Manifest Destiny
The 19th-century doctrine asserting that U.S. expansion across the continent was both justified and inevitable
What is Manifest Destiny?
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel shifted Northern public opinion by highlighting the moral evils of slavery.
What is Uncle Tom's Cabin?
This executive order freed slaves in rebelling states and fundamentally changed the purpose of the war to ending slavery.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
This Constitutional Amendment officially abolished slavery throughout the United States
What is the 13th Amendment?
This Amendment prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude
What is the 15th Amendment?
This 1848 treaty ended the Mexican-American War and granted the U.S. territories, including California, Nevada, and Utah
What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
This 1854 Act overturned the Missouri Compromise by allowing "popular sovereignty" to determine the status of slavery in new territories.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The Union's strategic plan to "suffocate" the South through a naval blockade and by seizing the Mississippi River
What is the Anaconda Plan?
This Amendment conferred citizenship and "equal protection" under the law to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S.
What is the 14th Amendment?
A nativist political party that emerged in the 1850s to oppose the influx of Catholic immigrants.
What is the Know-Nothing Party?
The 1862 Act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers with 160 acres of public land.
What is the Homestead Act?
The 1857 Supreme Court case that ruled Black people were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories
What is Dred Scott v. Sanford?
These two 1863 battles are considered the dual turning points that shifted momentum permanently to the North.
What are the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg?
This federal agency was established to provide food, housing, and education to formerly enslaved people in the South.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
This political party emerged in the North following the collapse of the Whigs, committed to stopping the extension of slavery.
What is the Republican Party?
A failed proposal that sought to ban slavery in any territory acquired from the Mexican-American War.
What is the Wilmot Proviso?
This movement argued that slavery was a threat to "free labor" and white republicanism rather than focusing on its moral evil
What is the Free Soil Movement
In this famous speech, Abraham Lincoln framed the Civil War as a struggle for "a new birth of freedom.
What is the Gettysburg Address?
A labor system that trapped many African Americans in a cycle of debt and poverty, often resembling the conditions of slavery.
What is Sharecropping?
These two paramilitary groups used violence and intimidation to suppress the Black vote and dismantle Reconstruction.
Who are the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) and the White League?
These two immigrant groups arrived in substantial numbers during this era, seeking economic opportunity and religious refuge.
Who are the Irish and Germans?
This event served as the final catalyst for South Carolina's secession, as the winner did not receive a single Southern electoral vote.
What is the Election of 1860?
This term describes the mobilization of entire societies and economies, a strategy the North used to overwhelm the South's resources
What is Total War?
This informal deal settled the 1876 election and ended Reconstruction by removing federal troops from the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
This 1850 agreement included the Fugitive Slave Act and admitted California as a free state
What is the Compromise of 1850