AP®︎ US History: Topic 5.6 Flashcards

Policy allowing territorial settlers to decide slavery; in practice it produced fraud, rival governments, and violence rather than an accepted result

1820 settlement prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′ except Missouri; the Kansas–Nebraska Act repealed its restriction

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

Northern belief that slaveholders and their allies were using the federal government to extend and protect slavery

Proslavery Missourians who crossed into Kansas, cast illegal ballots, and intimidated antislavery settlers during territorial elections

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

May 1856 proslavery attack on the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, destroying newspaper offices and other property

John Brown and his followers’ retaliatory killing of five proslavery men near Pottawatomie Creek during Bleeding Kansas

Radical abolitionist who led the Pottawatomie killings and later raided Harpers Ferry in hopes of starting an enslaved uprising

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

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

National party that disintegrated in the 1850s as Northern antislavery Whigs and Southern Whigs could no longer cooperate over slavery’s expansion

Hostility toward immigrants, especially Catholic Irish and Germans, that disrupted party loyalties but ultimately could not displace the slavery issue

Nativist party hostile to Catholic immigration that briefly attracted former Whigs before dividing along sectional lines over slavery

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

Belief that western territories should exclude slavery and remain open to free labor, independent farmers, and economic advancement

The last major party with substantial support in both sections, increasingly divided over whether settlers could exclude slavery from federal territories

James Buchanan defeated Republican John C. Frémont and Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore, while Frémont’s Northern strength revealed a powerful sectional realignment

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

Democratic president elected in 1856 who supported admitting Kansas under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, splitting his party and discrediting his administration

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

Chief justice whose Dred Scott opinion held that people descended from enslaved Africans were not U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories

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

Republican who argued that slavery was wrong and should not expand, challenged Douglas in 1858, and emerged as a prominent national party leader

Lincoln’s warning that the nation could not remain permanently divided between slavery and freedom and would eventually become all one or the other

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