Slavery & Sectional Conflict
1820 compromise that temporarily balanced free and slave states.
Missouri Compromise
1850 law requiring return of escaped enslaved people even in free states.
Fugitive Slave Act
1863 executive order freeing enslaved people in rebelling states.
Emancipation Proclamation
Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States.
13th Amendment
System of labor in the South where freedpeople worked land for a share of crops.
Sharecropping
Doctrine allowing territories to decide slavery by popular vote.
Popular sovereignty
1854 law that repealed Missouri Compromise restrictions.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Battle considered the turning point of the Civil War.
Gettysburg
Amendment granting citizenship and equal protection under law.
14th Amendment
Southern state laws restricting African American freedom after Reconstruction.
Black Codes
Supreme Court case ruling that African Americans could not be citizens.
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Violent conflict in Kansas over slavery expansion.
Bleeding Kansas
Strategy of Union military plan to block Southern trade and split Confederacy.
Anaconda Plan
Amendment granting voting rights regardless of race.
15th Amendment
Secret society using terror to suppress Black political participation.
Ku Klux Klan
Expansion of slavery into western territories created this recurring national conflict.
Balance of power between free and slave states
John Brown’s raid increased sectional tensions by doing this.
Intensifying Southern fear of abolitionist violence
Lincoln suspended this constitutional protection during the war.
Habeas corpus
Reconstruction governments expanded federal power primarily through this.
Military occupation and enforcement
Supreme Court decisions in the 1870s weakened Reconstruction by doing this.
Narrowing federal enforcement of civil rights
Explain how westward expansion intensified sectional conflict over slavery.
Each new territory forced debate over free vs. slave state balance
Explain why compromise failed to resolve sectional tensions in the 1850s.
Each compromise only temporarily postponed conflict
Explain how the Civil War expanded federal power.
Increased military authority and wartime government control
Explain the significance of the Reconstruction Amendments in constitutional history.
Expanded federal protection of civil rights
Explain why Reconstruction ultimately ended.
Northern political fatigue and economic concerns