evenly divided between friends and opponents of an expanded currency, agreed in 1878 to a compromise that included retention of the Resumption Act, the expansion of paper money redeemable in gold, and enactment of the Bland-Allison Act, which provided for a limited resumption of the coinage of silver dollars. In the midterm elections of 1878, the Greenback-Labor Party elected 14 members of Congress and in 1880 its candidate for president polled more than 300,000 votes, but after 1878 most champions of an expanded currency judged that their best chance of success was the movement for the unlimited coinage of silver.

John Tyler

He was elected to the latter office on the 1840 Whig ticket with President William Henry Harrison. Tyler succeeded to the presidency after Harrison's death in April 1841, a mere month after the start of the new administration. He was a supporter of states' rights, and as president he adopted nationalist policies only when they did not infringe on the powers of the states. His unexpected rise to the presidency, with the resulting threat to the presidential ambitions of Henry Clay, US Senator from Kentucky, and other politicians, left him estranged from both major political parties. Tyler, born to a prominent Virginia planter family, became a national figure at a time of political upheaval. In the 1820s the nation's only political party, the Democratic-Republicans, split into factions. He was initially a Democrat, but opposed Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis. Tyler believed that Jackson's actions infringed upon states' rights, and criticized his expansion of executive power during the Bank War. This led Tyler to ally with the Whig Party. Tyler served as a Virginia state legislator, governor, U.S. representative, and U.S. senator (elected by the state legislature under contemporary practice). He was put on the 1840 presidential ticket to attract states' rights Southerners to a Whig coalition to defeat Martin Van Buren's re-election bid. With the death of President Harrison, Tyler became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency without election. After Harrison's one-month term, Tyler served longer than any president in U.S. history not elected to the office. To forestall constitutional uncertainty, Tyler immediately took the oath of office, moved into the White House, and assumed full presidential powers, a precedent that governed future successions and was codified in the Twenty-fifth Amendment (ratified in 1967). A strict constructionist, Tyler found much of the Whig platform unconstitutional, and vetoed several of his party's bills. Believing that the president rather than Congress should set policy, he sought to bypass the Whig establishment, most notably the powerful Kentucky Senator Henry Clay. Most of Tyler's Cabinet resigned soon into his term, and the Whigs, dubbing him His Accidency, expelled him from the party. Tyler was the first president to see his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. Although he faced a stalemate on domestic policy, he had several foreign-policy achievements, including the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Britain, which resolved border issues with British North America, and issues of trade compensation and reconciliation, and the Treaty of Wanghia with Qing China. The Republic of Texas separated from Mexico in 1836; Tyler, a firm believer in manifest destiny, thought its annexation by the US would provide an economic advantage to the nation, and worked diligently to make it happen. He initially sought election to a full term as president, but after failing to gain the support of either Whigs or Democrats, he withdrew in support of Democrat James K. Polk, who favored annexation. Polk won the election, and Tyler signed a bill to annex Texas three days before leaving office. Under Polk, the process was completed.

Nullification Crisis

In 1832-1833, South Carolina declared that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of the state. On July 14, 1832, before Calhoun had resigned the Vice Presidency in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification. Jackson signed into law the Tariff of 1832. This compromise tariff received the support of most northerners and half of the southerners in Congress. The reductions were too little for South Carolina, and on November 24, 1832, a state convention adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and unenforceable in South Carolina after February 1, 1833. Military preparations to resist anticipated federal enforcement were initiated by the state. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed both the Force Bill—authorizing the President to use military forces against South Carolina—and a new negotiated tariff, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which was satisfactory to South Carolina. The South Carolina convention reconvened and repealed its Nullification Ordinance on March 15, 1833, but three days later nullified the Force Bill as a symbolic gesture to maintain its principles. The crisis was over, and both sides could find reasons to claim victory. The tariff rates were reduced and stayed low to the satisfaction of the South, but the states' rights doctrine of nullification remained controversial. By the 1850s the issues of the expansion of slavery into the western territories and the threat of the Slave Power became the central issues in the nation.

Whiskey Ring

In the United States, the Whiskey Ring was a scandal, exposed in 1875, involving diversion of tax revenues in a conspiracy among government agents, politicians, whiskey distillers, and distributors. The Whiskey Ring began in St. Louis but was also organized in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Peoria. The scheme involved an extensive network of bribes involving distillers, rectifiers, gaugers, storekeepers, and internal revenue agents. Essentially, distillers bribed government officials, and those officials helped the distillers evade federal taxes on the whiskey they produced and sold. Whiskey was supposed to be taxed at 70 cents per gallon, however distillers would instead pay the officials 35 cents per gallon and the illicit whiskey was stamped as having the tax paid. Before they were caught, a group of politicians were able to siphon off millions of dollars in federal taxes. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow, working without the knowledge of the President or the Attorney General, broke the tightly connected and politically powerful ring in 1875 using secret agents from outside the Treasury department to conduct a series of raids across the country on May 10, 1875. The trials began at Jefferson City, Missouri in October 1875. Ultimately, 110 convictions were made and over $3 million in taxes were recovered. President Grant appointed General John Brooks Henderson (a former U.S. Senator from Missouri) to serve as special prosecutor in charge of the indictments and trials, but Grant eventually fired Gen. Henderson for challenging Grant's interference in the prosecutions. Grant replaced Henderson with attorney James Broadhead. The Whiskey Ring was seen by many as a sign of corruption under the Republican governments that took power across the nation following the American Civil War. General Orville E. Babcock, the private secretary to the President, was indicted as a member of the ring — for this reason, President Ulysses S. Grant, although not directly involved in the ring, came to be seen as emblematic of Republican corruption, and later scandals involving his Secretary of War William W. Belknap only confirmed that perception. The Whiskey Ring along with other alleged abuses of power by the Republican party, contributed to national weariness of Reconstruction, which ended Grant's presidency with the Compromise of 1877.

Colfax Massacre

The Colfax Massacre occurred on April 13, 1873. The battle-turned-massacre took place in the small town of Colfax, Louisiana as a clash between blacks and whites. Three whites and an estimated 150 blacks died in the conflict. The massacre took place against the backdrop of racial tensions following the hotly contested Louisiana governor's race of 1872. While the Republicans narrowly won the contest and retained control of the state, white Democrats, angry over the defeat, vowed revenge. In Colfax Parish (county) as in other areas of the state, they organized a white militia to directly challenge the mostly black state militia under the control of the governor. Colfax Parish reflected the political and racial divide in Louisiana. Its 4,600 voters in the 1872 election were split between approximately 2,400 hundred mostly black Republican voters and 2,200 white Democratic voters. One incident however, touched off the Colfax massacre. On March 28, local white Democratic leaders called for armed supporters to help them take the Colfax Parish Courthouse from the black and white GOP officeholders on April 1. The Republicans responded by urging their mostly black supporters to defend them. Although nothing happened on April 1, the next day fighting erupted between the two groups. On April 13, Easter Sunday, more than 300 armed white men, including members of white supremacist organizations such as the Knights of White Camellia and the Ku Klux Klan, attacked the Courthouse building. When the militia maneuvered a cannon to fire on the Courthouse, some of the sixty black defenders fled while others surrendered. When the leader of the attackers, James Hadnot, was accidentally shot by one of his own men, the white militia responded by shooting the black prisoners. Those who were wounded in the earlier battle, particularly black militia members, were singled out for execution The indiscriminate killing spread to African Americans who had not been at the courthouse and continued into the night. All told, approximately 150 African Americans were killed including 48 who were murdered after the battle. Only three whites were killed, and few were injured in the largely one-sided battle of Colfax. On April 14, the state militia under the control of Republican Governor William Kellogg arrived at the scene and recorded the carnage. New Orleans police and federal troops also arrived in the next few days to reestablish order. A total of 97 white militia men were arrested and charged with violation of the U.S. Enforcement Act of 1870 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act). A handful of them were convicted but were eventually released in 1875 when the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Cruikshank ruled the Enforcement Act was unconstitutional. No one was ever arrested by the state of Louisiana or by intimidated local officials.

Election of 1876/Compromise of 1877

The Compromise of 1877 was a purported informal, unwritten deal that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era. Through the Compromise, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden on the understanding that Hayes would remove the federal troops whose support was essential for the survival of Republican state governments in South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. The compromise involved Democrats who controlled the House of Representatives allowing the decision of the Electoral Commission to take effect. The outgoing president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant, removed the soldiers from Florida. As president, Hayes removed the remaining troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. As soon as the troops left, many white Republicans also left, and the "Redeemer" Democrats took control. They already dominated most other state governments in the South. What was exactly agreed is somewhat contested as the documentation is scanty. Black Republicans felt betrayed as they lost power and were subject to discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. At the turn of the twentieth century, most black people were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every southern state, despite being a majority in some.

Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 & 1871

The Enforcement Act of 1870, also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1870 or First Ku Klux Klan Act, or Force Act was a United States federal law written to empower the President with the legal authority to enforce the first section of the Fifteenth Amendment throughout the United States. The act was the first of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks on the suffrage rights of African Americans from state officials or violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Enforcement Act of 1870 prohibited discrimination by state officials in voter registration on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It established penalties for interfering with a person's right to vote and gave federal courts the power to enforce the act. The act also authorized the President to employ the use of the army to uphold the act and the use of federal marshals to bring charges against offenders for election fraud, the bribery or intimidation of voters, and conspiracies to prevent citizens from exercising their constitutional rights. an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacy organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts. This legislation was asked for by President Grant and passed within one month of the president's request for it to Congress. Grant's request was a result of the reports he was receiving of widespread racial threats in the Deep South, particularly in South Carolina. He felt that he needed to have his authority broadened before he could effectively intervene. After the act's passage, the president had the power for the first time to both suppress state disorders on his own initiative and to suspend the right of habeas corpus. Grant did not hesitate to use this authority on numerous occasions during his presidency, and as a result the first era KKK was completely dismantled and did not resurface in any meaningful way until the first part of the 20th century

Tariff of Abominations

The controversial and highly protective Tariff of 1828 (known to its detractors as the "Tariff of Abominations") was enacted into law during the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Industries in the northern United States were being driven out of business by low-priced imported goods; the major goal of the tariff was to protect these industries by taxing those goods. The South, however, was harmed directly by having to pay higher prices on goods the region did not produce, and indirectly because reducing the exportation of British goods to the U.S. made it difficult for the British to pay for the cotton they imported from the South. The reaction in the South, particularly in South Carolina, would lead to the Nullification Crisis. The U.S. suffered an economic downturn throughout the 1820s, and South Carolina was particularly affected. Many South Carolina politicians blamed the change in fortunes on the national tariff policy that developed after the War of 1812 to promote American manufacturing over its European competition. The tariff was opposed in the South and parts of New England. By 1828, South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. Its opponents expected that the election of Jackson as President would result in the tariff being significantly reduced. When the Jackson administration failed to take any actions to address their concerns, the most radical faction in the state began to advocate that the state itself declare the tariff null and void within South Carolina. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun, a native South Carolinian and the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification.

Bleeding Kansas

Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War was a series of violent political confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1861 involving anti-slavery "Free-Staters" and pro-slavery "Border Ruffian", or "southern" elements in Kansas. At the heart of the conflict was the question of whether Kansas would allow or outlaw slavery, and thus enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 called for "popular sovereignty"—that is, the decision about slavery was to be made by the settlers (rather than outsiders). It would be decided by votes—or more exactly which side had more votes counted by officials. Pro-slavery forces said every settler had the right to bring his own property, including slaves, into the territory. Anti-slavery "free soil" forces said the rich slaveholders would buy up all the good farmland and work it with black slaves, leaving little or no opportunity for non-slaveholders. As such, Bleeding Kansas was a conflict between anti-slavery forces in the North and pro-slavery forces from the South over the issue of slavery in the United States, and its violence indicated that compromise was unlikely, and thus it presaged the Civil War.

Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner (January 6, 1811 - March 11, 1874) was an American politician and United States Senator from Massachusetts. As an academic lawyer and a powerful orator, Sumner was the leader of the anti-slavery forces in Massachusetts and a leader of the Radical Republicans in the U.S. Senate during the American Civil War working to destroy the Confederacy, free all the slaves, and keep on good terms with Europe. During Reconstruction, he fought to minimize the power of the ex-Confederates and guarantee equal rights to the freedmen. Sumner changed his political party several times as anti-slavery coalitions rose and fell in the 1830s and 1840s before coalescing in the 1850s as the Republican Party, the affiliation with which he became best known. He devoted his enormous energies to the destruction of what Republicans called the Slave Power, the influence over the federal government of Southern slave owners who sought the continuation and expansion of slavery. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman, Democrat Preston Brooks, nearly killed Sumner on the Senate floor two days after Sumner delivered an intensely anti-slavery speech called "The Crime Against Kansas." In the speech, Sumner characterized the attacker's cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, a Democrat, as a pimp for slavery. The episode played a major role in the coming of the Civil War. During the war Sumner was a leader of the Radical Republican faction that criticized President Abraham Lincoln for being too moderate on the South. One of the most learned statesmen of the era, he specialized in foreign affairs, and worked closely with Abraham Lincoln to keep the British and the French from intervening on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Sumner's expertise and energy made him a powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. As the chief Radical leader in the Senate during Reconstruction, Sumner fought hard to provide equal civil and voting rights for the freedmen on the grounds that "consent of the governed" was a basic principle of American republicanism, and to block ex-Confederates from power so they would not reverse the gains made from the Union's victory in the Civil War. Sumner, teaming with House leader Thaddeus Stevens, battled Andrew Johnson's reconstruction plans and sought to impose a Radical program on the South. Although Sumner forcefully advocated the annexation of Alaska in the Senate, he was against the annexation of the Dominican Republic, then known by the name of its capital, Santo Domingo. After leading Senators to defeat President Ulysses S. Grant's Santo Domingo Treaty in 1870, Sumner broke with Grant, and denounced him in such terms that reconciliation was impossible. In 1871, President Grant and his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish retaliated; through Grant's supporters in the Senate, Sumner was deposed as head of the Foreign Relations Committee. Sumner had become convinced that Grant was a corrupt despot and that the success of Reconstruction policies called for new national leadership. Sumner bitterly opposed Grant's reelection by supporting the Liberal Republican candidate Horace Greeley in 1872 and lost his power inside the Republican Party. Less than two years later, he died in office.

Henry Clay

A leading war hawk, he helped lead Congress into declaring the War of 1812 against Britain over violations of American honor. In 1814, Clay helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. After the war, Clay developed his American System, which called for an increase in tariffs to foster industry in the United States and the use of federal funding to build infrastructure. He helped launch a strong national bank and defended it against attacks from President Andrew Jackson. After unsuccessfully running for president in the 1824 presidential election, Clay helped Adams win the 1824 contingent election in the House of Representatives. Jackson denounced Clay's role in Adams's victory, as well as Clay's subsequent appointment as Secretary of State, as a "corrupt bargain". He continued to advocate his American System, and mobilized the opposition to President Jackson and his new Democratic Party. Jackson opposed federally subsidized internal improvements and a national bank as a threat to states' rights, and as president used his veto power to defeat many of Clay's proposals. In 1832, Clay ran for president as a candidate of the National Republican Party, losing to Jackson. Following the election, the National Republicans united with other opponents of Jackson to form the Whig Party, which remained one of the two major American political parties at the time of Clay's death. In 1844, Clay won the Whig Party's presidential nomination. Clay's opposition to the annexation of Texas, partly over fears that such an annexation would inflame the slavery issue, hurt his campaign, and Democrat James K. Polk won the election. Clay later opposed the Mexican-American War, which resulted in part from the Texas annexation. Clay returned to the Senate for a final term, where he helped broker a compromise over the status of slavery in the Mexican Cession. Known as "The Great Compromiser", Clay brokered important agreements during the Nullification Crisis and on the slavery issue. As part of the "Great Triumvirate" or "Immortal Trio," along with his colleagues Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, he was instrumental in formulating the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and the Compromise of 1850 to ease sectional tensions. He was viewed as the primary representative of Western interests in this group, and was given the names "Harry of the West" and "The Western Star."

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown.

Andrew Jackson

Jackson faced the threat of secession by South Carolina over the "Tariff of Abominations." The crisis was defused when the tariff was amended, and Jackson threatened the use of military force if South Carolina attempted to secede. Congress, led by Clay, tried to reauthorize the Second Bank of the United States; Jackson regarded the Bank as a corrupt institution and vetoed the renewal of its charter. After a lengthy struggle, Jackson and his allies thoroughly dismantled the Bank. In 1835, Jackson became the only president to completely pay off the national debt, fulfilling a longtime goal. His presidency marked the beginning of the ascendancy of the "spoils system" in American politics. In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which relocated most members of the Native American tribes in the South to Indian Territory. The relocation process dispossessed the Indians and resulted in widespread death and sickness. In foreign affairs, Jackson's administration concluded a "most favored nation" treaty with Great Britain, settled claims of damages against France from the Napoleonic Wars, and recognized the Republic of Texas. He vehemently opposed the rising trend of abolitionism.

Civil Rights Act of 1866

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27-30, enacted April 9, 1866, was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law.[1] It was mainly intended to protect the civil rights of persons of African descent born in or brought to the U.S., in the wake of the American Civil War.[2] This legislation was enacted by Congress in 1865 but vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. In April 1866 Congress again passed the bill to support the Thirteenth Amendment. Although Johnson again vetoed it, a two-thirds majority in each chamber overcame the veto and the bill therefore became law.

Sam Houston

Sam Houston (March 2, 1793 - July 26, 1863) was an American soldier and politician. His victory at the Battle of San Jacinto secured the independence of Texas from Mexico in one of the shortest decisive battles in modern history. He was also the only governor within a future Confederate state to oppose secession (which led to the outbreak of the American Civil War) and to refuse an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, a decision that led to his removal from office by the Texas secession convention. After the war, Houston became a key figure in Texas and was elected as the first and third President of the Republic of Texas. He supported annexation by the United States and he became a U.S. Senator upon achieving it in 1845, and finally a governor of the State of Texas in 1859, whereby Houston became the only person to have become the governor of two different U.S. states through popular election, as well as the only state governor to have been a foreign head of state. As governor, he refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy when Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 with the outbreak of the American Civil War, and he was removed from office. To avoid bloodshed, he refused an offer of a Union army to put down the Confederate rebellion. Instead, he retired to Huntsville, Texas, where he died before the end of the war.

Sherman's March to the Sea

Sherman's March to the Sea, more formally known as the Savannah Campaign, was a military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia from November 15 to December 21, 1864 by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. The campaign began with Sherman's troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces destroyed military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property and disrupted the Confederacy's economy and its transportation networks. The operation broke the back of the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender. Sherman's bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be one of the major achievements of the war. Sherman's "March to the Sea" followed his successful Atlanta Campaign of May to September 1864. He and the Union Army's commander, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, believed that the Civil War would come to an end only if the Confederacy's strategic, economic, and psychological capacity for warfare were decisively broken.[4] Sherman therefore planned an operation that has been compared to the modern principles of scorched earth warfare, or total war. Although his formal orders (excerpted below) specified control over destruction of infrastructure in areas in which his army was unmolested by guerrilla activity, he recognized that supplying an army through liberal foraging would have a destructive effect on the morale of the civilian population it encountered in its wide sweep through the state.[5] The second objective of the campaign was more traditional. Grant's armies in Virginia continued in a stalemate against Robert E. Lee's army, besieged in Petersburg, Virginia. By moving in Lee's rear and performing a massive turning movement against him, Sherman could possibly increase pressure on Lee, allowing Grant the opportunity to break through, or at least keep Southern reinforcements away from Virginia. The campaign was designed by Grant and Sherman to be similar to Grant's innovative and successful Vicksburg Campaign and Sherman's Meridian Campaign, in that Sherman's armies would reduce their need for traditional supply lines by "living off the land" after consuming their 20 days of rations. Foragers, known as "bummers", would provide food seized from local farms for the Army while they destroyed the railroads and the manufacturing and agricultural infrastructure of Georgia. In planning for the march, Sherman used livestock and crop production data from the 1860 census to lead his troops through areas where he believed they would be able to forage most effectively.[6] The twisted and broken railroad rails that the troops heated over fires and wrapped around tree trunks and left behind became known as "Sherman's neckties". As the army would be out of touch with the North throughout the campaign, Sherman gave explicit orders, Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 120, regarding the conduct of the campaign.

Specie Circular

The Act was a reaction to the growing concerns about excessive speculations of land after the Indian removal, which was mostly done with soft currency. The sale of public lands increased five times between 1834 and 1836. Speculators paid for these purchases with depreciating paper money. While government law already demanded that land purchases be completed with specie or paper notes from specie-backed banks, a large portion of buyers used paper money from state banks not backed by hard money. After August 15, the government refused to take anything but gold and silver specie in exchange for public lands. Because the order was one of Jackson's last acts in office, most of its consequences occurred during and were attributed to the Presidency of Martin van Buren. The devaluation of paper currency only increased with Jackson's proclamation. This sent inflation and prices upwards. Many at the time (and historians subsequently) blamed the Specie Circular for the rise in prices and the following Panic of 1837. Cries of "rescind the circular!" went up and former President Jackson sent word to Van Buren asking him not to rescind the order. Jackson believed that it had to be given enough time to work. Lobbying efforts, especially by bankers, increased in Washington in an attempt to revoke the Specie Circular. Others, like Nicholas Biddle, believed that Jackson's defeat of the Second Bank of the United States was directly responsible for the irresponsible creation of paper money by the state banks which had precipitated this crisis.[5] The restrictions on credit caused by the order resulted in numerous bankruptcies and the failure of smaller banks. In the South the resulting recession drove down cotton prices well into the 1840s. Small farmers who had bought land on credit were unable to meet their loan repayments with their income from staple crops cut by a half. When they defaulted, "[t]heir land and slaves were repossessed and sold at auction, usually to already well-established slaveholders. ... Some farmers were able to keep a few acres and eke out a living as lesser yeomen. But many lost everything and fell into tenancy and sharecropping. When the cotton market finally recovered, affluent slaveholders held nearly all the South's best land

The Battle of the Wilderness

The Battle of the Wilderness, fought May 5-7, 1864, was the first battle of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's 1864 Virginia Overland Campaign against Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War. Both armies suffered heavy casualties, a harbinger of a bloody war of attrition by Grant against Lee's army and, eventually, the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. The battle was tactically inconclusive, as Grant disengaged and continued his offensive.

Bank War

The Bank War refers to the political struggle that developed over the issue of rechartering the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837). The affair resulted in the destruction of the bank and its replacement by various state banks. Anti-Bank Jacksonian Democrats were mobilized in opposition to the national bank's re-authorization on the grounds that the institution conferred economic privileges on a small group of financial elites, violating Constitutional principles of social equality. The Jacksonians considered the Second Bank of the United States to be an illegitimate corporation whose charter violated state sovereignty, posing an implicit threat to the agriculture-based economy dependent upon the Southern states' widely practiced institution of slavery.[1][2] With the Bank charter due to expire in 1836, the President of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, in alliance with the National Republicans under Senator Henry Clay (KY) and Senator Daniel Webster (MA), decided to make rechartering a referendum on the legitimacy of the institution in the elections of 1832. When Congress voted to reauthorize the Bank, Jackson, as incumbent and candidate in the race, promptly vetoed the bill. His veto message justifying his action was a polemical declaration of the social philosophy of the Jacksonian movement pitting "farmers, mechanics and laborers" against the "monied interest" and arguing against the Bank's constitutionality.[3] Pro-Bank National Republicans warned the public that Jackson would abolish the Bank altogether if granted a second term. In the presidential election of 1832, the BUS served as the central issue in mobilizing the opposing Jacksonian Democrats and National Republicans. Jackson and Biddle personified the positions on each side.[4] Jacksonians successfully concealed the incompatibility of their "hard money" and "paper money" factions in the anti-Bank campaign,[5] allowing Jackson to score an overwhelming victory against Henry Clay. Fearing economic reprisals from Biddle and the Bank, Jackson moved swiftly to remove federal deposits from the institution. In 1833, he succeeded in distributing the funds to several dozen private banks throughout the country. The new Whig Party emerged in opposition to his perceived abuse of executive power, officially censuring Jackson in the Senate. In an effort to promote sympathy for the institution's survival, Biddle retaliated by contracting Bank credit, inducing a serious and protracted financial downturn.[6] A reaction set in throughout America's financial and business centers against Biddle's economic warfare,[7] compelling the Bank to reverse its tight money policies.[8] By the close of 1834, recharter was a "lost cause."[9] Rather than permitting the Bank to go out of existence, Biddle arranged its conversion to a state chartered corporation in Pennsylvania just weeks before its federal charter expired in March 1836. This episode in the Bank's decline and fall ended in 1841 with liquidation of the institution. Jackson's campaign against the Bank had triumphed.

Antietam, MD

The Battle of Antietam /ænˈtiːtəm/, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, particularly in the Southern United States, was fought on September 17, 1862, between Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Union General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign. It was the first field army-level engagement in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil and is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing. After pursuing the Confederate general Robert E. Lee into Maryland, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan of the Union Army launched attacks against Lee's army, in defensive positions behind Antietam Creek. At dawn on September 17, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's corps mounted a powerful assault on Lee's left flank. Attacks and counterattacks swept across Miller's Cornfield, and fighting swirled around the Dunker Church. Union assaults against the Sunken Road eventually pierced the Confederate center, but the Federal advantage was not followed up. In the afternoon, Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside's corps entered the action, capturing a stone bridge over Antietam Creek and advancing against the Confederate right. At a crucial moment, Confederate Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill's division arrived from Harpers Ferry and launched a surprise counterattack, driving back Burnside and ending the battle. Although outnumbered two-to-one, Lee committed his entire force, while McClellan sent in less than three-quarters of his army, enabling Lee to fight the Federals to a standstill. During the night, both armies consolidated their lines. In spite of crippling casualties, Lee continued to skirmish with McClellan throughout September 18, while removing his battered army south of the Potomac River.[9] Despite having superiority of numbers, McClellan's attacks failed to achieve force concentration, which allowed Lee to counter by shifting forces and moving along interior lines to meet each challenge. Therefore, despite ample reserve forces that could have been deployed to exploit localized successes, McClellan failed to destroy Lee's army. McClellan's persistent but erroneous belief that he was outnumbered contributed to his cautiousness throughout the campaign. McClellan had halted Lee's invasion of Maryland, but Lee was able to withdraw his army back to Virginia without interference from the cautious McClellan. McClellan's refusal to pursue Lee's army led to his removal from command by President Abraham Lincoln in November. Although the battle was tactically inconclusive, the Confederate troops had withdrawn first from the battlefield, making it a Union strategic victory. It was a sufficiently significant victory to give Lincoln the confidence to announce his Emancipation Proclamation, which discouraged the British and French governments from pursuing any potential plans to recognize the Confederacy.

Battle of Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1-3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is often described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, halting Lee's invasion of the North. After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863, Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even Philadelphia. Prodded by President Abraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved of command just three days before the battle and replaced by Meade. Elements of the two armies initially collided at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, and soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the streets of the town to the hills just to the south. On the second day of battle, most of both armies had assembled. The Union line was laid out in a defensive formation resembling a fishhook. In the late afternoon of July 2, Lee launched a heavy assault on the Union left flank, and fierce fighting raged at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den, and the Peach Orchard. On the Union right, Confederate demonstrations escalated into full-scale assaults on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill. All across the battlefield, despite significant losses, the Union defenders held their lines. On the third day of battle, fighting resumed on Culp's Hill, and cavalry battles raged to the east and south, but the main event was a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, known as Pickett's Charge. The charge was repulsed by Union rifle and artillery fire, at great loss to the Confederate army. Lee led his army on a torturous retreat back to Virginia. Between 46,000 and 51,000 soldiers from both armies were casualties in the three-day battle, the most costly in US history. On November 19, President Lincoln used the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the fallen Union soldiers and redefine the purpose of the war in his historic Gettysburg Address.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

The Lincoln-Douglas debates (also known as The Great Debates of 1858) were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois, and incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures; thus Lincoln and Douglas were trying for their respective parties to win control of the Illinois General Assembly. The debates previewed the issues that Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 presidential election. Although Illinois was a free state, the main issue discussed in all seven debates was slavery in the United States.

Ford Theater

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending a play at Ford's Theatre as the American Civil War was drawing to a close. The assassination occurred five days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Booth was a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland; though he never joined the Confederate army, he had contacts with the Confederate secret service.[322] In 1864, Booth formulated a plan (very similar to one of Thomas N. Conrad previously authorized by the Confederacy)[323] to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. After attending an April 11, 1865, speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks, an incensed Booth changed his plans and became determined to assassinate the president.[324] Learning that the President and Grant would be attending Ford's Theatre, Booth formulated a plan with co-conspirators to assassinate Lincoln and Grant at the theater, as well as Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward at their homes. Without his main bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin on April 14. At the last minute, Grant decided to go to New Jersey to visit his children instead of attending the play.[325] Lincoln's bodyguard, John Parker, left Ford's Theater during intermission to drink at the saloon next door. The now unguarded President sat in his state box in the balcony. Seizing the opportunity, Booth crept up from behind and at about 10:13 pm, aimed at the back of Lincoln's head and fired at point-blank range, mortally wounding the President. Major Henry Rathbone momentarily grappled with Booth, but Booth stabbed him and escaped.

Spoils System

Andrew Jackson's first inauguration, March 4, 1829, signaled a sharp departure from the past. An unruly mob of office seekers made something of a shambles of the event, and though some tried to explain this as democratic enthusiasm, the real truth was Jackson supporters had been lavished with promises of positions in return for political support. These promises were honored by an astonishing number of removals after Jackson assumed power. At the beginning of Jackson's administration, fully 919 officials were removed from government positions, amounting to nearly 10 percent of all government postings. The Jackson administration attempted to explain this unprecedented purge as reform, or constructive turnover, aimed at creating a more efficient system where the chain of command of public employees all obeyed the higher entities of government.

Panic of 1837

Andrew Jackson, whom Van Buren had served as secretary of state, vice president, and close adviser, hurt the federal Second Bank of the United States by moving federal funds to smaller state banks. Jackson thought the Bank of the United States hurt ordinary citizens by exercising too much control over credit and economic opportunity, and he succeeded in shutting it down. But the state banks' reckless credit policies led to massive speculation in Western lands. By 1837, after Van Buren had become president, banks were clearly in trouble. Some began to close, businesses began to fail, and thousands of people lost their land. Even with the nation in economic crisis, Van Buren stuck to the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson that the federal government should exercise only limited power. He refused to listen to those who said the federal government should try to stabilize and take control of the nation's failing economy through a new Bank of the United States. The only thing he was willing to do was move federal funds from state banks to an independent treasury. This didn't stop the economic turmoil. For this and other reasons, when Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840, he was soundly defeated.

General Santa Anna

Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón (Spanish pronunciation: [anˈtonjo ˈlopes ðe sant(a)ˈana]; 21 February 1794 - 21 June 1876),[1] often known as Santa Anna[2] or López de Santa Anna was a Mexican politician and general who fought to defend royalist New Spain and then for Mexican independence. He greatly influenced early Mexican politics and government, and was an adept soldier and cunning politician, who dominated Mexican history in the first half of the nineteenth century to such an extent that historians often refer to it as the "Age of Santa Anna".[3] He was called "the Man of Destiny", who "loomed over his time like a melodramatic colossus, the uncrowned monarch."[4] Santa Anna first opposed the movement for Mexican independence from Spain, but then fought in support of it. Though not the first caudillo (military leader) of modern Mexico, he "represents the stereotypical caudillo in Mexican history," and among the earliest.[5][6] Conservative historian, intellectual, and politician Lucas Alamán wrote that "The history of Mexico since 1822 might accurately be called the history of Santa Anna's revolutions.... His name plays the major role in all the political events of the country and its destiny has become intertwined with his."[7] An enigmatic, patriotic and controversial figure, Santa Anna had great power in Mexico; during a turbulent 40-year career, he served as general at crucial points and served eleven non-consecutive presidential terms over a period of 22 years.[a] In the periods of time when he was not serving as president, he continued to pursue his military career. [9]A wealthy landowner, he built a firm political base in the major port city of Veracruz. He was perceived as a hero by his troops; he sought glory for himself and his army, and independent Mexico. He repeatedly rebuilt his reputation after major losses. Historians and many Mexicans also rank him as perhaps the principal inhabitant even today of Mexico's pantheon of "those who failed the nation."[10] His centralist rhetoric and military failures resulted in Mexico losing just over half its territory, beginning with the Texas Revolution of 1836, and culminating with the Mexican Cession of 1848 following its defeat by the United States in the Mexican-American War.

Shakers

As pacifists, the Shakers did not believe that it was acceptable to kill or harm others, even in time of war. As a result, the Civil War brought with it a strange time for the Shaker communities in America. Both Union and Confederate soldiers found their way to the Shaker communities. Shakers tended to sympathize with the Union but they did feed and care for both Union and Confederate soldiers. President Lincoln exempted Shaker males from military service, and they became some of the first conscientious objectors in American history. The end of the Civil War brought large changes to the Shaker communities. One of the most important changes was the postwar economy. The Shakers had a hard time competing in the industrialized economy that followed the Civil War. With prosperity falling, converts were hard to find.

Gadsden's Purchase

As the nation expanded westward, support began to emerge for building a transcontinental railroad. Debate over where to place eastern terminus where line could connect with existing railroad network east of the Mississippi. Northerners favored Chicago, Southerners favored Memphis, New Orleans, or St. Louis. Surveys indicated that railroad with southern terminus would have to pass through Mexican territory. But in 1853 Jefferson Davis sent James Gadsden to Mexico, who persuaded them to accept 10 million in exchange for land that would facilitated southern route. Result was accentuation of sectional rivalry.

Daniel Webster

Born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, Webster was one of the most highly regarded courtroom lawyers of the era and shaped several key U.S. Supreme Court cases that established important constitutional precedents that bolstered the authority of the federal government. Webster entered politics during the era of the Second Party System, which was the political system in the United States from about 1828 to 1854, characterized by rapidly increasing voter interest and personal loyalty to parties. Webster served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He was identified with the National Republican Party and supported John Quincy Adams. He took his seat in the Senate in 1827. As a senator, Webster was an outstanding spokesman for American nationalism with powerful oratory that made him a key Whig leader. His explication of the United States as not a creation of individual states but a cohesive whole in itself strengthened the power and integrity of the Union during the Nullification Crisis. He spoke for conservatives and led the opposition to Democrat Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party, firmly challenging Jackson's policies in the Bank War. Webster was a spokesman for modernization, banking, and industry, but not for the common people who composed the base of his opponents in Jacksonian democracy. "He was a thoroughgoing elitist, and he reveled in it," says biographer Robert Remini.

Daniel Webster

Born in Salisbury, New Hampshire, Webster was one of the most highly regarded courtroom lawyers of the era and shaped several key U.S. Supreme Court cases that established important constitutional precedents that bolstered the authority of the federal government. Webster entered politics during the era of the Second Party System, which was the political system in the United States from about 1828 to 1854, characterized by rapidly increasing voter interest and personal loyalty to parties. Webster served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He was identified with the National Republican Party and supported John Quincy Adams. He took his seat in the Senate in 1827. As a senator, Webster was an outstanding spokesman for American nationalism with powerful oratory that made him a key Whig leader. His explication of the United States as not a creation of individual states but a cohesive whole in itself strengthened the power and integrity of the Union during the Nullification Crisis. He spoke for conservatives and led the opposition to Democrat Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party, firmly challenging Jackson's policies in the Bank War. Webster was a spokesman for modernization, banking, and industry, but not for the common people who composed the base of his opponents in Jacksonian democracy. He was a thoroughgoing elitist, and he reveled in it. Chiefly recognized for his Senate tenure, Webster was a key figure in the institution's "Golden days". Webster was the Northern member of the "Great Triumvirate", with his colleagues Henry Clay from the West (Kentucky) and John C. Calhoun from the South (South Carolina). His "Reply to Hayne" in 1830 has been regarded as one of the greatest speeches in the Senate's history.[4] As with Clay, his fellow Whig, Webster wanted to see the Union preserved and civil war averted. They both worked for compromises to stave off the sectionalism that threatened war between the North and the South. Webster's support for the Compromise of 1850, devised in part by Clay, proved crucial to its passage. The decision was, however, widely unpopular in Massachusetts. As a result, Webster resigned, but he soon after was appointed to serve another term as Secretary of State, this time under Millard Fillmore. In 1957, a Senate committee selected Webster as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators with Clay, Calhoun, Robert La Follette, and Robert A. Taft.

David Walker

David Walker's Appeal, arguably the most radical of all anti-slavery documents, caused a great stir when it was published in September of 1829 with its call for slaves to revolt against their masters. David Walker, a free black originally from the South wrote, ". . .they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us. . . therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed. . . and believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty." Even the outspoken William Lloyd Garrison objected to Walker's approach in an editorial about the Appeal. The goal of the Appeal was to instill pride in its black readers and give hope that change would someday come. It spoke out against colonization, a popular movement that sought to move free blacks to a colony in Africa. America, Walker believed, belonged to all who helped build it. He went even further, stating, "America is more our country than it is the whites -- we have enriched it with our blood and tears." He then asked, "will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood?" Copies of the Appeal were discovered in Savannah, Georgia, within weeks of its publication. Within several months copies were found from Virginia to Louisiana. Walker revised his Appeal. He died in August of 1830, shortly after publishing the third edition.

Dred Scot

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), also known simply as the Dred Scott case, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on US labor law and constitutional law. It held that "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves",[2][3] whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court,[4][5] and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Dred Scott, an enslaved man of "the negro African race"[3] who had been taken by his owners to free states and territories, attempted to sue for his freedom. In a 7-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the court denied Scott's request. The decision was only the second time that the Supreme Court had ruled an Act of Congress to be unconstitutional.[6] Although Taney hoped that his ruling would finally settle the slavery question, the decision immediately spurred vehement dissent from anti-slavery elements in the North. Many contemporary lawyers, and most modern legal scholars, consider the ruling regarding slavery in the territories to be dictum, not binding precedent. The decision proved to be an indirect catalyst for the American Civil War. It was functionally superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1868, which gave African Americans full citizenship.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (November 12, 1815 - October 26, 1902) was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States.[1][2] Stanton was president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1892 until 1900. Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist with her husband Henry Brewster Stanton (co-founder of the Republican Party) and cousin Gerrit Smith. Unlike many of those involved in the women's rights movement, Stanton addressed various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce, the economic health of the family, and birth control.[3] She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement. After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the women's rights movement when she, together with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, were denied those same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, about twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (1818- 1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket.[10] Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union With Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to dialogue with slave owners, he famously replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.

Roger Taney

He delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that ruled, among other things, that African-Americans, having been considered inferior at the time the United States Constitution was drafted, were not part of the original community of citizens and, whether free or slave, could not be considered citizens of the United States, which created an uproar among abolitionists and the free states of the northern U.S. He was the first Roman Catholic (and first non-Protestant) appointed both to a presidential cabinet, as Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson, as well as to the Court. Taney, a Jacksonian Democrat, was made Chief Justice by Jackson.[A] He believed that power and liberty were extremely important and if power became too concentrated, then it posed a grave threat to individual liberty. He opposed attempts by the national government to regulate or control matters that would restrict the rights of individuals. From Prince Frederick, Maryland, he had practiced law and politics simultaneously and succeeded in both. After abandoning the Federalist Party as a losing cause, he rose to the top of the state's Jacksonian machine. As Attorney General (1831-1833) and then Secretary of the Treasury (1833-1834), and as a prominent member of the Kitchen Cabinet, Taney became one of Jackson's closest advisers, assisting Jackson in his populist crusade against the powerful Bank of the United States. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, a slave named Dred Scott had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom based on his having been brought by his masters to live in free territories. The Taney Court ruled that persons of African descent could not be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens under the U.S. Constitution, and that the plaintiff (Scott) was without legal standing to file a suit. The framers of the Constitution, Taney wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."[3] The court also declared the Missouri Compromise (1820) unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all of the country's territories. Taney died during the final months of the American Civil War on the same day that his home state of Maryland abolished slavery.

Nullification

In 1832-1833, South Carolina declared that the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of the state. On July 14, 1832, before Calhoun had resigned the Vice Presidency in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification. Jackson signed into law the Tariff of 1832. This compromise tariff received the support of most northerners and half of the southerners in Congress. The reductions were too little for South Carolina, and on November 24, 1832, a state convention adopted the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared that the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and unenforceable in South Carolina after February 1, 1833. Military preparations to resist anticipated federal enforcement were initiated by the state. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed both the Force Bill—authorizing the President to use military forces against South Carolina—and a new negotiated tariff, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which was satisfactory to South Carolina. The South Carolina convention reconvened and repealed its Nullification Ordinance on March 15, 1833, but three days later nullified the Force Bill as a symbolic gesture to maintain its principles. The crisis was over, and both sides could find reasons to claim victory. The tariff rates were reduced and stayed low to the satisfaction of the South, but the states' rights doctrine of nullification remained controversial. By the 1850s the issues of the expansion of slavery into the western territories and the threat of the Slave Power became the central issues in the nation.

54-40 or Fight!

In 1844 the Democrats nominated JAMES K. POLK, an unknown candidate from Tennessee. It appeared as though the Whig Party candidate, Henry Clay, would win in a landslide. Very few Americans had ever heard the name Polk, but Clay's illustrious career was widely known. However, Polk was an excellent strategist. He tapped into the public mood and realized that manifest destiny was the very issue that could lead him to victory. Polk called for expansion that included Texas, California, and the entire Oregon territory. The northern boundary of Oregon was the latitude line of 54 degrees, 40 minutes. "FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!" was the popular slogan that led Polk to victory against all odds. Claiming the territory in an election campaign was one thing. Acquiring it from the powerful British was another. Although Polk blustered about obtaining the entire territory from Britain, he was secretly willing to compromise. Trouble was brewing with Mexico in the south. Surely the new nation could ill afford to fight Mexico in the southwest and the British in the northwest simultaneously. Nevertheless, Polk boldly declared to Great Britain that joint occupation would end within one year. The British were confident they could win, but by 1846 they were vastly outnumbered in Oregon by a margin of greater than six to one. In June of that year, Britain proposed splitting Oregon at the 49th parallel. Polk agreed to the compromise, and conflict was avoided.

Copperheads

In the 1860s, the Copperheads were a vocal faction of Democrats in the Northern United States of the Union who opposed the American Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement with the Confederates. Republicans started calling anti-war Democrats "Copperheads", likening them to the venomous snake. Those Democrats accepted the label, reinterpreting the copper "head" as the likeness of Liberty, which they cut from Liberty Head large cent coins and proudly wore as badges.[1] Democratic supporters of the war, by contrast, were called War Democrats. The Copperheads represented the more extreme wing of the "Northern Democrats." Notable Copperheads included two Democratic congressmen from Ohio: Clement L. Vallandigham and Alexander Long. Republican prosecutors accused some prominent Copperheads of treason in a series of trials in 1864.[2] Copperheadism was a highly contentious grass-roots movement. It had its strongest base in the area just north of the Ohio River, as well as in some urban ethnic wards. Some historians have argued that it represented a traditionalistic element alarmed at the rapid modernization of society sponsored by the Republican Party, and that it looked back to Jacksonian Democracy for inspiration. Weber (2006) argues that the Copperheads damaged the Union war effort by opposing conscription (the "draft"), encouraging desertion, and forming conspiracies, but other historians say that the draft was already in disrepute and that the Republicans greatly exaggerated the conspiracies for partisan reasons. Convinced that the Republicans were ruining the traditional world they loved, they were obstructionist partisans.[3] In turn the Copperheads became a major target of the Union (Republican) party in the 1864 presidential election, where they were used to discredit the main Democratic candidates. Copperhead support increased when Union armies did poorly, and decreased when they won great victories. After the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, Union military success seemed assured, and Copperheadism collapsed.

John Brown's Raid

John Brown (May 9, 1800 - December 2, 1859) was an American abolitionist who believed and advocated that armed insurrection was the only way to overthrow the institution of slavery in the United States. Brown first gained attention when he led small groups of volunteers during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of 1856. Dissatisfied with the pacifism of the organized abolitionist movement, he said, "These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!" During the Kansas campaign, Brown commanded forces at the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie. He and his supporters killed five supporters of slavery in the Pottawatomie massacre of May 1856 in response to the sacking of Lawrence by pro-slavery forces. In 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry to start a liberation movement among the slaves there. During the raid, he seized the armory; seven people were killed, and ten or more were injured. He intended to arm slaves with weapons from the arsenal, but the attack failed. Within 36 hours, Brown's men had fled or been killed or captured by local pro-slavery farmers, militiamen, and U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five men, and inciting a slave insurrection. He was found guilty on all counts and was hanged. Brown's raid captured the nation's attention, as Southerners feared it was just the first of many Northern plots to cause a slave rebellion that might endanger their lives, while Republicans dismissed the notion and claimed they would not interfere with slavery in the South. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid escalated tensions that, a year later, led to the South's secession and Civil War. David Potter has said the emotional effect of Brown's raid was greater than the philosophical effect of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and that it reaffirmed a deep division between North and South. Some writers, including Bruce Olds, describe him as a monomaniacal zealot; others, such as Stephen B. Oates, regard him as "one of the most perceptive human beings of his generation".[1] David S. Reynolds hails him as the man who "killed slavery, sparked the civil war, and seeded civil rights" and Richard Owen Boyer emphasizes that Brown was "an American who gave his life that millions of other Americans might be free".[2] "John Brown's Body" was a popular Union marching song during the Civil War and made him a martyr.

Ten Percent Plan

Lincoln's blueprint for Reconstruction included the Ten-Percent Plan, which specified that a southern state could be readmitted into the Union once 10 percent of its voters (from the voter rolls for the election of 1860) swore an oath of allegiance to the Union. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments. All southerners except for high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials would be granted a full pardon. Lincoln guaranteed southerners that he would protect their private property, though not their slaves. Most moderate Republicans in Congress supported the president's proposal for Reconstruction because they wanted to bring a quick end to the war. In many ways, the Ten-Percent Plan was more of a political maneuver than a plan for Reconstruction. Lincoln wanted to end the war quickly. He feared that a protracted war would lose public support and that the North and South would never be reunited if the fighting did not stop quickly. His fears were justified: by late 1863, a large number of Democrats were clamoring for a truce and peaceful resolution. Lincoln's Ten-Percent Plan was thus lenient—an attempt to entice the South to surrender.

Lyman Trumbull

Lyman Trumbull (October 12, 1813 - June 25, 1896) was a United States Senator from Illinois and the co-author of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Born in Colchester, Connecticut, Trumbull established a law practice in Greenville, Georgia before moving to Alton, Illinois in 1837. He served as the Illinois Secretary of State from 1841 to 1843 and as a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court from 1848 to 1853. He was elected to the Senate in 1855 and became a member of the Republican Party. As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1861 to 1873, he co-wrote the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. In the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, Trumbull voted to acquit Johnson despite heavy pressure from other Republican Senators. He was a candidate for the presidential nomination at the 1872 Liberal Republican convention but the fledgling party nominated Horace Greeley instead. Trumbull left the Senate in 1873 to establish a legal practice in Chicago. Before his death in 1896, he became a member of the Populist Party and represented Eugene V. Debs before the Supreme Court.

Margaret Fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (May 23, 1810 - July 19, 1850), commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Fuller was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Many other advocates for women's rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau. She said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Shortly after Fuller's death, her importance faded; the editors who prepared her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, censored or altered much of her work before publication.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping became widespread in the South as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction.[17][18] Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both White and Black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit. At harvest time, the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest). The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant.[19] The system started with Blacks when large plantations were subdivided. By the 1880s, white farmers also became sharecroppers. The system was distinct from that of the tenant farmer, who rented the land, provided his own tools and mule, and received half the crop. Landowners provided more supervision to sharecroppers, and less or none to tenant farmers. Sharecropping in the United States probably originated in the Natchez District, roughly centered in Adams County, Mississippi with its county seat, Natchez.[20] Sharecroppers worked a section of the plantation independently, usually growing cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, and other cash crops, and receiving half of the parcel's output.[21][22] Sharecroppers also often received their farming tools and all other goods from the landowner they were contracted with.[23] Landowners dictated decisions relating to the crop mix, and sharecroppers were often in agreements to sell their portion of the crop back to the landowner, thus being subjected to manipulated prices.[24] In addition to this, landowners, threatening to not renew the lease at the end of the growing season, were able to apply pressure to their tenants.[25] Sharecropping often proved economically problematic, as the landowners held significant economic control.[26] Although the sharecropping system was primarily a post-Civil War development, it did exist in antebellum Mississippi, especially in the northeastern part of the state, an area with few slaves or plantations,[27] and most likely existed in Tennessee.[28] Sharecropping, along with tenant farming, was a dominant form in the cotton South from the 1870s to the 1950s, among both blacks and whites.

Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 - March 13, 1906) was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and co-worker in social reform activities, primarily in the field of women's rights. In 1852, they founded the New York Women's State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female. In 1863, they founded the Women's Loyal National League, which conducted the largest petition drive in United States history up to that time, collecting nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery. In 1866, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. In 1868, they began publishing a women's rights newspaper called The Revolution. In 1869, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association as part of a split in the women's movement. In 1890, the split was formally healed when their organization merged with the rival American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, with Anthony as its key force. In 1876, Anthony and Stanton began working with Matilda Joslyn Gage on what eventually grew into the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. The interests of Anthony and Stanton diverged somewhat in later years, but the two remained close friends.

American System

The American System was an economic plan that played a prominent role in American policy during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the "American School" ideas of Alexander Hamilton, the plan "consisted of three mutually reinforcing parts: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other 'internal improvements' to develop profitable markets for agriculture". Congressman Henry Clay was the plan's foremost proponent and the first to refer to it as the "American System". A plan to strengthen and unify the nation, the American System, was advanced by the Whig Party and a number of leading politicians including Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams. The System ran counter to federalism and included: Support for a high tariff to protect American industries and generate revenue for the federal government Maintenance of high public land prices to generate federal revenue Preservation of the Bank of the United States to stabilize the currency and rein in risky state and local banks Development of a system of internal improvements (such as roads and canals) which would knit the nation together and be financed by the tariff and land sales Clay protested that the West, which opposed the tariff, should support it since urban factory workers would be consumers of western foods. In Clay's view, the South (which also opposed high tariffs) should support them because of the ready market for cotton in northern mills. This last argument was the weak link. The South never strongly supported the American System and had access to plenty of markets for its cotton exports. Portions of the American System were enacted by the United States Congress. The Second Bank of the United States was rechartered in 1816 for 20 years. High tariffs were first suggested by Alexander Hamilton in his 1791 Report on Manufactures but were not approved by Congress until the Tariff of 1816. Tariffs were subsequently raised until they peaked in 1828 after the so-called Tariff of Abominations. After the Nullification Crisis in 1833, tariffs remained the same rate until the Civil War. However, the national system of internal improvements was never adequately funded; the failure to do so was due in part to sectional jealousies and constitutional squabbles about such expenditures. The American System did not enjoy universal success, however; in 1830, President Jackson vetoed a bill which would allow the federal government to purchase stock in the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike Road Company, which had been organized to construct a road linking Lexington and the Ohio River, the entirety of which would be in the state of Kentucky. Jackson's Maysville Road veto was due to both his personal conflict with Clay and his ideological objections.

Anti-Masonry

The Anti-Masonic Party (also known as the Anti-Masonic Movement) was the first "third party" in the United States.[4] It strongly opposed Freemasonry as a single-issue party, and later aspired to become a major party by expanding its platform to take positions on other issues. After emerging as a political force in the late 1820s, most of the Anti-Masonic Party's members joined the Whig Party in the 1830s, and the party disappeared after 1838. The party was founded in the aftermath of the disappearance of William Morgan, a former Mason who had become a prominent critic of the organization. Many believed that the Masons had murdered Morgan for speaking out against Masonry, and many churches and other groups condemned masonry. As many Masons were prominent businessmen and politicians, the backlash against the Masons was also a form of anti-elitism. Mass opposition to Masonry eventually coalesced into a political party. Before and during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, the United States endured a period of political realignment, and the Anti-Masons emerged as an important third party alternative to Andrew Jackson's Democrats and Adams's National Republicans. In New York, the Anti-Masons supplanted the National Republicans as the primary opposition to the Democrats. After experiencing unexpected success in the 1828 elections, the Anti-Masons began to adopt other issues, most notably support for internal improvements and a protective tariff. Several Anti-Masons, including William A. Palmer and Joseph Ritner, won election to prominent positions. In states like Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, the party controlled the balance of power in the state legislature and provided crucial support to candidates for the United States Senate. In 1831, the party held the first presidential nominating convention, a practice that was subsequently adopted by all major parties. The convention chose former Attorney General William Wirt as the party's standard bearer in the 1832 presidential election, and Wirt won 7.8% of the popular vote and carried Vermont. As the 1830s progressed, many of the Anti-Masonic Party's supporters joined the Whig Party, which sought to unite those opposed to the policies of President Jackson. The Anti-Masonic Party held a national convention in 1835, nominating William Henry Harrison, but a second convention announced that the party would not officially support a candidate. Harrison campaigned as a Whig in the 1836 presidential election, and his relative success in the election encouraged further Anti-Masonic migration into the Whig Party. By 1840, the party had ceased to function as a national organization. In subsequent decades, former Anti-Masonic candidates and supporters such as Millard Fillmore, William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed and Thaddeus Stevens would become well-known members of the Whig Party.

Shiloh, TN

The Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing) was a major battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought April 6-7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee. A Union force known as the Army of the Tennessee under Major General Ulysses S. Grant had moved via the Tennessee River deep into Tennessee and was encamped principally at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee on the west bank of that river, where the Confederate Army of Mississippi, under General Albert Sidney Johnston and second-in-command P. G. T. Beauregard, launched a surprise attack on Grant's army from its base in Corinth, Mississippi. Johnston was mortally wounded during the fighting; Beauregard, who thus succeeded to command of the army, decided against pressing the attack late in the evening. Overnight Grant was reinforced by one of his own divisions stationed further north and was joined by three divisions from another Union army under Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. This allowed them to launch an unexpected counterattack the next morning which completely reversed the Confederate gains of the previous day. On April 6, the first day of the battle, the Confederates struck with the intention of driving the Union defenders away from the river and into the swamps of Owl Creek to the west. Johnston hoped to defeat Grant's army before the anticipated arrival of General Buell's Army of the Ohio. The Confederate battle lines became confused during the fierce fighting, and Grant's men instead fell back to the northeast, in the direction of Pittsburg Landing. A Union position on a slightly sunken road, nicknamed the "Hornet's Nest," defended by the men of Brig. Gens. Benjamin Prentiss's and William H. L. Wallace's divisions, provided critical time for the remainder of the Union line to stabilize under the protection of numerous artillery batteries. Wallace was mortally wounded when the position collapsed, while several regiments from the two divisions were eventually surrounded and surrendered. General Johnston was shot in the leg and bled to death while personally leading an attack. Beauregard, his second in command, acknowledged how tired the army was from the day's exertions and decided against assaulting the final Union position that night. Tired but unfought and well-organized men from Buell's army and a division of Grant's army arrived in the evening of April 6 and helped turn the tide the next morning, when the Union commanders launched a counterattack along the entire line. Confederate forces were forced to retreat from the area, ending their hopes of blocking the Union advance into northern Mississippi. The Battle of Shiloh was the bloodiest battle in American history up to that time. It was eventually superseded that coming September by the Battle of Antietam (an overall bloodier battle, and still the bloodiest single-day in American military history), then the next year by the Battle of Chancellorsville, and, soon after, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, which would prove to be the bloodiest overall battle of the war.

The Alamo

The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 - March 6, 1836) was a pivotal event in the Texas Revolution. Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna launched an assault on the Alamo Mission near San Antonio de Béxar (modern-day San Antonio, Texas, United States), killing all of the Texian defenders. Santa Anna's cruelty during the battle inspired many Texians—both Texas settlers and adventurers from the United States—to join the Texian Army. Buoyed by a desire for revenge, the Texians defeated the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, ending the revolution. Several months previously, Texians had driven all Mexican troops out of Mexican Texas. About 100 Texians were then garrisoned at the Alamo. The Texian force grew slightly with the arrival of reinforcements led by eventual Alamo co-commanders James Bowie and William B. Travis. On February 23, approximately 1,500 Mexicans marched into San Antonio de Béxar as the first step in a campaign to retake Texas. For the next 10 days, the two armies engaged in several skirmishes with minimal casualties. Aware that his garrison could not withstand an attack by such a large force, Travis wrote multiple letters pleading for more men and supplies, but the Texians were reinforced by fewer than 100 men. In the early morning hours of March 6, the Mexican Army advanced on the Alamo. After repelling two attacks, the Texians were unable to fend off a third attack. As Mexican soldiers scaled the walls, most of the Texian soldiers withdrew into interior buildings. Defenders unable to reach these points were slain by the Mexican cavalry as they attempted to escape. Between five and seven Texians may have surrendered; if so, they were quickly executed. Most eyewitness accounts reported between 182 and 257 Texians died, while most historians of the Alamo agree that around 600 Mexicans were killed or wounded. Several noncombatants were sent to Gonzales to spread word of the Texian defeat. The news sparked both a strong rush to join the Texian army and a panic, known as "The Runaway Scrape", in which the Texian army, most settlers, and the new Republic of Texas government fled from the advancing Mexican Army.

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 on the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The compromise, drafted by Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and brokered by Clay and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, reduced sectional conflict. Controversy arose over the Fugitive Slave provision. The Compromise was greeted with relief, but each side disliked some of its specific provisions: Texas surrendered its claim to New Mexico as well as its claims north of 36°30'. It retained the Texas Panhandle, and the federal government took over the state's public debt. California was admitted as a free state, with its current boundaries. The South prevented adoption of the Wilmot Proviso that would have outlawed slavery in the new territories,[1] and the new Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory were allowed, under popular sovereignty, to decide whether to allow slavery in their borders. In practice, these lands were generally unsuited to plantation agriculture, and their settlers were uninterested in slavery. The slave trade, but not slavery altogether, was banned in the District of Columbia. A more stringent Fugitive Slave Law was enacted. The Compromise became possible after the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor, who, although a slave owner, wanted to exclude slavery from the Southwest. Whig leader Henry Clay designed a compromise, which failed to pass in early 1850 because of opposition by both pro-slavery southern Democrats, led by John C. Calhoun, and anti-slavery northern Whigs. Upon Clay's instruction, Douglas then divided Clay's bill into several smaller pieces and narrowly won their passage, over the opposition of radicals on both sides.

South Carolina Secession

The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union was a proclamation issued on December 24, 1860, by the government of South Carolina to explain its reasons for seceding from the United States (Full text of the declaration). It followed the brief Ordinance of Secession that had been issued on December 20. The declaration is a product of a convention organized by the state's government in the month following the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. President, where it was drafted in a committee headed by Christopher Memminger. The declaration stated the primary reasoning behind South Carolina's declaring of secession from the U.S., which was described as "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery"

Erie Canal

The Erie Canal greatly lowered the cost of shipping between the Midwest and the Northeast, bringing much lower food costs to Eastern cities and allowing the East to economically ship machinery and manufactured goods to the Midwest. The canal also made an immense contribution to the wealth and importance of New York City, Buffalo, and New York State. Its impact went much further, increasing trade throughout the nation by opening eastern and overseas markets to Midwestern farm products and by enabling migration to the West. It was faster than carts pulled by draft animals and cut transport costs by about 95%. The canal gave New York City's port an incomparable advantage over all other U.S. port cities and ushered in the state's 19th century political and cultural ascendancy. The canal fostered a population surge in western New York and opened regions farther west to settlement Its success also prompted imitation: a rash of canal-building followed. Also, the many technical hurdles that had to be overcome made heroes of those whose innovations made the canal possible.

Free Soil Ideology

The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections, and in some state elections. A single-issue party, its main purpose was to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing that free men on free soil constituted a morally and economically superior system to slavery. It also sometimes worked to remove existing laws that discriminated against freed African Americans in states such as Ohio. The party originated in New York after the state Democratic convention refused to endorse the Wilmot Proviso, a proposed law that would have banned slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. A faction of New York Democrats known as the Barnburners objected to slavery in the territories and opposed the 1848 Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass. The Barnburners and other anti-slavery Democrats joined with some anti-slavery Whigs and the Liberty Party to form the Free Soil Party. Salmon P. Chase, John P. Hale, and other party leaders organized the 1848 Free Soil Convention, which nominated a ticket consisting of former President Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams Sr. In the 1848 presidential election, Van Buren won 10.1% of the popular vote and Whig nominee Zachary Taylor defeated Cass. The Compromise of 1850 reduced tensions regarding slavery, but some remained in the party. In the 1852 presidential election, Hale won 4.9% of the popular vote as the party's nominee. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 revitalized the anti-slavery movement, and the party membership (including leaders such as Hale and Chase) was largely absorbed by the Republican Party between 1854 and 1856, by way of the Anti-Nebraska movement.

Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, and one of the best-known speeches in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863 - four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to others' presentations that day, came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just over two minutes Lincoln reiterated the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence[6] and proclaimed the Civil War as a struggle for the preservation of the Union sundered by the secession crisis,[7] with "a new birth of freedom"[8] that would bring true equality to all of its citizens.[9] Lincoln also redefined the Civil War as a struggle not just for the Union, but also for the principle of human equality.[6] Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago"‍—‌referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence eighty-seven years earlier‍—‌Lincoln invoked the United States' founding principles as set forth in that document, then reminded his listeners of the peril to those principles posed by the Civil War then in progress. He extolled the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, and exhorted his listeners to continue the struggle for survival of the nation's representative democracy as a beacon to the world‍—‌urging resolve "that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Grimke Sisters

The Grimké sisters were the first American female advocates of abolition and women's rights. They were writers, orators, and educators. They grew up in a slave-holding family in the Southern United States but moved to the North in the 1820s, settling for a time in Philadelphia and becoming part of its substantial Quaker community. They became more deeply involved with the abolitionist movement, traveling on its lecture circuit and recounting their firsthand experiences with slavery on their family's plantation. Among the first American women to act publicly in social reform movements, they were ridiculed for their abolitionist activity. They became early activists in the women's rights movement. They eventually developed a private school.

Hudson River School

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales in New England, the Maritimes, the American West, and South America.

Indian Removal

The Indian Removal Act was signed by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830. The law authorized the president to negotiate with southern Indian tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their lands. The act enjoyed strong support from the non-Indian peoples of the South, but there was a large amount of resistance from the Indian tribes, the Whig Party, and whites in the northeast, especially New England. The Cherokee worked together as an independent nation to stop this relocation, but they were unsuccessful.

Know-Nothing Party

The Native American Party, renamed the American Party in 1855 and commonly known as the "Know Nothing" movement, was an American nativist political party that operated nationally in the mid-1850s. It was primarily anti-Catholic and hostile to immigration, starting originally as a secret society. The movement briefly emerged as a major political party in the form of the American Party. Adherents to the movement were to reply "I know nothing" when asked about its specifics by outsiders, thus providing the group with its common appellation. The "Know Nothings" believed a "Romanist" conspiracy was afoot to subvert civil and religious liberty in America and sought to politically organize native-born Protestants in the defense of traditional religious and political values. It is remembered for this theme because of fears by Protestants that Catholic priests and bishops would control a large bloc of voters. In most places, "Know Nothingism" lasted only a year or two before disintegrating because of weak local leaders, few publicly-declared national leaders, and a deep split over the issue of slavery. In the South, the party did not emphasize anti-Catholicism, but was the main alternative to the dominant Democratic Party. The collapse of the Whig Party after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act left an opening for the emergence of a new major party in opposition to the Democrats. The Know Nothings elected Congressman Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts and several other individuals in the 1854 elections and created a new party organization known as the American Party. Particularly in the South, the American Party served as a vehicle for politicians opposed to the Democratic Party. Many also hoped that it would seek a middle ground between the pro-slavery positions of many Democratic politicians and the anti-slavery positions of the emerging Republican Party. The American Party nominated former President Millard Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election, although he kept quiet about his membership.[1] Fillmore received 21.5% of the popular vote in the 1856 presidential election, finishing behind the Democratic and Republican nominees. The party declined rapidly after the 1856 election. The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford further aroused opposition to slavery in the North, where many Know Nothings joined the Republicans. Most of the remaining members of the party supported the Constitutional Union Party in the 1860 presidential election.

Republic of Texas

The Republic of Texas (Spanish: República de Tejas) was an independent sovereign country in North America that existed from March 2, 1836, to February 19, 1846. It was bordered by Mexico to the west and southwest, the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast, the two U.S. states of Louisiana and Arkansas to the east and northeast, and United States territories encompassing parts of the current U.S. states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming to the north. The citizens of the republic were known as Texians. The Mexican province of Tejas (in English history books usually referred to as Mexican Texas) declared its independence from Mexico during the Texas Revolution in 1836. The Texas war of independence ended on April 21, 1836, but Mexico refused to recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, and intermittent conflicts between the two states continued into the 1840s. The United States recognized the Republic of Texas in March 1837 but declined to annex the territory.[2] The Republic-claimed borders were based upon the Treaties of Velasco between the newly created Texas Republic and Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico. The eastern boundary had been defined by the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 between the United States and Spain, which recognised the Sabine River as the eastern boundary of Spanish Texas and western boundary of the Missouri Territory. Under the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 the United States had renounced its claim to Spanish land to the east of the Rocky Mountains and to the north of the Rio Grande which it claimed to have acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The republic's southern and western boundary with Mexico continued to be disputed throughout the republic's existence. Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its southern boundary, while Mexico insisted that the Nueces River was the boundary. Texas was annexed by the United States on December 29, 1845 and was admitted to the Union as the 28th state on that day, with the transfer of power from the Republic to the new state of Texas formally taking place on February 19, 1846. However, the United States again inherited the southern and western border dispute with Mexico, which became a trigger for the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

Vicksburg, MS

The Siege of Vicksburg (May 18 - July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the Confederate Army of Mississippi, led by Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Vicksburg was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River; therefore, capturing it completed the second part of the Northern strategy, the Anaconda Plan. When two major assaults (May 19 and 22, 1863) against the Confederate fortifications were repulsed with heavy casualties, Grant decided to besiege the city beginning on May 25. After holding out for more than forty days, with no reinforcement and supplies nearly gone, the garrison finally surrendered on July 4. The successful ending of the Vicksburg Campaign significantly degraded the ability of the Confederacy to maintain its war effort, as described in the Aftermath section of the campaign article. Some historians—e.g., Ballard, p. 308—suggest that the decisive battle in the campaign was actually the Battle of Champion Hill, which, once won by Grant, made victory in the subsequent siege a foregone conclusion. This action (combined with the surrender of Port Hudson to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks on July 9) yielded command of the Mississippi River to the Union forces, who would hold it for the rest of the conflict. The Confederate surrender on July 4, 1863, is sometimes considered, when combined with Gen. Robert E. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg by Maj. Gen. George Meade and retreat beginning the same day, the turning point of the war. It cut off the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas from the rest of the Confederate States, effectively splitting the Confederacy in two for the duration of the war. The Union victory also permanently severed communication between the balance of the Confederacy and the Trans-Mississippi Department.

Trail of Tears

The Trail of Tears was a series of forced removals, sometimes at gunpoint, of Native American nations from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to other areas, one which was an area West of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Many of the relocated native people suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their new designated reserve, and many died before reaching their various designated reserve(s). The removal included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Ponca nations. The phrase "Trail of Tears" originates from a description of the many native american tribes removal; including the infamous Cherokee Nation in 1838.[1][2][3] Between 1830 and 1850, the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee people (including mixed-race and black freedmen and slaves who lived among them) were forcibly removed from their traditional lands in the Southeastern United States, and relocated farther west.[4] Those Native Americans that were relocated were forced to march to their destinations by state and local militias.[5] The Cherokee removal in 1838 (the last forced removal east of the Mississippi) was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush.[6] Approximately 2,000-6,000 of the 16,543 relocated Cherokee perished along the way

Impeachment of A. Johnson

The U.S. House of Representatives votes 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson, nine of which cite Johnson's removal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The House vote made President Johnson the first president to be impeached in U.S. history. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Andrew Johnson, a senator from Tennessee, was the only U.S. senator from a seceding state who remained loyal to the Union. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, and in 1864 he was elected vice president of the United States. Sworn in as president after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, President Johnson enacted a lenient Reconstruction policy for the defeated South, including almost total amnesty to ex-Confederates, a program of rapid restoration of U.S.-state status for the seceded states, and the approval of new, local Southern governments, which were able to legislate "Black Codes" that preserved the system of slavery in all but its name. The Republican-dominated Congress greatly opposed Johnson's Reconstruction program and in March 1867 passed the Tenure of Office Act over the president's veto. The bill prohibited the president from removing officials confirmed by the Senate without senatorial approval and was designed to shield members of Johnson's Cabinet like Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had been a leading Republican radical in the Lincoln administration. In the fall of 1867, President Johnson attempted to test the constitutionality of the act by replacing Stanton with General Ulysses S. Grant. However, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to rule on the case, and Grant turned the office back to Stanton after the Senate passed a measure in protest of the dismissal. On February 21, 1868, Johnson decided to rid himself of Stanton once and for all and appointed General Lorenzo Thomas, an individual far less favorable to the Congress than Grant, as secretary of war. Stanton refused to yield, barricading himself in his office, and the House of Representatives, which had already discussed impeachment after Johnson's first dismissal of Stanton, initiated formal impeachment proceedings against the president. On February 24, Johnson was impeached, and on March 13 his impeachment trial began in the Senate under the direction of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. The trial ended on May 26 with Johnson's opponents narrowly failing to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to convict him.

West Virginia

The U.S. state of West Virginia was formed out of western Virginia and added to the Union as a direct result of the American Civil War (see History of West Virginia). In the summer of 1861, Union troops under General George McClellan drove off Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee. This essentially freed Unionists in the northwestern counties of Virginia to form a functioning government of their own as a result of the Wheeling Convention. Prior to the admission of West Virginia the government in Wheeling formally claimed jurisdiction over all of Virginia, although from its creation it was firmly committed to the formation of a separate state. After Lee's departure, western Virginia continued to be a target of Confederate raids, even after the creation of the new state in 1863. These actions focused both on supplying the Confederate Army with provisions as well as attacking the vital Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that linked the northeast with the midwest, as exemplified in the Jones-Imboden Raid. Guerrilla warfare also gripped the new state, especially in the Allegheny Mountain counties to the east, where loyalties were much more divided than in the Unionist northwest part of the state

Lowell System/Waltham Plan

The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed in the United States, particularly in New England, during the early years of the American textile industry in the early 19th century. Made possible by inventions such as the spinning jenny, spinning mule, and water frame around the time of the American Revolution, the textile industry was among the earliest mechanized industries, and models of production and labor sources were first explored here. The system used domestic labor, often referred to as mill girls, who came to the new textile centers from rural towns to earn more money than they could at home, and to live a cultured life in "the city". Their life was very regimented - they lived in company boardinghouses and were held to strict hours and a moral code. As competition grew in the domestic textile industry and wages declined, strikes began to occur, and with the introduction of cheaper imported foreign workers by mid-century, the system proved unprofitable and collapsed.

KS-NE Act

The availability of tens of millions of acres of excellent farmland in the area made it necessary to create a territorial infrastructure to allow settlement. Railroad interests were especially eager to start operations since they needed farmers as customers. Four previous attempts to pass legislation had failed. The solution was a bill proposed in January 1854 by Douglas: the Democratic Party leader in the US Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Territories, an avid promoter of railroads, an aspirant to the presidency, and a fervent believer in popular sovereignty: the policy of letting the voters, almost exclusively white males, of a territory decide whether or not slavery should exist in it. Since the 1840s, the topic of a transcontinental railroad had been discussed. While there were debates over the specifics, especially the route to be taken, there was a public consensus that such a railroad should be built by private interests, financed by public land grants. In 1845, Douglas, serving in his first term in the US House of Representatives, had submitted an unsuccessful plan to organize the Nebraska Territory formally, as the first step in building a railroad with its eastern terminus in Chicago. Railroad proposals were debated in all subsequent sessions of Congress with cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Quincy, Memphis, and New Orleans competing to be the jumping-off point for the construction.[3] The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and President Franklin Pierce. The initial purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to open up thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. The popular sovereignty clause of the law led pro- and anti-slavery elements to flood into Kansas with the goal of voting slavery up or down, resulting in Bleeding Kansas.

Crop-lien system

The crop-lien system was a credit system that became widely used by cotton farmers in the United States in the South from the 1860s to the 1930s. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers who did not own the land they worked obtained supplies and food on credit from local merchants. The merchants held a lien on the cotton crop and the merchants and landowners were the first ones paid from its sale. What was left over went to the farmer. The system ended in the 1940s as prosperity returned and many poor farmers moved permanently to cities and towns, where jobs were plentiful because of the war. After the American Civil War, farmers in the South had little cash. During the war, British interests had invested in cotton plantations in Egypt and India, resulting in an oversupply of the commodity. Cotton prices dropped below the levels enjoyed in the 1850s. The crop-lien system was a way for farmers — both black and white — to get credit before the planting season by borrowing against the value of anticipated harvests. Local merchants provided food and supplies all year long on credit; when the cotton crop was harvested farmers turned it over to the merchant to pay back their loan. Sometimes there was cash left over; when cotton prices were low, the crop did not cover the debt and the farmer started the next year in the red. The credit system was used by land owners, sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Sharecroppers had no mules or tools; tenant farmers did have them and commanded a larger share of the crop. The owner took the rest. At harvest time the merchant collected his debts from the sale of the crop.[1] The merchants had to borrow the money to buy supplies, and in turn charged the farmer interest as well as a higher price for merchandise bought on such credit. The merchant insisted that more cotton (or some other cash crop) be grown—nothing else paid well—and thus came to dictate the crops that a farmer grew. Abuses in the crop lien system reduced many tenant farmers to a state of economic slavery, as their debts to landlords and merchants carried over from one year to the next. Many landowners joined the ranks of farm tenants when excessive indebtedness led to foreclosure. An 1887 report of the state's Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that the crop lien system had proven "a worse curse to North Carolina than droughts, floods, cyclones, storms, rust, caterpillars, and every other evil that attends the farmer."

Cult of domesticity

The culture of domesticity (often shortened to cult of domesticity) or cult of true womanhood is a term used by some historians to describe what they consider to have been a prevailing value system among the upper and middle classes during the nineteenth century in the United States[2] and Great Britain. This value system emphasized new ideas of femininity, the woman's role within the home and the dynamics of work and family. "True women", according to this idea, were supposed to possess four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. The idea revolved around the woman being the center of the family; she was considered "The light of the home". The women and men who most actively promoted these standards were generally white and Protestant; the most prominent of them, lived in New England and the Northeastern United States. Although all women were supposed to emulate this ideal of femininity, black, working class, and immigrant women were often excluded from the definition of "true women" because of social prejudice. Since the idea was first advanced by Barbara Welter in 1966, many historians have argued that the subject is far more complex and nuanced than terms such as "Cult of Domesticity" or "True Womanhood" suggest, and that the roles played by and expected of women within the middle-class, nineteenth-century context were quite varied and often contradictory; for example, it has been argued that much of what has been considered as anti-feminist in the past, in fact, helped lead to feminism.

15th Amendment

These amendments were intended to guarantee freedom to former slaves and to establish and prevent discrimination in civil rights to former slaves and all citizens of the United States. The promise of these amendments was eroded by state laws and federal court decisions over the course of the 19th century. Women were prohibited by some state constitutions and laws from voting, leading to Susan B. Anthony attempting to vote in New York in the 1872 Presidential election as an act of civil disobedience. In 1876 and later, some states passed Jim Crow laws that limited the rights of African-Americans. Important Supreme Court decisions that undermined these amendments were the Slaughter-House Cases in 1873, which prevented rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges or immunities clause from being extended to rights under state law; and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which originated the phrase "separate but equal" and gave federal approval to Jim Crow laws.

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. It arose as a reaction to or protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. The Second Great Awakening was a Protestant religious revival during the early 19th century in the United States. The movement began around 1790, gained momentum by 1800 and, after 1820, membership rose rapidly among Baptist and Methodist congregations whose preachers led the movement. It was past its peak by the late 1850s. The Second Great Awakening reflected Romanticism characterized by enthusiasm, emotion, and an appeal to the super-natural. It rejected the skeptical rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment. The revivals enrolled millions of new members in existing evangelical denominations and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age. The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the anticipated Second Coming of Jesus Christ

Amistad

United States v. Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. (15 Pet.) 518 (1841), was a United States Supreme Court case resulting from the rebellion of Africans on board the Spanish schooner La Amistad in 1839.[1] It was an unusual freedom suit that involved international issues and parties, as well as United States law. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison described it in 1969 as the most important court case involving slavery before being eclipsed by that of Dred Scott in 1857.[2] The schooner was traveling along the coast of Cuba on its way to a port for re-sale of the slaves. The African captives, who had been kidnapped in the area of Sierra Leone in West Africa and illegally sold into slavery and shipped to Cuba, escaped their shackles and took over the ship. They killed the captain and the cook; two other crew members escaped in a lifeboat. The Africans directed the two Spanish navigator survivors to return them to Africa. The crew tricked them, sailing north at night. The La Amistad was later apprehended near Long Island, New York, by the United States Revenue Cutter Service (1790 predecessor before 1915 of the modern U.S. Coast Guard) and taken into custody. The widely publicized court cases in the United States federal district court and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. in 1841, which addressed international issues, helped the abolitionist anti-slavery movement. In 1840, a federal district court found that the transport of the kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic Ocean on the Portuguese slave ship Tecora was in violation of laws and accepted treaties against the international slave trade by Great Britain, Spain and the United States. The captives were ruled to have acted as free men when they fought to escape their kidnapping and illegal confinement. The court ruled the Africans were entitled to take whatever legal measures necessary to secure their freedom, including the use of force. Under international and sectional pressure, eighth American President Martin Van Buren (1782-1862, served 1837-1841), ordered the case appealed to the Supreme Court. It affirmed the lower district court ruling on March 9, 1841, and authorized the release of the Africans, but overturned the additional order of the lower court that they be returned to Africa at government expense. Supporters arranged for temporary housing of the Africans in Farmington, Connecticut as well as funds for travel. In 1842 they transported by ship those who wanted to return to Africa, together with American Christian missionaries.

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Born in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and—in addition to publishing his poetry—was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money.

William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison (December 10, 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. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Garrison began his newspaper career as an apprentice compositor for the Newburyport Herald. He became involved in the anti-slavery movement in the 1820s, and over time he rejected both the American Colonization Society and the gradualist views of most others involved in the movement. Garrison co-founded The Liberator to espouse his abolitionist views, and in 1832 he organized the New-England Anti-Slavery Society. This society expanded into the American Anti-Slavery Society, which espoused the position that slavery should be immediately abolished. Garrison also emerged as a leading advocate of women's rights, which prompted a split in the abolitionist community. In the 1870s, Garrison became a prominent voice for the woman suffrage movement.