History Final Exam

Temperance

A widespread reform movement, led by militant Christians, focused on reducing the use of alcoholic beverages. - In the period following the American Revolution many Americans drank to excess. This was due in part to economic and social problems that occurred as a result of rapid inflation following the war for independence. But widespread drinking was also a way of life. - The movement was also influential in passing laws that prohibited the sale of liquor in several states. When people took the pledge to stop drinking they joined what was called the "Cold Water Army." - Temperance was also important because it connected to many other reform movements that sprang up in the country between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Many of these movements were motivated by a renewed interest in religion called the Second Great Awakening. - The temperance movement was also important because it was fundamental to the concept of individual choice and responsibility. Taking the pledge was a conscious act that one person did in an effort to make himself or herself a better human being.

Bargain of 1877

Deal made by a republican and democratic special congressional commission to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876; republican Rutherford b. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote, was declared the winner in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from involvement in politics in the south, marking the end of reconstruction. The triumphant southern democrats failed to live up to their pledge to recognize blacks as equal citizens.

Grimke Sisters

The daughters of a prominent South Carolina slave holder, Angelina and Sarah Grimke had been converted first to Quakerism and then to abolitionism while visiting Philadelphia. The Grimke sisters were neither the first women to lecture in public nor the first to be feverishly condemned by self-proclaimed guardians of female modesty. The Grimke's were the first to apply the abolitionist doctrine of universal freedom and equality to the status of women. The Grimke sisters soon retired from the fray , unwilling to endure the intense criticism to which they were subjected. But their writings helped to spark the movement for woman's rights, which arose in the 1840s

Wilmot Proviso

The divisive potential of tis issue became clear in 1846, when congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico. Party lines crumbled as every northerner, democrat and whig alike, supported what came to be known as the Wilmot Proviso, while nearly all southerners opposed it. The measure passed the House, where the more populous North possessed a majority, but failed in the senate, with its even balance of free and slave states.

Robert Owen

The most important secular communitarian (meaning a person who plans or lives in a cooperative community) was Robert Owen, a British factory owner. Appalled by the degradation of workers in the early industrial revolution, Owen created a model factory village at New Lanark, Scotland, which combined strict rules of work discipline with comfortable housing and free public education. Communitarianism Established New Harmony in Indiana. Owen's settlement only lasted a few years, but it strongly influenced the labor movement, educational reformers, and women's rights advocates. Owen's vision resonated with the widely held American belief that a community of equals could be created in the New World.

Henry David Thoreau

Was jailed in Massachusetts in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the war. defending his action, Thoreau wrote an important essay "On civil disobedience", which inspired such later advocates of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws as Martin Luther King Jr.

Sojourner Truth

At an 1851 women's rights convention, the black convention, the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth insisted that the movement devote attention to the plight of poor and working class women and repudiate the idea that women were too delicate to engage in work outside the home. significance?

Free Soil Party

In 1848, opponents of slavery's expansion organized the Free Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, as his running mate. Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, who proposed that the decision on whether to allow slavery should be left to settlers in the new territories ( "popular sovereignty").

13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

13th: Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. 14th: Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. Section 2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. Section 3: No person shall be a senator or representative in congress, or elector of president and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of congress, or an officer of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. Section 4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, should not be questioned. Section 5: The congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. 15th: Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account or race, color, or previous condition of servitude. section 2: the congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

William Lloyd Garrison

1831 The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison's weekly journal published in Boston, did the new breed of abolitionism find a permanent voice. "I will be harsh as truth" Garrison's pamphlet "Thoughts on African Colonization" persuaded many foes of slavery that blacks must be recognized as part of American Society, not viewed as aliens to be shipped overseas. Other Antislavery publications soon emerged, but "The Liberator" remained the preeminent abolitionist journal.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

1854 law sponsored by Illinois senator Douglas to allow settlers newly organized territories north of the Missouri border to decide the slavery issue for themselves; fury over the resulting repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 led to violence in Kansas and to the formation of the Republican Party. Thanks to Douglas's energetic leadership, the Kansas- Nebraska Act became law. But it shattered the Democratic Parties unity. Even as congress debated, protest meetings sprang up throughout the north. Fearing that the bill's unpopularity among their constitutes would harm their chances for reelection, half the northern democrats in the house cast negative votes. It is difficult to think of a piece of legislation in American history that had more profound impact on national life. In the wake of the bill's passage, American politics underwent a profound reorganization. During the next two years, the whig party, unable to develop a unified response to the political crisis, collapsed. The south became solidly democrat. Most northern whigs, augmented by thousands of disgruntled democrats, joined a new organization, the Republican Party, dedicated to preventing the further expansion of slavery.

Dred Scott Decision

1857 US Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice roger b. Taney ruled that congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, on the grounds that such a prohibition would violate the fifth amendment rights of slaveholders, and that no black person could be a citizen of the United States. One the most famous or infamous rulings in the long history of the supreme court, was announced in march 1857, two days after Buchanan's inauguration. The justices addressed three questions. Could a black person be a citizen and therefore sue in federal court? did congress possess the power to prohibit slavery in a territory? did residence in free state make Scott free? The impact of the party system was far reaching. Among the decision's casualties was the reputation of the court itself, which in the north, sank to the lowest level in all of American history. Rather than abandoning their opposition to the expansion of slavery, republicans now viewed the court as controlled by the slave power.

John Brown

An armed assault by the abolitionist John Brown on the federal arsenal at Harper's ferry, Virginia, further heightened sectional tensions. Brown had a long career of involvement in antislavery activities. In the 1830s and 1840s, he had befriended fugitive slaves and, although chronically in debt, helped to finance antislavery publications. Like other abolitionists, Brown was a deeply religious man. Harsh religion. On October 16, 1859, with twenty one men, five of them black, Brown seized Harper's ferry. Militarily, the plan made little sense. Brown's band was soon surrounded and killed or captured by a detachment of federal soldiers headed by colonel Robert E. Lee. Placed on trial for treason to the state of Virginia, Brown conducted himself with dignity and courage, winning admiration from millions of northerners who disapproved of his violent deeds. Black leaders have long hailed him as a rare white person willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of racial justice. To the south, the failure of brown's assault seemed less significant than the adulation he seemed to arouse from much of the northern public. His raid and execution further widened the breach between the sections.

Emancipation Proclamation

Declaration issued by President Abraham Lincoln; the preliminary proclamation on September 22, 1862, freed the slaves in areas under confederate control as of January 1st, 1863, the date of the final proclamation, which also authorized the enrollment of black soldiers into the union army. The document did not liberate all the slaves- indeed, on the day it was issued, it applied very few. Because its legality derived from the president's authority as military commander and chief to combat the south's rebellion, the proclamation exempted areas firmly under union control. It did not apply to the loyal border slave states that had never seceded or to the areas of the confederacy occupied by union soldiers. Despite its limitations, the proclamation set off scenes of jubilation among free blacks and abolitionists in the north and "contrabands" and slaves in the south. Not only did the emancipation proclamation alter the nature of the civil war and the course of American history, but it also represented a turning point in Lincoln's own thinking. The evolution of Lincoln's emancipation policy displayed the hallmarks of his wartime leadership- his capacity for growth and his ability to develop broad public support for administration.

Seneca Falls Convention

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the key organizers in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, were veterans of the antislavery crusade. The Seneca Falls Convention, a gathering on behalf of Women's rights held in the upstate New York town where Stanton lived, raised the issue of women's suffrage for the first time. Seneca Falls marked the beginning of the seventy-year struggle for Women suffrage. The declaration of sentiments condemned the entire structure of inequality that denied woman access to education and employment, gave husbands control over property and wages of their wives and custody of children in the vent of divorce, deprived women of independent legal status after they are married, and restricted them to the home as their "sphere of action". Equal rights became the rallying cry of the early movement for women's rights, and equal rights meant claiming access to all the prevailing definitions of freedom.

Compromise of 1850

In 1850, California asked to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Many southerners opposed the measure, fearing that it would upset the sectional balance in congress. Senator Henry Clay offered a plan with four main provisions that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850. California would enter the union as a free state. The slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be abolished in the nation's capital. A stringent new law would allow southerners to reclaim runaway slaves. And the status of slavery in the remaining territories acquired from Mexico would be left to the decision of the local white inhabitants. The US would also agree to pay off the massive debt Texas had accumulated while independent. Fillmore helped to break the impasse in Congress and secure adoption of the Compromise of 1850.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

In February 1848, the two governments agreed to the Treaty of Gaudalupe Hidalgo, which confirmed the annexation Texas and ceded California and present day New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah to the United States. In exchange, the United States paid Mexico $15 million. The treaty guaranteed to "male citizens" of the area "the free enjoyment of their liberty and property" and "all the rights" pf Americans- a provision designed to protect the property of large Mexican landowners in California.

Black Codes

Laws passed from 1865 to 1866 in southern states to restrict the rights of former slaves; to nullify the codes, congress passed the civil rights act of 1866 and fourteenth amendment. these laws granted blacks certain rights, such as legalized marriage, ownership of property, and limited access to the courts. But it denied them the rights to testify against whites, to serve on juries or in state militias, or to vote. Declared that those who failed to sign yearly labor contracts could be arrested and hired out to white landowners. Most of the Union's army was swiftly demobilized. What motivated the north's turn against Johnson's policies was not a desire to punish the white south, but the inability of the south's political leaders to accept the reality of emancipation.

Fugitive Slave Act

Made further controversy inevitable. The law allowed special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even testimony by the accused individual. It prohibited local authorities from interfering with the capture of fugitives and required individual citizens to assist in ally strong defenders of states rights and local autonomy, supported a measure that brought federal agents into communities throughout the North, armed with the power to override local law enforcement and judicial procedures to secure the return of runaway slaves. The security of slavery was more important to them than states'-rights consistency. affected all free states. viewed as dangerous example of how a government doing the bidding of the south could override an individuals ability to act according to his conscience. The law further widened sectional divisions and reinvigorated the Underground Railroad.

American Colonization Society

Organized in 1816 to encourage colonization of free blacks to Africa; west African nation of Liberia founded in 1822 to serve as a homeland for them. Colonization struck many observers as totally impractical. Many northerners saw saw colonization as the only way to rid the nation of slavery. Southern supporters of colonization devoted most of their energy to persuading those African Americans who were already free to leave the United States. Most African Americans adamantly opposed the idea of colonization. In fact, the formation of the American colonization society galvanized free blacks to claim their rights as Americans. early 1817, some 3,000 free blacks assembled Philadelphia for the first national black convention.Insisted that blacks were Americans, entitled to the same freedoms and rights enjoyed as whites.