UNIT 5 (1844-1877)

Manifest Destiny: The belief that the U.S. had been given the special privilege from Providence, or God, to spread its civilization and culture across the entire continent, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, this would later justify expansion into islands in the Pacific and Caribbean in order to have access to Asian markets like Japan and China

Southern Position: Many of the people of the South argued that slavery was a constitutional right and they argued that the Missouri Compromise already decided where slavery could and could not exist. They argued that the line established by the Missouri Compromise should keep extending from Missouri all the way to the Pacific Ocean, making Texas, Florida, and New Mexico slave states (should New Mexico become a state in the future). To them, the Missouri Compromise was a guarantee that slavery and the Southern way of life, and their economy would be allowed to exist undisturbed below the line.

Free Soil Movement: The people of this movement were mostly Northern Democrats and Whigs that wanted any new territories of the United States to be made up of free laborers, not enslaved ones. But while they didn’t want slaves in this new territory, there were conflicting views. Some Northern Democrats and Whigs didn’t want any black people in these new territories at all and they wanted white people to be able to live there free from competition. Other groups, especially abolitionists, wanted to see slavery banned not only in new territories but also in every single state of the U.S. Eventually, some of these people would form a new political party, the Free Soil Party.

Popular Sovereignty: These people wanted the people (”popular”) in each territory to have the power (”sovereignty”) to decide whether it should have slavery or not. But both members of the Southern Position and the Free Soil Movement hated this idea because while letting the people decide for themselves sounds like a good idea, they feared that the people would have the opposite opinion of them. For the Southerners, what if the territories chose to not have slavery? For the Free Soilers, what if the territories decided to have slavery instead?

Know-Nothing Party: A political party that revolved entirely around its opposition to immigration. Essentially, the main goals of these people were to limit the cultural and political influence of these immigrants. And a few decades later, this hatred of immigrants would come to target the Mexicans and the Chinese arriving on the West Coast as well.

Underground Railroad: Many abolitionists used a system of routes and safehouses from the South to the North that was used to help slaves escape and find freedom in the North. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped through this passage and some even made it all the way to Canada to be protected from the Fugitive Slave Law.

Republican Party: Created in 1854 as a union of the many other smaller parties that had sprung up over the past few decades. For example, the Republican Party was made up of members of the Know Nothing Party, Northern Democrats, abolitionists, the Free Soil Party, Conscience Whigs, and many others

Secession: Withdrawal from the union, this happened after the election of Abraham Lincoln due to the South seeing the North as violating states’ rights, started with South Carolina in December of 1860. A few weeks later, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas joined them by February. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina would join them within the following months, creating the Confederate States of America and creating a new Constitution that limited federal power and established slavery as a permanent institution that couldn’t be abolished

Anaconda Plan: A Union strategy during the Civil War in which they would use their navy to block off southern ports and control the Mississippi River in order to split the Confederacy in half. Essentially, their goal was to surround and then suffocate the Confederacy economically.

Radical Republicans: A group of people who saw that the war had caused a lot of damage and loss of life to the nation and therefore, they wanted to see the South be punished severely. And because Johnson wasn't doing anything, they wanted Reconstruction to be carried out through Congress and legislation, not by the president. Created the Freedman’s Bureau, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and turned it into the 14th Amendment

Sharecropping: A system after the Civil War in which black workers would sign contracts to agree to work in the fields and pick cotton and be perpetually bound to the plantation they worked on. This was basically identical to slavery and allowed the South to have a new way to fuel the agricultural labor force that had disappeared after the Civil War. But over time though, this system did grow less extreme and was replaced by land owners giving workers seed and farm supplies in exchange for part of the harvest for free. And also, poor white people eventually came to be targeted by this sharecropping system too. This system kept sharecroppers in debt because they couldn’t sell their own crops, forcing them to keep working.

Ku Klux Klan: A secret society formed in 1867 to terrorize black people and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. Members of the Klan would burn buildings, control local politics, and even held public and private lynchings of black people.