AP®︎ US History: Topic 5.4 Flashcards

Vast territory transferred by Mexico in 1848 whose acquisition sparked conflict over whether slavery could expand westward

David Wilmot’s unsuccessful proposal to prohibit slavery in all territory acquired from Mexico; sectional House support and Senate opposition revealed the growing North–South divide

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

Radical southern defenders of slavery who threatened secession if the federal government denied what they considered southern constitutional rights

1850 meeting of delegates from several slave states to coordinate a southern response to restrictions on slavery and consider secession

Kentucky senator who introduced the broad compromise plan of 1850 and attempted to pass its concessions together as an omnibus bill

South Carolina senator who warned that northern power had destroyed sectional balance and demanded guarantees for southern rights to preserve the Union

President who favored admitting California and New Mexico directly as states and opposed Texas’s claims but died before the compromise passed

President who succeeded Zachary Taylor, supported the compromise, signed its separate measures into law, and enforced them

Illinois senator who secured passage by dividing Clay’s failed omnibus bill into separate measures supported by shifting sectional coalitions

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

Northern gain in the Compromise of 1850 that created a 16-to-15 free-state Senate majority and increased southern fears of political decline

Territories organized by the Compromise of 1850 without a federal ban on slavery, leaving their eventual decision to popular sovereignty

Texas surrendered its disputed western claims in exchange for $10 million, preventing armed conflict and permitting separate organization of New Mexico

Compromise measure ending the buying and selling of enslaved people in the capital while leaving slavery itself legal there

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

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel, inspired partly by the Fugitive Slave Act, that expanded northern moral opposition to slavery

Movement opposing slavery’s territorial expansion to preserve western land for free white labor; many supporters were not abolitionists

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

Massachusetts senator who supported the Compromise of 1850, including stronger fugitive-slave enforcement, to preserve the Union

Webster’s 1850 speech supporting sectional compromise as necessary to preserve the Union

New York senator who opposed concessions to slavery and argued that moral law condemned the institution

Seward’s argument that a moral law above the Constitution condemned slavery and outweighed demands for compromise

Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, the aging national leaders who represented competing positions in the Compromise of 1850 debate