Go West, Young Man
This popular 19th-century belief asserted that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its dominion and spread democracy across the entire North American continent.
What is Manifest Destiny?
This 1820 agreement established the 36°30’ line as the boundary for slavery within the Louisiana Purchase.
What is the Missouri Compromise?
This abolitionist and his followers murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie to "strike terror" into the hearts of proslavery people.
Who is John Brown?
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri made up this strategic group of slaveholding states that ultimately chose not to secede from the Union.
What are the Border States?
Rather than fighting for immediate total abolition, this political movement focused primarily on preventing the expansion of slavery into new western territories to keep land open for white laborers.
What is the Free Soil movement?
Signed in 1848, this treaty officially ended the Mexican-American War, forced Mexico to cede vast western territories to the U.S., and recognized the Rio Grande as the Texas border.
What is the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
This "electrifying" 1852 novel humanized the enslaved and highlighted the moral guilt of the slave system to a massive Northern and British audience.
What is Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Lincoln said that a house divided could not do this.
What is stand?
The first state to Secede from the Union in 1860.
What is South Carolina?
This political doctrine, heavily championed by Senator Stephen A. Douglas, argued that the residents of a territory should vote to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
What is popular sovereignty?
These individuals, numbering in the tens of thousands, rushed to California via ship and wagon to seek fortunes in the goldfields
Who are the Forty-Niners?
This highly controversial 1846 legislative proposal attempted—but failed—to ban slavery in any territory acquired from the Mexican-American War.
What is the Wilmot Proviso?
This Senator from Massachusetts was brutally beaten with a cane on the floor of Congress by Representative Preston Brooks after delivering an incendiary anti-slavery speech.
Who is Charles Sumner?
Missouri took this side when the Civil War began.
What is the Union?
Members of this 1850s party were dedicated to nativism and mobilizing against Irish and German Catholic immigrants.
What is the American Party/ Know-Nothing Party?
This 1850 legislation implemented a prohibitive fee specifically designed to drive Latino and Asian miners out of the goldfields.
What is the Foreign Miner’s Tax?
This 1854 act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise's 36°30' line and led to the collapse of the Whig Party.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The Southern Democrats ran this presidential candidate after walking out of the Democratic Party Convention in 1860.
Who is John Breckinridge?
The man who said that the government of the Confederacy rested on the "great truth" of racial equality ended up with this job in the Confederate government.
What is Vice President?
The 1848 Democratic candidate for president who supported so-called "squatter sovereignty."
Who is Senator Lewis Cass?
This 1853 land deal with Mexico was purchased to facilitate a transcontinental rail line connecting New Orleans to Los Angeles.
What is the Gadsden Purchase?
As part of the Compromise of 1850, the slave trade was abolished in this specific location, though slavery itself remained legal there.
What is the District of Columbia?
Radical abolitionist John Brown led a fateful 1859 raid on a federal armory in this town and state, hoping to spark an armed slave rebellion across the South.
What is Harpers Ferry, Virginia?
According to Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address, this is older than the Constitution.
What is the Union?
The Republican Party formed in 1854, bringing together a coalition from these three groups.
Who are ex-Whigs, Free Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats?