Key People
This formerly enslaved orator became one of the most famous abolitionists and civil rights leaders of the 19th century.
Who is Frederick Douglass?
This 1854 law allowed settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to decide the slavery question through popular sovereignty.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act?
The period after the Civil War when the U.S. government attempted to rebuild the South and expand rights.
What is Reconstruction?
These laws enforced racial segregation in the South after Reconstruction.
What are Jim Crow laws?
Lincoln stated that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” in this 1858 speech.
What is the House Divided speech?
This abolitionist wrote On the Constitution and the Union in 1832, condemning slavery as incompatible with moral law.
Who is William Lloyd Garrison?
The Supreme Court ruled that African Americans were not citizens in this 1857 case.
What is Dred Scott v. Sanford?
This amendment granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S.
What is the Fourteenth Amendment?
A tax placed on voting, used to suppress African American political participation.
What is a poll tax?
Lincoln delivered this speech in 1863, redefining the Civil War as a fight for equality and democracy.
What is the Gettysburg Address?
This speech by a U.S. Senator and civil rights leader criticized Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist stance in 1903.
What is “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” by W.E.B. DuBois?
Mississippi issued this 1861 document explaining why it chose to leave the Union, citing slavery as its central cause.
What is the Declaration of Immediate Causes for Secession?
This amendment granted voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
What is the Fifteenth Amendment?
This 1850 law required citizens to help capture enslaved people who escaped.
What is the Fugitive Slave Act?
This patriotic oath, first created in 1892, is recited in American schools today.
What is the Pledge of Allegiance?
This 1895 speech encouraged African Americans to pursue vocational training and economic self-reliance.
What is the Atlanta Exposition Address (Booker T. Washington)?
Lincoln’s 1863 order that freed enslaved people in rebelling states.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
Douglass urged Congress to guarantee equal voting rights in this 1867 address.
What is “Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage”?
This 1887 law attempted to break up tribal lands by turning communal property into individual allotments.
What is the Dawes Act?
Garrison condemned the Constitution as supporting slavery in this fiery 1832 text.
What is On the Constitution and the Union?
Lincoln condemned slavery but admitted its constitutional protection in this 1837 protest document.
What is the “Protest in Illinois Legislature on Slavery”?
Douglass argued that the Constitution could be interpreted as antislavery in this 1860 speech.
What is “Is the Constitution of the United States Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?”
This political deal ended Reconstruction and removed federal troops from the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?
This political party of the late 1800s represented farmers and laborers frustrated by economic inequality.
What is the Populist Party?
In this document, Mississippi claimed its “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”
What is the Declaration of Immediate Causes for Secession?