AP®︎ US History: Unit 5 Flashcards

Mid-19th-century belief that Providence and American superiority destined the United States to expand westward to the Pacific

The 1845 addition of the former Republic of Texas, which heightened slavery concerns and the boundary dispute with Mexico

Expansionist Democratic president elected in 1844 who pursued American claims to Texas and Oregon and oversaw major territorial acquisition

Expansionist slogan demanding all Oregon territory south of latitude 54°40′ rather than compromise with Britain

The 1846 agreement that peacefully divided Oregon at the 49th parallel while Britain retained Vancouver Island

Westward movement of persecuted Latter-day Saints who established a religious refuge in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847

Mass migration after California’s 1848 gold discovery that accelerated settlement, commerce, statehood, environmental damage, and Native dispossession

The 1862 law offering 160 acres of public land to eligible claimants who lived on and improved it for five years

The 1862 and 1864 laws funding a transcontinental railroad through federal loans and large land grants

The 1862 law granting federal land to states to finance colleges teaching agriculture and mechanical arts

The 1854 agreement opening Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships and permitting an American consul in Japan

The 1867 American purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, extending expansion and strategic interest in the Pacific

1846–1848 war provoked by annexation, expansionism, and the disputed Texas border; U.S. victory produced the Mexican Cession and intensified conflict over slavery and western peoples

1848 treaty ending the war: Mexico recognized the Rio Grande border, ceded California and New Mexico, and received $15 million, while Mexican residents were promised citizenship and property protections

Approximately 525,000 square miles transferred by Mexico in 1848, including California and New Mexico; it expanded the United States to the Pacific and reopened the slavery question

David Wilmot’s unsuccessful 1846 proposal to prohibit slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico; it exposed growing sectional voting and conflict

1853 U.S. purchase from Mexico of land in present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico for $10 million, partly for a southern railroad route

Mexican residents of California whose citizenship and property rights were promised after the Mexican Cession but who often lost land through legal costs, fraud, and discrimination

Federal policy that confined Native nations to restricted areas while opening their former lands and resources to non-Native settlement

The 1864 attack in which Colorado militia killed about 150 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly women, children, and the elderly

Policy allowing territorial settlers to decide whether to permit slavery; used in Utah and New Mexico but left the timing and legality of slavery unsettled

Five-law sectional settlement admitting free California, using popular sovereignty in Utah and New Mexico, settling Texas’s boundary, ending Washington’s slave trade, and strengthening fugitive-slave enforcement

Federal law strengthening the capture and return of alleged fugitives, denying them jury trials and testimony, allowing officials to compel assistance, and intensifying northern resistance

Northern state laws providing legal protections to alleged fugitives or withholding state cooperation from federal fugitive-slave enforcement

Great Famine migration of mostly poor Catholics who settled near eastern cities, supplied low-wage labor, built parish communities, and gained influence through the Democratic Party

Migration driven by economic hardship and political unrest that created diverse German farming and urban communities, especially in the Midwest

The belief that native-born white Protestant interests and culture should be protected against immigrants and their political influence

The 1850s nativist party that sought longer naturalization periods, reduced immigrant voting, native-born officeholding, and Protestant control of civic life

Belief that ordinary people should advance through their own work and gain independent farms or businesses rather than depend on slavery

Political party whose 1848 presidential campaign made opposition to slavery’s expansion an independent political force

The interracial minority movement seeking to end slavery through moral arguments, publications, petitions, escape assistance, and occasionally violence

White abolitionist who published The Liberator, demanded immediate emancipation, and used confrontational moral criticism of slavery

Formerly enslaved abolitionist speaker, writer, and publisher whose testimony attacked slavery and refuted racist claims about Black ability

Formerly enslaved abolitionist who escaped in 1849 and repeatedly returned south to guide other enslaved people to freedom

A loose network of routes, safe houses, Black communities, religious groups, and guides that assisted freedom seekers escaping slavery

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel that portrayed slavery’s human costs, strengthening Northern antislavery feeling and provoking Southern outrage

The claim that slavery was beneficial rather than a necessary evil because it supposedly produced racial order, security, and social stability

The argument that states controlled their domestic institutions and that federal restrictions on slavery violated state sovereignty

National competition between Democrats and Whigs whose cross-sectional coalitions collapsed in the 1850s under pressure from slavery and nativism

1854 law organizing Kansas and Nebraska under popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise restriction and provoking a sectional crisis

Illinois Democrat who sponsored the Kansas–Nebraska Act, defended popular sovereignty and the Freeport Doctrine, and opposed the Lecompton Constitution

Mid-1850s armed conflict in Kansas in which proslavery and antislavery forces used fraud and violence while competing to control the territory

Fraud-tainted proslavery Kansas constitution backed by Buchanan but opposed by Douglas; Congress rejected it and Kansas voters overwhelmingly defeated it

1856 assault in which Representative Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner after Sumner’s antislavery “Crime Against Kansas” speech

Northern-based party formed in 1854 from antislavery Whigs, Free-Soilers, antislavery Democrats, and others opposed to slavery’s territorial expansion

1857 ruling that Dred Scott lacked federal citizenship and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, making the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional

1858 Illinois Senate debates in which Lincoln opposed slavery’s expansion and Douglas defended popular sovereignty despite the Dred Scott ruling

Douglas’s claim that territories could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to enact the local laws and police protections it required

Brown’s failed 1859 seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to arm enslaved people and spark an uprising; after his execution, some Northerners portrayed him as a martyr, intensifying Southern fears

Lincoln won about 40 percent of the popular vote and 180 electoral votes without carrying a slave state, proving a Northern sectional coalition could control the presidency

Republican elected president in 1860 on a platform opposing slavery’s expansion but not abolishing it in existing states; his victory triggered secession

The crisis after Lincoln’s 1860 election in which eleven slave states left the Union, formed the Confederacy, and rejected failed efforts at compromise

Failed proposal to extend the 36°30′ line to the Pacific, banning slavery north of it and constitutionally protecting slavery south of it

Government formed at Montgomery in February 1861 by the seven seceded Deep South states to preserve their independence and slaveholding order

Mississippi politician selected as provisional president of the Confederate States of America in February 1861

Federal fort in Charleston Harbor bombarded by Confederate forces on April 12, 1861; its surrender began open warfare between the Union and Confederacy

Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—slave states that remained in the Union and provided vital people, resources, routes, and strategic geography

Union strategy to blockade Southern ports, control the Mississippi River, and steadily pressure Confederate armies and strategic centers

July 1861 Confederate victory that disproved expectations of a short war and led both sides to raise larger armies

Confederate strategy of using European dependence on Southern cotton to gain recognition or intervention from Britain or France

The Confederacy adopted the first national draft in 1862 and the Union followed in 1863, with exemptions and substitution provisions provoking class resentment

Northern Democrats who favored ending the war through negotiation and opposed policies such as emancipation, conscription, and military arrests

Violent July 1863 uprising against the Union draft that became racist attacks on Black New Yorkers, abolitionists, and the Colored Orphan Asylum

Lincoln’s wartime denial of some detainees’ right to have a court review their imprisonment, justified as necessary to suppress rebellion and protect the Union

September 17, 1862 battle that ended Lee’s Maryland invasion and enabled Lincoln to announce emancipation from a position of strength

Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 military order declaring enslaved people in areas still in rebellion free, authorizing Black enlistment, and making emancipation an official Union war aim

Famous Black Union regiment led by white officers whose costly 1863 assault on Fort Wagner challenged racist doubts about Black soldiers

July 1–3, 1863 Union victory in Pennsylvania that ended Lee’s major northern invasion and forced the Confederacy increasingly onto the defensive

Lincoln’s 1863 speech linking Union victory to equality, democratic self-government, and a national “new birth of freedom.”

Grant’s maneuver and siege campaign ending July 4, 1863, which gave the Union the Mississippi River and divided the Confederacy

Aggressive Union commander who won key western victories and, from 1864, coordinated all Union armies in sustained pressure against the Confederacy

Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia whose aggressive leadership produced early successes but costly losses and failed invasions of the North

November–December 1864 march from Atlanta to Savannah that destroyed Confederate transportation, supplies, economic resources, and morale

Site where Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865, under generous terms that effectively ended major Confederate resistance

Lincoln’s plan allowing a state government to form when 10 percent of its 1860 voters swore loyalty and accepted emancipation

Congressional plan requiring a majority of white men to swear they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy; Lincoln pocket-vetoed it

Johnson’s lenient restoration program requiring loyalty, rejection of secession and Confederate debt, and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment but not Black suffrage

Lincoln’s successor, a racist southern Unionist who favored rapid restoration of white-controlled governments and opposed Black political equality

Federal agency that provided relief, schools, legal assistance, and labor supervision to freedpeople and some poor whites after the war

Southern laws that restricted freedpeople’s movement, employment, legal rights, and autonomy to preserve white control and a dependent labor force

Moderates initially sought basic civil equality and orderly readmission; Radicals demanded stronger federal protection, Black male suffrage, and deeper southern reform

Law declaring U.S.-born people citizens regardless of race and protecting contracts, property, lawsuits, and testimony; enacted over Johnson’s veto

1865 amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude nationwide except as punishment for a crime after conviction

1868 amendment establishing birthright citizenship and barring states from abridging citizens’ privileges or immunities or denying due process or equal protection

1870 amendment prohibiting denial of voting rights because of race, color, or previous servitude, protecting Black male but not women’s suffrage

Republican-led Reconstruction tying readmission to federal protection of civil rights, Black male political participation, and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment

1867 laws dividing ten former Confederate states into five military districts and requiring biracial voting, new constitutions, and Fourteenth Amendment ratification

The House impeached Johnson in 1868 mainly over the Tenure of Office Act, but the Senate acquitted him by one vote and did not remove him

Organization founded in 1869 by Stanton and Anthony to seek a federal women’s suffrage amendment and a broad women’s rights program

Organization founded in 1869 by Stone and Blackwell that supported the Fifteenth Amendment and pursued women’s suffrage mainly state by state

Sherman’s wartime order reserving some coastal land for freed families, inspiring an expectation of land reform that never became a general guarantee

Pejorative name for northerners who moved South after the war as officials, teachers, missionaries, veterans, workers, or investors

Pejorative name for white southern Republicans who supported Reconstruction and the region’s biracial Republican governments

Black men elected to local, state, and federal offices during Reconstruction who helped create public schools, protect civil rights, and build biracial governments

A landless family farmed an owner’s land for a share of the crop, leaving many Black and poor white farmers dependent and indebted

Farmers pledged future crops for high-interest credit, often ending the year in debt and tied to the same land or creditor

White supremacist organization founded in 1866 that used terrorism to suppress Black voting, remove Republicans, and restore white Democratic rule

Federal laws of 1870–1871 authorizing action against conspiracies that interfered with civil and voting rights

Federal law prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, largely invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1883

White Southern Democrats who claimed to “redeem” the South by ending Republican rule and restoring Democratic control and white supremacy

The 1873 decision narrowly interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause and limiting federal protection of civil rights

The 1876 decision overturning Colfax convictions and holding that the Fourteenth Amendment restricted state action, not purely private violence

A financial panic that began a severe depression and shifted Northern attention away from enforcing African American rights in the South

Informal settlement accepting Hayes as president while Republicans withdrew remaining federal support from Southern Reconstruction governments

Redeemer demand for freedom from federal supervision, which in practice allowed white Southern governments to suppress Black political rights

The post-Reconstruction system of legally enforced segregation, disfranchisement, discrimination, and racial subordination