Manifest Destiny

A term coined by John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 to express the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

“Fifty-four forty or fight!”

Democratic candidate Governor James K. Polk’s slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Territory, stretching from California to Russian-occupied Alaska and presently shared with Great Britain

Wilmot Proviso

The 1846 proposal by Pennsylvania’s congressional representative to ban slavery in territory acquired from the Mexican-American War.

free-soil movement

Opposed the expansion of slavery, in 1848, its members organized their own political party, which depicted slavery as a threat to republicanism and to the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder society. They won broad support among aspiring white farmers.

Compromise of 1850

Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. Key elements included the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act.

Ostend Manifesto

An 1854 declaration that urged President Franklin Pierce to seize the slave-owning province of Cuba from Spain. Northern Democrats denounced this aggressive initiative, and the plan was scuttled.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

A controversial 1854 law that divided Indian Territory into two separate states, repealed the Missouri Compromise, and left the new territories to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty.

Know-Nothing Party

A political party formed in 1851 that drew on the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements of the 1840s. In 1854, the party gained control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

“Bleeding Kansas”

Term for the struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in this state following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854.

Dred Scottv.

SandfordThe 1857 Supreme Court decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens.

James K. Polk

Won the presidential election of 1844 by supporting the annexation of Texas and demanding the entire Oregon territory from Britain. As president, he doubled America’s territory by defeating Mexico and acquiring 525,000 square miles.

Frederick Douglass

Escaped slave who became the foremost black abolitionist of his time. Mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, he broke from Garrison and published his own abolitionist paper, the North Star.

Stephen Douglas

This senator from Illinois initiated the Kansas-Nebraska Act in an effort to bring the transcontinental railroad through Chicago.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

She wrote the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin which gave a heartrending account of the brutality of slavery and heightened the tension between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders.

John Brown

Radical abolitionist from New York who led his followers into Kansas in 1856 and murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie, beginning two years of guerrilla warfare known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Abraham Lincoln

He was the nominee of the newly formed Republican Party in the 1860 presidential election. Taking a moderate stance on slavery, he won the election with only 40% of the popular vote, prompting South Carolina to secede from the Union.