Manifest Destiny
Who is Horace Greeley?
This general received orders from President Polk to cross the Nueces into Mexican territory and start the Mexican American War.
Who is Zachary Taylor?
California entered the Union on September 9, 1850, but only after Henry Clay secured passage of this controversial legislation as part of the Compromise of 1850.
What is the Fugitive Slave Act?
Debate over this legislative decision led to violence in the West and violence in the legislature itself.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The bloody battle, the deadliest to take place on one day in American history, convinced Lincoln that he needed to end slavery in order to cripple the Confederate war effort.
What is the Battle of Antietam?
This amendment states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens and had equal protection under the law and due process of law.
What is the Fourteenth Amendment?
Democrats and former Confederates who wanted to restore white rule in the South; they eventually returned to power at the state level by the late 1870s.
What are "redeemers"?
The annexation of this large former republic in 1845 was one of the main reasons for the war with Mexico.
What is Texas?
The name for the territory gained from Mexico in 1848.
What is the Mexican Cession?
Originally proposed by a Democrat from Michigan that allowed the decision of slavery within a territory to be decided upon by the settlers of the area.
What is popular sovereignty?
Before his 1859 execution, this man wrote that he was "quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood."
Who is John Brown?
Lincoln's policies sought to keep these slaveholding border states — originally four, but eventually five — from joining the Confederacy.
What are Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri?
President Johnson's plans for reuniting the nation with a series of proclamations pardoning white southerners and restoring their political and property rights.
What is Presidential Reconstruction?
Scandals during this president's administration, including the Credit Mobilier affair and the Whiskey Ring case, damaged his effectiveness to lead Reconstruction.
Who is Ulysses Grant?
The U.S. signed this treaty with Japan in 1854 after Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay and forced the Japanese to open their country to Americans; the treaty would eventually lead to commercial ties between the two countries.
What is the Treaty of Kanagawa?
This man overthrew Mexican rule in Alta California and established the short-lived Bear Flag Republic.
Who is John C. Fremont?
This paramilitary group, formed in 1851, committed genocide against the Ahwahnechee people as part of the California genocide.
What is the Mariposa Battalion?
This 1852 anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War."
What is Uncle Tom's Cabin?
This turning point finally convinced the French and English that they could definitely not recognize or support the Confederate States of America.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
This legislation was meant to protect the citizenship and protection of African Americans while enacting the Thirteenth Amendment.
What is the 1866 Civil Rights Act?
Republicans promised to remove federal troops from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana if Southern Democrats would stop blocking the certification of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in this back-room agreement.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
This president, known as "Young Hickory," sought to implement Jacksonian expansionism by instigating a war with Mexico; his 1844 campaign slogan was "54° 40' or fight!"
Who is James K. Polk?
This treaty ended the war and resulted in Mexico giving up territory between Texas and the Pacific Ocean.
The Supreme Court ruled in this 1857 case that both free and enslaved Black Americans could not be considered United States citizens per the original intentions of the Founders.
What is Dred Scott v. Sandford?
This Congressional proposal contained a series of constitutional amendments that would have guaranteed the future of slavery where it existed while extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.
What is the Crittenden Compromise?
This strategy, developed by Winfield Scott, was the Union strategy to blockade Southern ports and cut off essential supplies from reaching the Confederacy.
What is the Anaconda Plan?
This federal agency built hospitals and historically black universities and colleges during its existence from 1865 to 1872.
What is the Freedmen's Bureau?
This Southern white supremacist paramilitary group — less widely known than the KKK, but equally if not more destructive — was responsible for the 1873 Colfax Massacre.
What is the White League?
Although the border was not established at 54'40", this land was added to the USA after a boundary dispute with the British was settled in 1846.
What is Oregon territory?
This failed attempt to abolish slavery in all new territories acquired from Mexico was not added to the Compromise of 1850.
What was the Wilmot Proviso?
Drafted by a pro-southern convention and supported by President Buchanan, it led to increased sectional tensions before its rejection by Kansas voters in 1858.
What was the Lecompton Constitution?
This 1860 document proclaimed South Carolina's reasons for secession.
What is the Declaration of the Immediate Causes of Secession?
Lincoln violated many civil liberties when he believed it was for the general good of the country, including this right to not be held in prison without a fair trial.
What is habeas corpus?
This law divided the South into five military districts, required Southern states to guarantee voting rights for all men regardless of race, and required those states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union.
What is the 1867 Reconstruction Act?
The court case effectively ended Reconstruction when it overturned the 1870 Enforcement Act and acquitted participants in the Colfax Massacre.
What is United States v. Cruikshank?