AP®︎ US History: Topic 5.5 Flashcards

Immigrant settlements that preserved languages, religions, institutions, foods, and customs while gradually incorporating residents into American life

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

German liberal and nationalist refugees who immigrated after the failed European revolutions of 1848

Migration to California and the Far West accelerated by the Gold Rush, supplying labor while provoking discriminatory taxes, legal restrictions, and racial violence

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

Prejudice claiming that Catholic loyalty to priests and the pope made Catholic immigrants unfit for independent republican citizenship

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

The diverse, increasingly industrial North relied principally on free labor, while the rural, agricultural South’s wealth and elite power depended on enslaved labor

The ideal that workers owned their labor, could make contracts and earn wages, and had the possibility of acquiring property and independence

The movement opposing slavery’s western expansion because slave labor and planter wealth threatened opportunities for free white farmers and workers

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

The abolitionist strategy of persuading slaveholders and the public that slavery was sinful and should be voluntarily rejected

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

William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, begun in 1831, that demanded immediate emancipation and condemned compromise with slavery

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

Published accounts by formerly enslaved people that exposed slavery’s violence and demonstrated Black humanity, intellect, and capacity for freedom

Author whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought slavery’s violence and family separations to a broad Northern audience

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

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

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

Northern state laws that protected alleged fugitives or obstructed federal slave catchers, angering Southerners who demanded enforcement

Militant abolitionist who used violence in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry in 1859 in a failed effort to begin an uprising against slavery

Claims based on racism and pseudoscience that people of African descent were naturally inferior and suited to enslavement

The proslavery claim that enslavers acted as protective household heads who provided dependent workers with care and lifelong security

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

Southern political leader who declared slavery a positive good in 1837 and defended it as the basis of a stable social order

Nonslaveholding white Southerner whose 1857 book The Impending Crisis of the South argued that slavery economically harmed nonslaveholding whites

Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 economic attack on slavery for harming nonslaveholding whites and obstructing Southern development

The argument that enslaved people were legally protected property and that the Constitution safeguarded slaveholding interests

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

Proslavery advocates cited biblical recognition of slavery, while abolitionists appealed to Christian principles of human equality, love, and justice