APUSH Unit 5 (Period 5) Review: 1844–1877

Topics

5.1 Contextualizing Period 5
Overspread · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.1, Contextualizing Period 5, sets the scene for the years from 1844 to 1877 by describing the nation as it stood in 1844. The country had 26 states, 13 free and 13 slave, and the Missouri Compromise line at 36°30′ had kept an uneasy peace over slavery since 1820. Canals and railroads tied regions together through the market revolution, and cotton grown by enslaved people made up more than half of exports. Whigs and Democrats avoided the slavery question, and in May 1844 the Democrats nominated James K. Polk, who wanted Texas and Oregon.
Summary and transcript
5.2 Manifest Destiny
Overspread · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.2, Manifest Destiny, is about the belief that the United States was meant to spread across North America, and about the annexations, treaties and war that carried its borders to the Pacific between 1845 and 1853. Texas joined in 1845 as a slave state, the Oregon Treaty of 1846 set the border with Britain at the 49th parallel, the Mexican Cession of 1848 added more than half a million square miles, and the Gadsden Purchase followed in 1853. Settlers, gold seekers and merchants moved west and across the Pacific, often at the expense of Native peoples and Mexicans already there.
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5.3 The Mexican–American War
The Spot · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.3, The Mexican–American War, covers the conflict of 1846 to 1848 that gave the United States California and the Southwest. After the United States annexed Texas in 1845, President Polk sent troops to the Rio Grande, the border Texas claimed, and Congress voted for war in May 1846 after a clash with Mexican soldiers. American forces took Mexico City in September 1847. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, Mexico gave up California and New Mexico for $15 million. The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in the new land, passed the House but never the Senate.
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5.4 The Compromise of 1850
A Higher Law · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.4, The Compromise of 1850, is about the five laws passed in September 1850 to settle slavery in the land taken from Mexico and hold the Union together. California entered as a free state, Texas gave up land claims for $10 million, Utah and New Mexico territories could decide on slavery for themselves, the slave trade (not slavery) ended in Washington, D.C., and a harsher Fugitive Slave Act took effect. Henry Clay designed the plan, and when his omnibus bill failed, Stephen Douglas passed it in pieces. The fugitive law denied accused people a jury, and the truce lasted four years.
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5.5 Sectional Conflict: Regional Differences
The Fifth of July · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.5, Sectional Conflict: Regional Differences, explains why the North and South drifted apart in the 1850s even though cotton and credit tied them together. The South's enslaved population grew from under 700,000 in 1790 to nearly four million in 1860, and planters defended slavery as a positive good. The North ran on wage labor, railroads and immigration, and 427,833 immigrants arrived in 1854, most settling there. Nativism produced the Know-Nothing Party, abolitionists grew more militant after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and Free Soilers fought to keep the West for free labor.
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5.6 Failure of Compromise
A House Divided · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.6, Failure of Compromise, covers the years from 1854 to 1858 when each attempt to settle slavery in the West made sectional conflict worse. Stephen Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 voided the Missouri Compromise line and left slavery to settlers. The Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party formed. Bleeding Kansas brought fighting such as the 1856 sack of Lawrence, and violence reached the Senate when Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner. In 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford held that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. The Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858 then made Abraham Lincoln a national figure.
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5.7 Election of 1860 and Secession
The Cornerstone · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.7, Election of 1860 and Secession, covers how Abraham Lincoln's victory led seven Southern states to leave the Union before he took office. The Democratic Party split in 1860 into Northern and Southern tickets, so four candidates ran. Lincoln won nearly every free state and no slave state, with about 40 percent of the popular vote. South Carolina voted to secede on December 20, 1860, and six more states followed by February 1. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Lincoln called for 75,000 militia, four more states seceded.
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5.8 Military Conflict in the Civil War
The Terrible Arithmetic · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.8, Military Conflict in the Civil War, explains how the Union used its advantages in people and industry to win a four-year war. The North had about 22 million people to the Confederacy's 9 million, plus most of the factories and railroads, but it needed generals willing to use those numbers. The Anaconda Plan called for a blockade and control of the Mississippi. Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863, Lee failed at Gettysburg, Grant pinned Lee at Petersburg, Sherman took Atlanta and marched to Savannah, and Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.
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5.9 Government Policies During the Civil War
Forever Free · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.9, Government Policies During the Civil War, covers how the federal government expanded its powers and turned a war to save the Union into a war that ended slavery. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, Republicans in Congress passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and a draft, and Congress ended slavery in Washington, D.C. in April 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 declared enslaved people in areas in rebellion free as a war measure and opened the army to Black men. The Thirteenth Amendment passed Congress on January 31, 1865.
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5.10 Reconstruction
The First Vote · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.10, Reconstruction, covers the years from 1865 to 1870 when the country decided what freedom for four million formerly enslaved people would mean. President Andrew Johnson let Southern states return quickly, and their legislatures passed Black Codes. Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which passed over his veto, the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship and guaranteed equal protection, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which put ten states under military rule. The Senate fell one vote short of removing Johnson in 1868, and the Fifteenth Amendment barred denying the vote because of race.
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5.11 Failure of Reconstruction
A Brief Moment in the Sun · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.11, Failure of Reconstruction, explains how the rights written into the Constitution between 1865 and 1870 stopped working by 1877. President Johnson's pardons returned most land that Sherman's Field Orders No. 15 had set aside for freedpeople, and sharecropping and crop liens tied families to debt. The Ku Klux Klan used terror until the Enforcement Acts broke it by 1872, but the Supreme Court limited federal protection in the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank. Northern voters tired of the issue, and in 1877 President Hayes ended federal military protection of the last Republican governments in the South.
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5.12 Comparison in Period 5
Freedom on the Dome · Coming soon
AP US History Topic 5.12, Comparison in Period 5, asks students to compare the United States of 1844 with the nation of 1877 and judge what the Civil War changed. The war settled two questions: no state could leave the Union, and no person could be property. It left two open: how far federal power should reach and who counted as a full citizen. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments stayed in the Constitution after federal troops stopped guarding the South's last Republican governments in April 1877, and a new generation used them to win civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Key terms

Telegraph: Topic 5.1
A machine that sends messages as pulses of electricity down a wire. Morse's 1844 line between Washington and Baltimore proved it worked, and by 1852 more than 23,000 miles of wire ran across the country. News, prices and politics could now move faster than any person or train.
Nominating convention: Topic 5.1
A meeting of party delegates that picks the party's candidates. The parties of the 1830s and 1840s replaced the old caucus of congressmen with conventions, so the choice looked like it came from the party's members.
Dark horse: Topic 5.1
A candidate few people expected to win, who takes the nomination out of nowhere and sometimes the election too. James K. Polk in 1844 is the classic example.
36°30′: Topic 5.1
The Missouri Compromise line (1820). Slavery was banned north of it in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, except in Missouri, and allowed south of it.
Market revolution: Topic 5.1
The early-1800s shift from making goods for home and local use to making them for sale in distant markets, carried by canals, steamboats, railroads and factories.
Second Party System: Topic 5.1
The rivalry between the Democrats and the Whigs, from the 1830s to the 1850s. Each party had Northern and Southern wings, so both worked to keep slavery out of national politics.
Gag rule: Topic 5.1
A House rule (1836–1844) that tabled antislavery petitions without reading or debating them. Adams moved to repeal it, and the House did so on December 3, 1844, 108 to 80.
Annexation: Topic 5.2
Formally adding a territory to a country. Texans asked in 1836; Congress finally agreed in 1845.
Security interests: Topic 5.2
A nation's worry that a rival power next door could threaten it. Americans feared Britain would gain influence in Texas, Oregon or California.
Liberty Party: Topic 5.2
A small antislavery party that ran James G. Birney in 1844. Its votes in New York may have cost Clay the state and the election.
Joint resolution: Topic 5.2
A measure passed by a simple majority of both houses of Congress. Unlike a treaty, it needs no two-thirds vote in the Senate.
Manifest Destiny: Topic 5.2
The 1840s belief that God and history meant the United States to spread across North America, because its institutions were better. Supporters used it to justify taking Texas, Oregon and California. Critics saw ambition and slavery.
Whig Party: Topic 5.2
A party formed in the 1830s against Andrew Jackson. Whigs backed roads, canals and banks, and many opposed adding territory that might spread slavery or start a war.
Joint occupation: Topic 5.2
The 1818 agreement, renewed later, that let Americans and Britons settle and trade in Oregon Country while neither nation gave up its claim.
Oregon Treaty (1846): Topic 5.2
Signed in June 1846. Britain and the United States split Oregon Country at the 49th parallel: the United States got the land south of it, and Britain kept Vancouver Island.
Overland trails: Topic 5.2
The wagon roads west across the plains to Oregon, California and Utah. Most emigrants left in spring from towns on the Missouri River, to reach the mountains before winter snow.
Push and pull factors: Topic 5.2
Reasons people leave one place (push) and reasons a new place attracts them (pull). In the 1840s, Americans were pulled west by cotton land, farms, religious refuge and gold.
Mexican Cession: Topic 5.2
The land Mexico gave up to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848. It included California, Nevada and Utah, and much of Arizona and New Mexico.
Gadsden Purchase (1853): Topic 5.2
A strip of desert the United States bought from Mexico for $10 million in 1853, in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico. It offered the best route for a railroad across the South to the Pacific.
Gold Rush: Topic 5.2
The mass migration to California that began when gold was found at Coloma in January 1848. It drew people from across the United States and the Pacific world, and it sped California's path to statehood in 1850.
Forty-niners: Topic 5.2
The roughly 80,000 people who came to California in 1849 to look for gold, by sea and overland, from across the United States and the world. Most were men, and most did not strike it rich.
Gam Saan (Gold Mountain): Topic 5.2
The Cantonese name Chinese migrants gave California. Most who came were men from Guangdong province, hoping to earn money in the gold fields and, often, to return home.
Californios: Topic 5.2
Spanish-speaking families whose roots in California go back to Spain and Mexico. They ran large cattle ranchos, and the Gold Rush made them a minority in their own homeland.
Free state: Topic 5.2
A state that did not allow slavery. In 1850 the Senate stood at 15 free and 15 slave states. California's admission made it 16 free.
Treaty of Wangxia (1844): Topic 5.2
The first U.S. treaty with China, signed after Britain's victory in the Opium War (1839–42). It opened five ports to American trade and put Americans in China under their own country's courts.
Extraterritoriality: Topic 5.2
Foreigners tried under their own country's laws, not the host country's. Under Wangxia, Americans accused of crimes in China answered to U.S. consuls, not Chinese courts.
Sakoku: Topic 5.2
Japan's “closed country” policy of the 1600s to 1850s. Almost no foreign contact, apart from limited trade with the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki.
Treaty of Kanagawa (1854): Topic 5.2
The first U.S. treaty with Japan. It opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships for coal and supplies, and promised help for shipwrecked sailors.
Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854): Topic 5.2
Law creating the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Settlers there could decide on slavery for themselves, which wiped out the Missouri Compromise's ban north of 36°30′.
Homestead Act (1862): Topic 5.2
Law that gave settlers 160 acres of western public land if they lived on it and farmed it for five years. Signed May 20, 1862.
Pacific Railway Act (1862): Topic 5.2
Law that backed a railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific with federal loans and land grants. The Union Pacific built west and the Central Pacific built east. Signed July 1, 1862.
Battle of Chapultepec (Sept. 13, 1847): Topic 5.3
U.S. troops under Gen. Winfield Scott stormed the hilltop castle and military academy that guarded the western approach to Mexico City. The city fell the next day.
Training ground for the Civil War: Topic 5.3
Many of the Civil War's top commanders, Union and Confederate, learned to lead as junior officers in Mexico. Grant, Lee, Jackson, Longstreet and Pickett all served in this war.
Mexican–American War (1846–1848): Topic 5.3
War between the United States and Mexico that began over the Texas border. In the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded California and the rest of the Mexican Cession and accepted the Rio Grande as the Texas border.
Spot Resolutions (1847): Topic 5.3
Eight questions Rep. Abraham Lincoln put to President Polk on December 22, 1847, asking him to name the exact spot where American blood was shed and prove it was American soil. Polk never answered and the House never acted on them. They became a symbol of Whig doubt that Mexico started the war.
Nueces Strip: Topic 5.3
The land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Under Spain and Mexico it belonged to Tamaulipas and Coahuila, but Texas claimed it after 1836. The dispute over who owned it led directly to the Mexican–American War.
Republic of Texas (1836–1845): Topic 5.3
Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836 and governed itself as a separate country for nine years. It claimed the Rio Grande as its southern border. Mexico refused to recognize its independence.
Annexation of Texas (1845): Topic 5.3
Congress added Texas to the United States by joint resolution, signed by President Tyler on March 1, 1845. Texas became the 28th state that December. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations.
Army of Occupation: Topic 5.3
The name for Gen. Zachary Taylor's roughly 3,000 U.S. soldiers in Texas. In January 1846 Polk ordered them to the Rio Grande, onto land that both the United States and Mexico claimed.
Fort Texas (1846): Topic 5.3
The earthwork Taylor's army built on the north bank of the Rio Grande, facing Matamoros. Mexican guns opened fire on it on May 3, 1846. It was later renamed Fort Brown for its commander, Maj. Jacob Brown, who died of wounds from the shelling.
Thornton Affair (April 25, 1846): Topic 5.3
A Mexican cavalry force attacked a U.S. dragoon patrol under Capt. Seth Thornton north of the Rio Grande, near Rancho de Carricitos. At least eleven Americans were killed. Polk called it the shedding of "American blood upon the American soil."
Civil disobedience: Topic 5.3
Openly refusing to obey a law you think unjust, and accepting the punishment. Thoreau's 1849 essay, first titled 'Resistance to Civil Government,' made the idea famous.
Abolitionist: Topic 5.3
Someone who worked to end slavery. Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, began The North Star in Rochester in December 1847.
Whigs: Topic 5.3
Party formed against Andrew Jackson. Many Northern Whigs opposed the war, suspecting it would spread slavery, but voted money for the troops.
Bear Flag Revolt (1846): Topic 5.3
On June 14, 1846, American settlers in Sonoma, backed by Capt. John C. Frémont's survey party, seized the town from Mexican California and proclaimed a California Republic. It lasted about 25 days, until U.S. forces raised the American flag.
Taos Revolt (1847): Topic 5.3
On January 19, 1847, New Mexicans and Taos Pueblo men killed Charles Bent, the U.S.-appointed governor, and other officials. U.S. troops crushed the uprising in early February. It shows that conquest met armed resistance.
Martial law (General Orders No. 20): Topic 5.3
Gen. Scott's order of Feb. 19, 1847, put Americans and Mexicans in occupied Mexico under military law. Murder, rape and robbery were tried before military commissions, not local courts.
Mexico City campaign (1847): Topic 5.3
Gen. Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz in March 1847 and marched inland to take the Mexican capital. It was Polk's Plan E.
Saint Patrick's Battalion (San Patricios): Topic 5.3
A unit of mostly Irish and other immigrant soldiers who deserted the U.S. Army and fought for Mexico in 1846-47, led by John Riley. Those captured were tried as deserters; fifty were hanged.
Niños Héroes: Topic 5.3
Six cadets of Mexico's military college who died in the fight for Chapultepec on September 13, 1847. Mexico honors them every year on that date.
West Point (U.S. Military Academy): Topic 5.3
The Army's officer school on the Hudson River, founded in 1802. Its graduates led the regular Army in Mexico and, later, both armies in the Civil War.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848): Topic 5.3
The treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. Signed February 2, 1848; the U.S. Senate approved it March 10. Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as Texas's border and gave up California, New Mexico and the land between for 15 million dollars. It promised Mexicans in those lands citizenship and protection of their property.
"All of Mexico" movement: Topic 5.3
A push in 1847 and 1848, mostly by expansionist Democrats, to annex the whole country of Mexico. It failed. Opponents included Whigs and Southerners like John C. Calhoun, who argued from race that Mexicans should not become fellow citizens.
Article XI (Indian raids): Topic 5.3
The United States promised to stop Comanche and Apache raids into Mexico. It never managed to, and the 1853 Gadsden treaty cancelled the promise.
California Land Act (1851): Topic 5.3
A federal law that made holders of Spanish and Mexican land grants file claims with a Board of Land Commissioners and prove their titles. Many claims were confirmed in the end, but hearings averaged 17 years, and owners lost land to legal fees and squatters.
Foreign Miners' Tax (1850): Topic 5.3
A California law charging every miner who was not a U.S. citizen $20 a month. It fell hardest on Mexican and Chilean miners, and thousands left the gold fields. The legislature repealed it in 1851.
Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850): Topic 5.3
A California law that, despite its title, let settlers take Native children as unpaid workers and let courts sell the labor of Native adults arrested for vagrancy. It also kept courts from convicting a white man on Native testimony.
Wilmot Proviso (1846): Topic 5.3
Rep. David Wilmot's amendment to ban slavery in any territory won from Mexico. The House passed it more than once and the Senate never did. It opened the fight over slavery's spread into the West.
Free soil: Topic 5.3
The demand that slavery be barred from the western territories. Many free-soilers wanted this to protect white farmers and workers, not to end slavery where it already existed. Free soil was not abolition.
36°30′ line (Missouri Compromise, 1820): Topic 5.3
The line that barred slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase. It stopped at the old Mexican border and said nothing about land the United States had yet to take. After 1848 the Cession had no rule at all.
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Topic 5.4
Part of the Compromise of 1850, signed September 18, 1850. It let slaveholders claim people who had escaped slavery, even in free states. Federal commissioners decided each case with no jury, and the accused could not testify.
Compromise of 1850: Topic 5.4
Five laws Congress passed in September 1850 to settle the fight over slavery in the land won from Mexico. California entered as a free state, Utah and New Mexico could decide on slavery later, the Fugitive Slave Act got tougher, and the slave trade (not slavery) ended in Washington, D.C.
Higher law: Topic 5.4
The idea that a moral or divine law outranks a government's written laws. William Seward used the phrase in the Senate in March 1850, about slavery in the western territories. Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act soon used it about conscience.
Wilmot Proviso: Topic 5.4
1846 amendment to ban slavery in any land taken from Mexico. The House passed it more than once. The Senate never did.
Popular sovereignty: Topic 5.4
The idea that settlers in a territory, not Congress, decide whether to allow slavery there. Lewis Cass made it famous in 1847.
Free-Soil Party: Topic 5.4
1848 party formed by antislavery 'Conscience Whigs,' antislavery Democrats known as 'Barnburners,' and others. It fought slavery's spread into new land, not slavery where it already existed.
Contextualization: Topic 5.4
AP skill: explain how the wider circumstances around an event shaped it. Here, the Gold Rush is why California could vote before Congress could argue.
Sectionalism: Topic 5.4
Putting your region's interests ahead of the nation's. By 1849, North and South voted as blocs on slavery, more than as parties.
Great Triumvirate: Topic 5.4
Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the three senators who dominated national politics for a generation. Clay stood for compromise, Calhoun for the South, Webster for the Union. The debate of 1850 was their last together.
Omnibus bill: Topic 5.4
One bill that bundles many separate measures. Clay's committee combined California, the territories and Texas's boundary, so senators had to take all of it or none, and an attack on any one part could sink the rest.
Nashville Convention: Topic 5.4
A June 1850 meeting of delegates from nine slave states to plan Southern resistance if slavery were barred from the West. Its platform asked to extend the 36°30′ line to the Pacific. Moderates kept it from calling for secession.
Armistice: Topic 5.4
A pause in a war, not a peace treaty. Potter used the word because the Compromise stopped a fight without settling what caused it.
Federal commissioner: Topic 5.4
An official appointed by the federal courts to hear fugitive slave cases. Under the Act of 1850 he decided alone, with no jury and no testimony from the accused, and his fee was higher if he returned the person.
Georgia Platform: Topic 5.4
Resolutions passed by a Georgia convention in December 1850. Georgia accepted the Compromise of 1850 on one condition: the North had to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. It helped Southern Unionists hold off secession talk.
Vigilance committee: Topic 5.4
A group formed in Boston in 1850 by Black and white residents to warn fugitives of slave catchers and help them get away.
Habeas corpus: Topic 5.4
A court order telling officials to bring a prisoner before a judge and show a legal reason for holding him. Sims's lawyers asked Massachusetts's highest court for it. Chief Justice Shaw refused, ruling that the Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional.
The five laws of 1850: Topic 5.4
California entered as a free state. Utah and New Mexico became territories under popular sovereignty. Texas gave up land claims for $10 million. Washington, D.C. ended its slave trade, but not slavery. And a much tougher Fugitive Slave Act passed.
Gradual emancipation: Topic 5.5
Freeing enslaved people in stages, not all at once. New York's 1799 law freed children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 once they reached 25 (girls) or 28 (boys). A 1817 law freed everyone else still enslaved in the state on July 4, 1827.
Cotton Kingdom: Topic 5.5
The Southern states that grew most of the world's cotton with enslaved labor. In 1860 raw cotton was more than half of all U.S. exports by value.
Commission merchant: Topic 5.5
A middleman who sold a planter's cotton for a fee and often lent him money against the crop. Many worked out of New York.
Secession: Topic 5.5
A state's withdrawal from the Union. South Carolina left on December 20, 1860; six more Southern states followed by February 1861.
Remittance: Topic 5.5
Money an immigrant sent home to family. McCarthy's $20 was 'four Pounds' in Ireland, real help for a family in Cork.
Tammany Hall: Topic 5.5
New York City's Democratic Party organization. Irish immigrants traded votes for jobs and help, and by the 1850s they had real power inside it.
Forty-Eighters: Topic 5.5
German liberals and radicals who fled after the failed revolutions of 1848–49. Many became editors and teachers, and later antislavery Republicans.
Kleindeutschland: Topic 5.5
'Little Germany,' New York's German neighborhood on the Lower East Side, one of the first big foreign-language neighborhoods in an American city.
Nativism: Topic 5.5
Hostility to immigrants, and the effort to limit their political power and cultural influence. In the 1840s and 1850s it was aimed above all at Irish and German Catholics.
Know-Nothing (American) Party: Topic 5.5
A nativist party of the mid-1850s, grown from a secret order. It wanted a 21-year wait for citizenship and only native-born men in office. It won big in 1854–55, then split over slavery.
Personal liberty laws: Topic 5.5
State laws meant to shield accused fugitives and free Black residents from seizure under the Fugitive Slave Act, for example by guaranteeing jury trials or barring state officials from helping slave catchers.
Garrisonians: Topic 5.5
Followers of William Lloyd Garrison. They called the Constitution a proslavery bargain, refused to vote or hold office under it, and trusted moral persuasion over politics.
Abolitionists: Topic 5.5
Americans who demanded an end to slavery, many of them immediately. A small minority even in the North, they made themselves heard with newspapers, petitions and lecture tours.
Fugitive Slave Act (1850): Topic 5.5
A federal law requiring even free states to help return people who had escaped slavery. Accused people got no jury trial, and anyone who helped them faced fines and jail.
Underground Railroad: Topic 5.5
A loose network of free Black communities, people who had escaped slavery, and white allies who hid and guided freedom seekers north. Most had already escaped on their own.
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): Topic 5.5
Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel, first printed weekly in the National Era and published as a book on March 20, 1852. It turned the moral case against slavery into a story millions of Northerners read, and it hardened Southern anger at abolitionists.
Anti-Tom literature: Topic 5.5
Roughly two dozen novels of the 1850s written to answer Stowe. They showed slavery as kindly and orderly, enslaved people as content, and abolitionists as meddlers or liars. Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1852) was among the best sellers.
HIPP (sourcing): Topic 5.5
Four questions to ask of any source: Historical situation, Intended audience, Purpose, Point of view. Together they explain why a source says what it says, and how far to trust it.
King Cotton: Topic 5.5
The Southern belief that the world's need for cotton made the South too important to be challenged, economically or militarily.
Mudsill theory: Topic 5.5
Hammond's 1858 claim that every society rests on a laboring class at the bottom, like the sill a house sits on. In the South it was enslaved Black people; in the North, he said, wage workers.
Racial doctrines: Topic 5.5
Pseudo-scientific claims that races were separate and unequal, used to defend slavery: Cartwright's 'drapetomania' (1851), Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854).
Positive good: Topic 5.5
The argument, made famous by John C. Calhoun in 1837, that slavery wasn't a necessary evil but a benefit to enslaved people and to society.
States' rights: Topic 5.5
The claim that states, not the federal government, held final power over matters such as slavery. Southern leaders used it to argue that Congress couldn't touch slavery in the states, or keep it out of the territories.
Free labor: Topic 5.5
The Northern belief that wage work was a stage, not a permanent condition: a worker could save, buy land or tools, and become independent. Slavery, free-labor men said, degraded all work and closed that road.
Free-soil movement: Topic 5.5
Northerners who opposed slavery's expansion into the western territories, mostly to protect free white labor. Many didn't object to slavery where it already existed, and many supported laws keeping Black people out.
Cotton Whigs: Topic 5.5
Wealthy Massachusetts Whigs, mostly textile-mill owners and merchants, whose business depended on Southern cotton. Their critics, the Conscience Whigs, said they put profit ahead of opposing slavery's spread.
Missouri Compromise (1820): Topic 5.5
Congress's 1820 deal: Missouri joined as a slave state, Maine as a free one, and slavery was banned in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′.
Organized territory: Topic 5.6
Land Congress has given a governor, a legislature and courts. It's the step before statehood.
Missouri Compromise line (36°30′): Topic 5.6
Congress's 1820 line: no slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of it, except Missouri.
New England Emigrant Aid Company: Topic 5.6
Formed in Massachusetts to help antislavery settlers move to Kansas. It founded Lawrence, but most Kansas settlers came without its help.
Border ruffians: Topic 5.6
Antislavery settlers' name for the proslavery Missourians who crossed into Kansas to vote in its elections and to fight for slavery.
Bogus legislature: Topic 5.6
The free-staters' name for the proslavery territorial legislature elected in March 1855, which met at Shawnee Mission and wrote Kansas's first laws.
Topeka government: Topic 5.6
The free-staters' rival government: a constitution written at Topeka in 1855 and a governor and legislature chosen under it. Congress never recognized it.
Beecher's Bibles: Topic 5.6
The name people gave the rifles shipped to free-state settlers in Kansas, after a newspaper reported a remark by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher.
Know-Nothing Party: Topic 5.6
The American Party, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party of the 1850s. It drew voters from the collapsing Whigs, then split over slavery.
Republican Party (1854): Topic 5.6
A party founded in 1854 by Northerners opposed to the spread of slavery into the territories. It aimed to stop slavery's growth, not to end it where it already existed.
Sectional party: Topic 5.6
A party whose voters come from one region. The Republicans were the first major one.
Sack of Lawrence: Topic 5.6
May 21, 1856: a proslavery posse burned the Free State Hotel in Lawrence and wrecked its presses. Northern papers said it proved proslavery men would use force to win Kansas.
Sumner–Brooks incident: Topic 5.6
May 22, 1856: Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. Northerners saw proof of Southern violence; many Southerners praised Brooks.
Pottawatomie Creek: Topic 5.6
Where John Brown’s band killed five proslavery settlers on the night of May 24, 1856, three days after the sack of Lawrence.
Bleeding Kansas: Topic 5.6
The name Northern papers gave to the violence in Kansas Territory, 1854–1861, over whether Kansas would be slave or free.
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): Topic 5.6
Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens, that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
Fifth Amendment: Topic 5.6
Says no one may be deprived of 'life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' The Court treated enslaved people as property under it.
Republican platform, 1856: Topic 5.6
The new party's 1856 program: Congress must bar slavery from the territories. Dred Scott ruled that power unconstitutional.
Lecompton Constitution: Topic 5.6
A proslavery constitution written at Lecompton in 1857. Voters could not reject it outright, and even its 'no slavery' version protected slavery where it already existed. President Buchanan backed it.
English bill: Topic 5.6
Congress's 1858 deal for Kansas. Accept Lecompton and become a state at once, or wait until Kansas had about 93,000 people. Kansans chose to wait.
House Divided speech: Topic 5.6
Lincoln's June 16, 1858 speech accepting the Illinois Republicans' nomination for the Senate. He said the country could not stay half slave and half free, and that it would become all one thing or all the other.
Slave Power: Topic 5.6
The Northern charge that slaveholders and their allies controlled the federal government and were working to spread slavery. Lincoln's speech accused four leaders of building toward it.
Lincoln–Douglas debates: Topic 5.6
Seven debates in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, from Ottawa on August 21 to Alton on October 15. Reporters took them down and newspapers across the country printed them.
Freeport Doctrine: Topic 5.6
Douglas's answer at Freeport, 1858: settlers could keep slavery out of a territory, whatever the Dred Scott decision said, by refusing to pass the local laws that protect it. It helped him win Illinois and cost him the South.
Election of senators: Topic 5.6
Until the 17th Amendment (1913), state legislatures chose U.S. senators, not voters. That is how a party could win more votes statewide and still lose the Senate seat.
Wyandotte Constitution: Topic 5.6
Kansas's fourth and last constitution, written in 1859. It banned slavery, and Kansas entered the Union under it on January 29, 1861.
John Brown: Topic 5.7
John Brown (1800–1859) · White abolitionist who believed only force could end slavery. He led the 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, hoping to spark a slave uprising, and Virginia hanged him for treason. Many white Southerners took the raid as proof the North wanted slave revolts.
Election of 1860: Topic 5.7
Election of 1860 · A four-way race for president on November 6, 1860. Republican Abraham Lincoln won with about 40 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes from any slave state. South Carolina voted to leave the Union six weeks later.
Harpers Ferry raid (1859): Topic 5.7
John Brown’s attempt to seize a federal armory and start an uprising of enslaved people in Virginia. It failed within two days and convinced many white Southerners that Northerners wanted slave revolts.
John Brown (1800–1859): Topic 5.7
White abolitionist who believed only violence would end slavery. Convicted of treason against Virginia, murder and conspiring with slaves to rebel, he was hanged on December 2, 1859.
Martyr: Topic 5.7
Someone honored for dying for a cause. Many Northern abolitionists called Brown one. Republican leaders called his raid a crime and denied any link to it.
Insurrection: Topic 5.7
An armed revolt, here by enslaved people against slaveholders. White Southerners had dreaded one since Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in 1831. After Harpers Ferry, many feared a Republican president would tolerate more John Browns.
Federal slave code: Topic 5.7
The Southern demand that Congress protect slavery in every territory. It built on Dred Scott (1857) and rejected Douglas's popular sovereignty.
Constitutional Union Party (1860): Topic 5.7
Former Whigs and Know-Nothings who ran John Bell of Tennessee on one idea: save the Union by not arguing about slavery.
What free soil did not mean: Topic 5.7
Most Republicans wanted slavery out of the West, not equal rights for Black Americans. Many free-soil voters wanted the territories kept for white farmers.
Fire-eaters: Topic 5.7
Southern politicians who wanted secession and said so.
Electoral College: Topic 5.7
The electors each state chooses to pick the president. A state gets one for every House seat plus two for its senators, and a candidate needs a majority of all electoral votes, not of the popular vote.
Plurality: Topic 5.7
More votes than any other candidate, but under half of all votes cast. Lincoln won a plurality of the popular vote, and a majority of the electoral vote.
Fusion ticket: Topic 5.7
A joint slate of electors backed by more than one party against a common rival. In 1860, anti-Lincoln forces really did fuse in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Lame duck: Topic 5.7
An official serving out a term after a successor has been elected.
Crittenden Compromise: Topic 5.7
December 1860: proposed amendments to restore the 36°30′ line to the Pacific, protect slavery south of it, and bar any later amendment from changing that. Republicans rejected it.
Confederate States of America: Topic 5.7
The government the seceded states of the Deep South formed at Montgomery in February 1861. It began with seven states.
Confederate Constitution: Topic 5.7
Adopted March 11, 1861. It copied much of the U.S. Constitution, banned protective tariffs and named slavery for protection. It banned only the foreign slave trade; trade among slave states stayed legal.
Cornerstone Speech: Topic 5.7
Stephens's March 21, 1861 speech in Savannah. He said the Confederacy rested on the claim that Black people are not equal to white people and that slavery is their natural condition.
Contextualization (skill 4.B): Topic 5.7
Placing a development in its broader setting. Secession: fear after Harpers Ferry, the free states' electoral majority, and the density and value of slavery.
First Inaugural Address (1861): Topic 5.7
Lincoln's speech of March 4, 1861. He promised not to touch slavery where it already existed, said he would hold federal property, and told the South that civil war would be its choice, not his.
Corwin Amendment (1861): Topic 5.7
An amendment Congress proposed in its last days before Lincoln took office (House 133–65, Senate 24–12). It would have barred Congress from ever abolishing or interfering with slavery in any state. The states never ratified it.
Perpetual Union: Topic 5.7
Lincoln's argument that the Union was older than the Constitution and could not be dissolved by one state's choice. If he was right, secession was not a right. It was rebellion.
Fort Sumter (1861): Topic 5.7
The federal fort in Charleston Harbor that Confederate batteries bombarded on April 12–13, 1861, starting the Civil War. After the attack most Northerners rallied to the Union, and four more slave states seceded.
Call for 75,000 militia: Topic 5.7
Call for 75,000 militia · Lincoln's April 15, 1861 proclamation asking the states for troops to retake the forts and enforce the laws. It forced the eight slave states still in the Union to choose between fighting other slave states and leaving.
Upper South: Topic 5.7
Upper South · Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. They refused to leave the Union through the winter of 1860–61, then seceded after Lincoln called for troops to use against other slave states.
Border states: Topic 5.7
Border states · Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri: slave states that stayed in the Union. Lincoln worked to keep them, because losing them would have made the war much harder to win.
Southern Unionists: Topic 5.7
Southern Unionists · white Southerners who opposed secession, often in regions with few enslaved people. Western Virginia was one: its counties stayed loyal and became West Virginia, a new state, on June 20, 1863.
Ninety-day volunteers: Topic 5.8
In April 1861 Lincoln called for 75,000 militia to serve just three months. Northerners expected a quick victory, and “On to Richmond!” was the cry.
Railroads at war: Topic 5.8
Both sides used railroads to move troops and supplies. At Bull Run, Confederate reinforcements from the Shenandoah Valley arrived by rail, the first time in an American war that a railroad rushed an army to a battle.
First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas): Topic 5.8
The first major battle of the Civil War, fought in Virginia on July 21, 1861. Confederates routed the Union army. It ended hopes of a short war and fed a Southern belief that the rebels were invincible. The North named battles for streams (Bull Run); the South, for nearby towns (Manassas).
war of attrition: Topic 5.8
A strategy of wearing the enemy down by lasting longer and losing less than they can afford. The Confederacy could win by outlasting the North's will to keep fighting.
Anaconda Plan: Topic 5.8
General Winfield Scott's 1861 strategy: blockade Southern ports and take the Mississippi River to cut the Confederacy in two and starve it. An army drive on Richmond was added later.
U.S. Military Telegraph: Topic 5.8
The Union army's own telegraph service. It strung 15,389 miles of wire, so Lincoln and his generals could direct armies hundreds of miles apart.
Monitor vs. Merrimack (Virginia): Topic 5.8
March 9, 1862: the first battle between ironclad warships. It ended in a draw, but the Union blockade held and wooden navies were obsolete.
Seven Days Battles: Topic 5.8
June 25–July 1, 1862. Lee's attacks drove McClellan away from Richmond. The Confederates lost more men, but they saved their capital.
Special Orders No. 191: Topic 5.8
Lee's orders for the Maryland invasion. They split his army into parts, and a Union copy, found on September 13, told McClellan where each part was.
Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg): Topic 5.8
September 17, 1862: the bloodiest single day of the war. It stopped Lee's invasion of Maryland and gave Lincoln the Union victory he wanted before announcing emancipation.
Battle of Shiloh (1862): Topic 5.8
A two-day battle in southwestern Tennessee, April 6–7, 1862. The Union won, but the casualties showed both sides that the war would be long and costly.
Ulysses S. Grant: Topic 5.8
Union general whose victories at Forts Henry and Donelson (1862) and Vicksburg (1863) earned Lincoln's trust. In 1864 Lincoln made him commander of all Union armies.
David Farragut and the fall of New Orleans (1862): Topic 5.8
Union Flag Officer David Farragut ran his wooden fleet past two forts on the Mississippi on April 24, 1862, and New Orleans fell within days. The Union held the river's mouth and the Confederacy's biggest port.
Siege of Vicksburg (May 18–July 4, 1863): Topic 5.8
After five victories in three weeks, Grant cut Vicksburg off from behind and besieged it for 47 days. Its surrender gave the Union control of the Mississippi and split the Confederacy in two.
Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1863): Topic 5.8
Lee's boldest victory. Outnumbered about two to one, he split his army and sent Stonewall Jackson on a flank march that crushed the Union right. It cost Lee Jackson, who died of his wounds.
Gettysburg and Vicksburg (July 1863): Topic 5.8
The war's turning point. Lee's second invasion of the North failed at Gettysburg, and the Union took Vicksburg, which gave it control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.
Union control of the Mississippi (July 1863): Topic 5.8
After Vicksburg (July 4) and Port Hudson (July 9) fell, the Union held the whole river. Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas were cut off from the rest of the Confederacy.
U.S. Sanitary Commission: Topic 5.8
A private relief agency, founded in 1861 and staffed largely by women volunteers, that raised money and supplies for Union soldiers' health and hospitals. It shows how civilians mobilized for the war.
Twenty Negro Law: Topic 5.8
An October 1862 Confederate law that exempted one owner or overseer on each plantation with twenty or more enslaved people from the draft. It was meant to keep order on plantations, and it fed resentment among poorer white Southerners.
Enrollment Act (1863): Topic 5.8
The Union's draft law of March 1863 for men aged 20 to 45. A drafted man could avoid service by paying $300 or hiring a substitute, so critics said the poor did the fighting.
Copperheads (Peace Democrats): Topic 5.8
Northern Democrats who opposed the war and wanted a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Their opponents named them for the venomous snake and accused them of disloyalty.
Overland Campaign (1864): Topic 5.8
Grant's spring 1864 offensive against Lee in Virginia: the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, then the siege of Petersburg. It was a war of attrition. Grant kept attacking, because the North could replace its losses and the South could not.
Battle of the Wilderness (1864): Topic 5.8
The first battle of the Overland Campaign, May 5–7, 1864, fought in thick woods in Virginia. Grant lost more men than Lee, but he did not retreat. He moved south.
Siege of Petersburg (1864–1865): Topic 5.8
From June 1864 to April 1865, Grant's armies held Lee's army in trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, the railroad junction that supplied Richmond. Lee could not move, and Grant kept cutting his supply lines.
Atlanta Campaign (1864): Topic 5.8
Sherman's summer 1864 campaign from Chattanooga to Atlanta, Georgia, a Confederate rail and supply center. Its fall on September 2 lifted Northern morale and helped Lincoln win reelection.
Election of 1864: Topic 5.8
The presidential election held during the war, on November 8, 1864. Lincoln, on a National Union ticket, beat Democrat George McClellan, 212 electoral votes to 21. The vote let the North keep fighting to the end.
Foraging: Topic 5.8
Taking food, fodder and animals from the countryside to feed an army, instead of hauling supplies. Sherman's order told his men to 'forage liberally on the country.'
Sherman's March to the Sea: Topic 5.8
November–December 1864: Sherman's army marched from Atlanta to Savannah, wrecking railroads, crops and property to break the South's ability and will to fight. Historians call the strategy 'hard war' or 'total war.'
Attrition: Topic 5.8
Winning by wearing the enemy down, through steady losses of men and supplies, until it cannot go on. Grant used it against Lee at Petersburg, where the Confederacy could not replace what it lost.
U.S. Colored Troops: Topic 5.8
Black regiments of the Union Army, raised from 1863 and mostly led by white officers. About 180,000 Black men served in them, and roughly 40,000 died.
Appomattox Court House: Topic 5.8
The Virginia village where Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant on April 9, 1865. Other Confederate armies surrendered over the next two months.
Parole: Topic 5.8
A soldier's signed promise not to fight again until he is formally exchanged. At Appomattox, Lee's men signed paroles and went home instead of to prison camps, safe from arrest as long as they kept them.
Home front: Topic 5.8
The civilians, farms and factories behind the fighting. In the Civil War the Union's home front kept producing and voting, while the Confederate home front suffered shortages, runaway inflation, bread riots and desertion.
Contraband: Topic 5.9
Enemy property an army may seize in war. Butler applied it to people escaping slavery: he kept them, but didn't call them free.
Ex parte Milligan (1866): Topic 5.9
Supreme Court ruling that civilians cannot be tried by military courts where the regular civil courts are open.
Confiscation Acts: Topic 5.9
Union laws of 1861 and 1862 that let the government seize rebels' property, including their claim to enslaved people who worked for the Confederacy.
Martial law: Topic 5.9
Military rule that replaces civilian government and courts. Hunter put three states under it on April 25, 1862, then argued that slavery could not exist under it.
Blockade: Topic 5.9
The Union navy's ring of warships off Southern ports, meant to stop cotton going out and supplies coming in. Du Pont's squadron held the Carolina and Georgia coast.
Commander in chief: Topic 5.9
Article II makes the president commander in chief of the army and navy. Lincoln said only he, not a general in the field, could decide whether freeing enslaved people was a military necessity.
Colonization: Topic 5.9
Plans to send free Black Americans to settle abroad. Most Black Americans rejected it. Lincoln backed voluntary colonization into 1863; the final Proclamation left it out.
Emancipation Proclamation: Topic 5.9
Lincoln issued a preliminary version on September 22, 1862 and the final one on January 1, 1863. A war measure, it freed enslaved people only in areas still in rebellion.
King Cotton diplomacy: Topic 5.9
The Confederacy's bet that Britain and France needed Southern cotton enough to recognize it. They found cotton in Egypt and India instead.
Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862): Topic 5.9
Gave each state federal land to sell to fund colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts.
Greenbacks: Topic 5.9
Paper dollars the Union printed to pay for the war, backed by the government rather than by gold. They helped fund the army and pushed prices up.
Military necessity: Topic 5.9
Lincoln's legal basis: as commander in chief he could take an enemy's resources in wartime. It reached only places in rebellion.
Emancipation Proclamation (1863): Topic 5.9
Lincoln's order of January 1, 1863, freeing enslaved people in areas still in rebellion. It skipped the loyal border states and Union-held areas, so it freed few people at once. It made ending slavery a Union war aim and let Black men enlist.
Diplomatic recognition: Topic 5.9
A government's formal acceptance of another as a legitimate state. The Confederacy wanted Britain and France to recognize it. The Proclamation made slavery the war's open issue, which made recognition politically costly.
Combahee River Raid: Topic 5.9
A June 1863 Union raid in South Carolina, led by Col. James Montgomery with Harriet Tubman as guide. It freed more than 700 enslaved people.
54th Massachusetts Infantry: Topic 5.9
One of the first Black regiments raised in the North, in 1863. It led the assault on Fort Wagner and refused unequal pay.
Militia Act of 1862: Topic 5.9
Let the Union army enlist Black men, but paid them $10 a month minus $3 for clothing, against $13 for a white private.
Fort Pillow (April 12, 1864): Topic 5.9
Confederate troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest overran a Union fort in Tennessee and killed many Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.
Gettysburg Address: Topic 5.9
Lincoln's speech of November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It tied the war to the Declaration's promise that 'all men are created equal' and asked for 'a new birth of freedom.'
Article V: Topic 5.9
The part of the Constitution that lets it be amended: two-thirds of both houses of Congress propose an amendment, and three-fourths of the states ratify it.
Thirteenth Amendment: Topic 5.9
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865; ratified December 6, 1865. It abolished slavery in the United States, except as punishment for a crime.
Second Inaugural Address: Topic 5.9
Lincoln's March 4, 1865 speech. It names slavery as the cause of the war and asks for peace without revenge.
Reunification: Topic 5.9
Bringing the Southern states back into the Union. Lincoln wanted it without revenge.
Suffrage: Topic 5.9
The right to vote. In 1865, most Northern states still barred Black men from the ballot.
Self-emancipation: Topic 5.9
Enslaved people freeing themselves by escaping to Union lines, without waiting for a law or a general.
Reconstruction: Topic 5.10
The years after the Civil War (1865–1877) when the nation decided how to bring the Confederate states back and what freedom would mean for four million formerly enslaved people. Presidents, Congress, white Southerners and freedpeople all pushed their own answers.
Ten Percent Plan: Topic 5.10
Lincoln’s plan of December 1863. Most Confederates who swore loyalty to the Union and accepted emancipation were pardoned. A state could form a new government once 10 percent of its 1860 voters took the oath.
Wade-Davis Bill: Topic 5.10
Congress’s tougher plan, passed July 1864. A majority of a state’s white men had to take a loyalty oath, and only men who swore they had never backed the Confederacy (the “ironclad oath”) could vote on a new constitution. Lincoln let it die by pocket veto.
Presidential Reconstruction: Topic 5.10
Johnson’s plan, 1865–66: quick pardons, new state governments chosen by white voters, and no guarantee of Black suffrage or civil rights. Congress took control of Reconstruction in 1867.
Black Codes: Topic 5.10
Laws passed by Southern states in 1865–66 to control freedpeople’s labor and movement. They limited renting land, demanded proof of a job, fined “vagrants” and hired them out, and in Mississippi let courts apprentice Black children to their former owners.
13th Amendment: Topic 5.10
Ratified December 1865. It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, “except as a punishment for crime.” The Southern states’ own ratifications helped put it over the top.
Juneteenth: Topic 5.10
June 19 + nineteenth. Freedpeople in Texas began holding celebrations on that date in 1866, and the name is first attested around 1890. In 1866 people called the day Emancipation Day or Jubilee.
Independent Black churches: Topic 5.10
After emancipation, freedpeople left white-controlled congregations and built their own, including the AME and Black Baptist churches. They also served as schools and meeting halls.
Freedmen's Bureau: Topic 5.10
Created March 3, 1865, to help freedpeople with food, medical care, labor contracts, courts, and above all schools. Howard University is named for its commissioner, Oliver Otis Howard.
Radical Republicans: Topic 5.10
Republicans, led by Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate, who wanted Congress to remake the South and guarantee equal rights to freedpeople before readmitting the states.
Civil Rights Act of 1866: Topic 5.10
The first federal law to define citizenship (everyone born in the U.S.) and guarantee citizens equal legal rights. It answered Dred Scott and the Black Codes, and it was the first major law passed over a president's veto: Senate 33–15, House 122–41. An override takes two-thirds of each house.
14th Amendment: Topic 5.10
Ratified in 1868. It made everyone born or naturalized in the U.S. a citizen and barred any state from denying due process or the equal protection of the laws.
Due process: Topic 5.10
The rule that government must follow fair, lawful procedures before it takes a person's life, liberty or property. The 14th Amendment applies it to the states.
Equal protection: Topic 5.10
The 14th Amendment's promise that a state must apply its laws to everyone within its borders on equal terms. Courts later used it against segregation and other discrimination.
Congressional Reconstruction: Topic 5.10
Reconstruction on Congress's terms, from 1867. After President Johnson's plan let white Southerners rebuild the old order, Congress took over: army rule, new state constitutions and votes for Black men.
Reconstruction Acts (1867): Topic 5.10
Four laws passed in 1867–68. The first, passed over Johnson's veto on March 2, 1867, put ten Southern states under army generals in five military districts until they wrote new constitutions and ratified the 14th Amendment.
Union League: Topic 5.10
Republican clubs that met at night in Southern churches and schoolhouses. Members explained the ballot to newly registered voters and got them to the polls.
Carpetbaggers and scalawags: Topic 5.10
Insults for Republicans in the South. Enemies called Northern-born Republicans 'carpetbaggers' and white Southerners who joined the party 'scalawags,' to say the new governments were foreign or disloyal.
Tenure of Office Act (1867): Topic 5.10
Passed over Johnson's veto on March 2, 1867. The president could not remove an official the Senate had confirmed unless the Senate agreed. Congress wanted to keep Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, its ally in running Reconstruction, at his desk.
Impeachment: Topic 5.10
The House votes to charge an official with wrongdoing. That is the accusation, not the removal. The Senate then holds the trial, with the Chief Justice presiding when the president is charged, and removal takes a two-thirds vote.
Myers v. United States (1926): Topic 5.10
The Supreme Court struck down a law requiring Senate consent to remove a postmaster. Chief Justice Taft, a former president, wrote that Johnson's Tenure of Office Act had been invalid too. Congress had repealed it in 1887.
Election of 1868: Topic 5.10
Republican Ulysses Grant beat Democrat Horatio Seymour, 214 to 80 in the Electoral College. It was the first presidential election in which Black men across much of the South could vote, and Seymour's party ran against Reconstruction.
15th Amendment: Topic 5.10
Ratified 1870. Bars the United States and every state from denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It does not mention sex.
American Equal Rights Association (1866): Topic 5.10
Founded by abolitionists and women’s rights leaders to win the vote for Black men and for all women together. Its members split over the 15th Amendment.
Modifies (Skill 3.D): Topic 5.10
Evidence can support a claim, modify it or refute it. CLAIM: the ballot is a matter of life and death for Black men. EVIDENCE from the floor: Black women face the same violence. VERDICT: modifies.
NWSA: Topic 5.10
National Woman Suffrage Association, founded 1869 by Stanton and Anthony. Sought a federal amendment for women, took up a broad reform agenda and had women-only officers. Opposed the 15th Amendment as written.
AWSA: Topic 5.10
American Woman Suffrage Association, founded 1869 by Lucy Stone and others. Worked state by state, supported the 15th Amendment, and had men and women as members and officers.
15th Amendment (1870): Topic 5.10
Bars the United States and every state from denying the vote 'on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.' It doesn't guarantee anyone the vote, and it says nothing about sex. Later, states used literacy tests and poll taxes to work around it.
Naturalization Act of 1870: Topic 5.10
Signed July 14, 1870. It extended naturalization to 'aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,' but Congress kept the old whites-only rule for everyone else, so Chinese immigrants stayed ineligible for citizenship.
Military Reconstruction: Topic 5.10
Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Congress put ten former Confederate states under army districts until each wrote a new constitution allowing Black men to vote and ratified the 14th Amendment. Georgia came back last, on July 15, 1870.
Presidential pardon: Topic 5.11
President Andrew Johnson's amnesty proclamation of May 29, 1865 forgave most ex-Confederates who swore an oath of loyalty and restored their property, except enslaved people. Wealthy planters had to apply to him personally.
Comparing sources (AP skill 3.C): Topic 5.11
Ask what two sources agree on, where they differ, and why. Who wrote each one, when, and for whom?
Special Field Orders No. 15: Topic 5.11
Sherman's order of January 16, 1865. It set aside land from Charleston south to Florida's St. Johns River for freedpeople, up to 40 acres a family. It says nothing about mules.
Reconstruction Amendments: Topic 5.11
The 13th (1865) ended slavery. The 14th (1868) made anyone born here a citizen and promised equal protection of the laws. The 15th (1870) barred denying the vote because of race.
Sharecropping: Topic 5.11
A system in which a family farmed part of a landowner's land and paid with a share of the crop, often half. The owner usually supplied the land, mules and tools.
Crop-lien system: Topic 5.11
Credit for supplies, secured by the lender's legal claim on the coming crop. Most Southern states passed lien laws in 1866 and 1867.
Time price: Topic 5.11
The higher price a merchant charged for goods bought on credit, compared with the cash price for the same goods.
Tenant farming: Topic 5.11
Farming land owned by someone else and paying for it in cash or a share of the crop. Sharecroppers were the poorest tenants.
Ku Klux Klan: Topic 5.11
A secret society founded by Confederate veterans in Tennessee about 1865–66. Its members used threats, whipping and murder to stop Black Southerners and white Republicans from voting, holding office and organizing.
Georgia's expulsions: Topic 5.11
Georgia's white majority claimed the state constitution let Black men vote but not hold office, and expelled nearly all of its Black legislators. Congress forced the state to reseat them in 1870.
Enforcement Acts (Force Acts): Topic 5.11
Three laws of 1870–71 that protected voting and civil rights with federal courts and troops. The third, in April 1871, is known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Colfax Massacre: Topic 5.11
The April 13, 1873 attack by a white force on Black men defending the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. Many of the dead were killed after they surrendered.
Slaughter-House Cases (1873): Topic 5.11
The Supreme Court's first ruling on the Fourteenth Amendment, decided 5–4. It said the 'privileges or immunities' clause protects only a short list of rights of national citizenship and leaves most rights to the states.
United States v. Cruikshank (1876): Topic 5.11
The Supreme Court threw out the Colfax convictions. It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment limits what states may do, and that protecting citizens from one another was the states' job.
State action: Topic 5.11
The rule that the Fourteenth Amendment restrains governments, not private people. After Cruikshank, federal prosecutors could not use it to charge individuals for attacking their neighbors' rights.
Liberal Republicans: Topic 5.11
Northern reformers who broke from Grant in 1872. They wanted amnesty for former Confederates and an end to federal troops in the South.
Crédit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring: Topic 5.11
Scandals of the Grant years. Railroad stock was handed to congressmen; distillers and federal tax officials stole whiskey revenue.
Panic of 1873: Topic 5.11
A financial crash set off when Jay Cooke & Co. failed. It brought a depression that lasted for years and pushed Northern voters to think about jobs before the South.
White League: Topic 5.11
An armed Democratic organization formed in Louisiana in 1874. It drove Republican officials from office by force.
Mississippi Plan: Topic 5.11
The 1875 Democratic campaign of open intimidation and violence that ended Republican rule in Mississippi. Democrats copied it in other states in 1876.
Redeemers: Topic 5.11
Southern Democrats who took back state governments in the 1870s, promising lower taxes, less spending and white supremacy.
Red Shirts: Topic 5.11
Armed white Democratic clubs in South Carolina in 1876. They broke up Republican meetings and threatened Black voters to help Wade Hampton win the governor's race.
Election of 1876: Topic 5.11
Tilden won the popular vote and led the electoral count, 184 to 165, but stood one vote short of the 185 needed. Twenty votes from four states were disputed, and Congress had to decide.
Electoral Commission (1877): Topic 5.11
A fifteen-member panel Congress created to settle the disputed 1876 returns. It voted 8–7 along party lines on every disputed state, and every vote went to Hayes.
Compromise of 1877: Topic 5.11
The understanding that let Hayes take office. Southern Democrats accepted his election, and Hayes's allies signaled that federal troops would leave the last two Republican statehouses, South Carolina and Louisiana. No signed agreement has ever been found, and historians still debate its terms.
Convict leasing: Topic 5.11
Southern states rented out prisoners, most of them Black, to planters, mines and railroads. The state collected the fees, the employer controlled the labor, and many prisoners died at it.
Black colleges: Topic 5.11
Colleges founded during Reconstruction to educate Black students and to train Black ministers and teachers. Howard, Atlanta University, Fisk and Morehouse all began in these years, many with help from the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern missionary societies.
Dunning School: Topic 5.11
Early-1900s historians, led by William A. Dunning of Columbia University, who taught that Reconstruction was a corrupt failure forced on the white South by Northern radicals and Black voters. Du Bois and later historians such as Eric Foner overturned this account.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954): Topic 5.11
Supreme Court decision, May 17, 1954, that struck down segregated public schools under the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws, overturning the 'separate but equal' rule of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Second Reconstruction: Topic 5.11
Historians' name for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which finally achieved the promise of the first Reconstruction. Eric Foner argued that it took this second Reconstruction to enforce the Reconstruction amendments.
Compensated emancipation: Topic 5.12
Freeing enslaved people and paying their owners for the loss. Congress did this in Washington, D.C., in April 1862, offering owners up to an average of $300 a person. Owners had to file petitions to be paid.
Unit 5 · Learning Objective M: Topic 5.12
Compare the relative significance of the effects of the Civil War on American values.
Comparison: Topic 5.12
A reasoning process: describe similarities and differences between two moments or developments, and explain why they matter.
Relative significance: Topic 5.12
Judging which of several changes or causes mattered most, and defending that judgment with evidence.
Continuity and change: Topic 5.12
A reasoning process: describe what stayed the same and what changed over a period, and explain why each matters.
Historically defensible claim: Topic 5.12
The AP essay's thesis point: answer the question with a claim that history can support, and give a line of reasoning for it.
Complexity: Topic 5.12
The AP essay's point for a sophisticated argument. You earn it with evidence that corroborates, qualifies or modifies your claim, or by weighing more than one perspective.
Key Concept 5.3: Topic 5.12
The Union victory in the Civil War and the contested reconstruction of the South settled the issues of slavery and secession, but left unresolved many questions about the power of the federal government and citizenship rights. (The CED's own words.)
John Brown's raid: Topic 5.12
In October 1859 the abolitionist John Brown led a small armed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a slave uprising. Virginia hanged him on December 2, 1859. Many Northerners mourned him as a martyr. Many white Southerners saw a plot against them, and the raid deepened the split that led to secession.
Westward expansion: Topic 5.12
After the Civil War, railroads, settlers and the army pushed across the Great Plains. Two 1862 laws opened the way: the Homestead Act offered 160 acres of public land to settlers, and the Pacific Railway Act funded a transcontinental railroad. Native nations lost land and lives in the Plains wars that followed. This is the story of AP Period 6.
Gilded Age: Topic 5.12
The name for the United States from roughly the 1870s to the 1890s, taken from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel. Under a thin gold surface: fast industrial growth, huge fortunes, political corruption, and bitter fights between workers and owners. This is the setting of AP Period 6.
Citizenship Clause: Topic 5.12
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment (1868): 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' It overturned the core of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which had held that Black Americans could not be citizens.

Unit 5 Review: 1844–1877

Topics

Key terms

The exam

All units