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20 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Abraham Lincoln |
Illinois lawyer who joined the Republican party in 1856 and ran for president in 1860. He became one of the most important presidents of the United States. |
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Charles Sumner |
Republican senator from Massachusetts who opposed slavery. |
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Compromise of 1850 |
Statehood for California; territorial status for Utah and New Mexico, allowing popular sovereignty; resolution of the Texas—New Mexico boundary disagreement; federal assumption of the Texas debt |
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Confederate States of America |
Formed on February 4, 1861 and was made up of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. |
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Dred Scott v. Sandford |
Court case in 1857 when a former slave, Dred Scott, sued for his own freedom after his master died on the grounds of his residence in free territory. In the end, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided that Scott could not sue for his own freedom. No black, whether a slave or a free person descended from a slave, could become a citizen of the United States. |
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Fort Sumter |
Located in Charleston, South Carolina, this was where the shots that began the Civil War were fired. |
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Franklin Pierce |
Democrat from New Hampshire who won the presidential election in 1848. |
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free soil |
The doctrine which insisted that Congress prohibit slavery in the territories. |
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Fugitive Slave Act |
Denied alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury, did not allow them to testify in their own behalf, permitted their return to slavery merely on the testimony of the claimant |
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higher law |
The will of God. |
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John Brown |
Famous white abolitionist who was wanted for the massacre of white southerners in Kansas in 1856. He believed that God had ordained him “to purge this land with blood” of the evil of slavery. |
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Kansas–Nebraska Act |
Signed by President Pierce at the end of May 1854, it made it possible for settlers in the new states of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether or not slavery would be allowed in their home states. |
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Know–Nothings |
Founded in 1850, this party was one of many such societies that mushroomed in response to the unprecedented immigration of the 1840s. It had sought to rid the United States of immigrant and Catholic political influence by pressuring the existing parties to nominate and appoint only native–born Protestants to office and by advocating an extension of the naturalization period before immigrants could vote. |
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Lecompton constitution |
A frame of government that protected the rights of those slaveholders already living in Kansas to their slave property and provided for a referendum in which voters could decide whether to allow in more slaves |
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personal–liberty laws |
Aimed to preclude state officials from enforcing the law by such techniques as forbidding the use of state jails to incarcerate alleged fugitives. |
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popular sovereignty |
Promised to ease the slavery extension issue out of national politics by allowing each territory to decide the question of slavery for itself. |
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Republican Party |
The political party that sprang up in several northern states in 1854 and 1855. After the Know–Nothings’ demise in 1856, this party became the major opposition to the Democratic party. |
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Slave Power |
The conspiracy of slaveholders and their northern dupes to grab more territory for slavery. |
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Stephen A. Douglas |
Politician from Illinois who was one of the nominees of the Democratic Party for President in 1860. He was the main advocate of the Compromise of 1850. |
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel which aroused wide northern sympathy for fugitive slaves. |
