This invention, created in 1793, significantly boosted the plantation economy and the expansion of slavery.
What is the Cotton Gin.
This 19th-century religious revival promoted moral reform and widened political divisions in the United States.
What is the Second Great Awakening?
This treaty ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and ceded large portions of land, including present-day California and New Mexico, to the United States.
What is the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo?
This 1854 law introduced popular sovereignty to decide the issue of slavery in new territories and repealed a landmark 1820 compromise.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
This abolitionist and former enslaved man wrote The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, exposing the brutality of slavery.
Who is Frederick Douglas?
The phrase "persons held to service" was used in this founding document to refer to enslaved people.
What is the Constitution?
This political movement in the 1820s expanded voting rights to landless white men while reinforcing white supremacy.
What is Jacksonian Democracy?
This state was admitted as a free state under the Compromise of 1850.
What is California?
This future president gained national attention after debating Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois Senate race.
Who is Abraham Lincoln?
This law, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, required Northerners to assist in the capture of escaped slaves.
What is the Fugitive Slave Act?
This 1803 event doubled the size of the United States and reignited debates over the expansion of slavery.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
The annexation of this state in 1845 heightened tensions between the North and South over slavery’s expansion.
What is Texas?
Published in 1852, this novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe galvanized anti-slavery sentiment in the North.
What is Uncle Tom's Cabin?
This compromise, which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ line, was declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision.
This new political party emerged in the 1850s, uniting antislavery advocates and opposing the expansion of slavery.
What is the Republican Party?
This landmark agreement in 1820 attempted to balance free and slave states by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
This planned 1822 uprising, led by a freed Black man, heightened Southern fears of slave revolts.
What is Denmark Vessey's Rebellion?
This principle, allowing settlers to decide on slavery, was central to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
This abolitionist led a failed 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, hoping to spark a slave uprising.
Who is John Brown?
This short-lived political party, also known as the American Party, gained traction in the 1850s with its anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic platform.
What is the Know-Nothing Party?
This section of the Constitution gave Southern states extra representation by counting enslaved individuals as three-fifths of a person.
What is Aricle I, Section II?
This 1846 proposal sought to ban slavery in territories acquired from Mexico but failed to pass the Senate.
What is the Wilmot Proviso?
This term describes the violent conflicts in Kansas between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces in the mid-1850s.
What is Bleeding Kansas?
After this Republican candidate won the presidency in 1860 without carrying a single Southern state, South Carolina seceded from the Union.
Who is Abraham Lincoln?
This violent abolitionist led the Pottawatomie Creek massacre in Kansas, killing five pro-slavery settlers in 1856.
Who is John Brown?