Exam 1

Question 1

This was the colonial-era boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania.
In the pre-Civil War period, it was regarded as the boundary between the slave states and the
non-slave states.

Answer 1

Mason-Dixon Line

Question 2

This was the idea that slavery was a morally evil institution, and it began in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. It was initially the viewpoint of a small minority and only became the majority viewpoint by the era of the Civil War.

Answer 2

Abolitionism

Question 3

This was a network of free blacks in the North and sympathetic
northern whites who helped slaves escape bondage through a series of designated routes and safe
houses, first into the free states and later into Canada. Harriet Tubman was a famous member of this organization.

Answer 3

Underground Railroad

Question 4

These are economies such as those in the southern states before the Civil War that depended upon labor-intensive crops grown for the market economy, particularly
tobacco and short-staple cotton. These economies came to depend upon slave labor.

Answer 4

Plantation Economics

Question 5

Founded in 1817, this was one of the first anti-slavery societies in the United States. It advocated the idea of gradual emancipation and the colonization
of slaves back to Africa, which it did on a very limited basis and founded the country of Liberia.

Answer 5

American Colonization Society

Question 6

This was a novel published in 1852 and written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
It was an immediate bestseller, and it brought to northern audiences the horrors that slaves in
South endured. It did much solidify anti-slavery sentiment in the North.

Answer 6

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Question 7

This was a law written by Thomas Jefferson in 1787, and it established the process by which lands northwest of the Ohio River would be surveyed and sold as well as the process by which new states would be able to join the federal union. It also forbade slavery in this region.

Answer 7

Northwest Ordinance

Question 8

This was an abolitionist party begun in 1840. It was not very successful, and it existed only during the 1840 and 1844 elections.

Answer 8

Liberty Party

Question 9

This was a word used by northerners to describe what they believed was a conspiracy by the slave states to add more slave territory to the United States and even turn the free states into slave states.

Answer 9

Slave Power

Question 10

In the period from the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to the advent of the Civil War, this was the notion that the number of free states and slave states had to be equal in order to preserve the balance between the two in the United States Senate.

Answer 10

Free State - Slave State Balance

Question 11

Founded in 1833, this was the foremost abolitionist group in the United States, and it was dedicated to immediate emancipation (as opposed to gradual emancipation) and full equality for freed slaves.

Answer 11

American Anti-Slavery Society

Question 12

This was a term used by northerners to describe northern Democrats who abetted southern Democrats and supporter their demands over the issue of slavery.

Answer 12

Doughface

Question 13

This man invented the cotton gin, which allowed for raw cotton to be rapidly separated from its seeds and allowed for cotton agriculture to sweep through the Deep South.

Answer 13

Eli Whitney

Question 14

This man was one of the foremost abolitionists in the United States before the Civil War and founded an abolitionist newspaper known as The Liberator in 1831.

Answer 14

William Lloyd Garrison

Question 15

This was an amendment to a revenue bill during the Mexican War that would have barred slavery from all the territory acquired from Mexico, better known as the Mexican Cession.

Answer 15

Wilmot Proviso

Question 16

This was a document written in 1854 that provided a rationale for the United States to purchase Cuba from Spain. The document also implied that the United States should declare war if Spain refused.

Answer 16

Ostend Manifesto

Question 17

This was the part of the South that included the states of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. These states grew less cotton, had fewer slaves, and relied more heavily upon tobacco, corn, and wheat. They were also less eager to leave the Union in 1860-1861.

Answer 17

Upper South

Question 18

These were New York Democrats led by Martin Van Buren who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories and broke away from the main party when it nominated Lewis Cass, a pro-popular sovereignty candidate, in 1848. They were one of several groups that later formed the Free-Soil Party.

Answer 18

Barnburners

Question 19

This system came into being with the birth of the
Republican Party in 1854 and became firmly established by 1856 as the Republican Party became a coalition of former northern Whigs, former Free Soil Democrats, and former Know-Nothings.

Answer 19

Third American Party System

Question 20

Between about 1800 and 1860, this was the process by which about 300,000 slaves were sold “down river” from the Upper South (where there was a surplus of slaves) to the Lower South, where the dramatic growth of cotton agriculture led to the demand for more slave laborers.

Answer 20

Internal Slave Trade

Question 21

This was a party founded in 1848 by former President Martin Van Buren that consisted mostly of northern Democrats who grew disillusioned with the “Slave Power,” or the southern Democrats who wanted to extend slavery to the territories, particularly the Mexican Cession. It consisted of both former Democrats and Whigs who opposed the extension of slavery.

Answer 21

Free-Soil Party

Question 22

This occurred in May 1856 when pro-slavery Missouri “border ruffians” entered the anti-slavery town of Lawrence in Kansas Territory and destroyed it. While no one was killed, it gave a boost to the new Republican Party, which blamed the destruction on the “Slave Power.”

Answer 22

Sack of Lawrence

Question 23

This was the part of the United States bounded by St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati that attracted the largest number of German immigrants before the Civil War.

Answer 23

German Triangle

Question 24

This was a political meeting held in 1850 composed of delegates from the southern states. It was largely in response the Wilmot Proviso, which many southerners believed was a northern attack on the South and the institution of slavery. This meeting paved the way for the Compromise of 1850 and the rise of many southern unionist and states’ rights parties in the South.

Answer 24

Nashville Convention

Question 25

This was the murder of five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas Territory committed by a mob led by the fanatical abolitionist John Brown on May 24, 1854.

Answer 25

Pottawatomie Creek Massacre

Question 26

This was a case in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1859 in which the court declared the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to be unconstitutional and an unnecessary intrusion of the federal government on a state’s rights.

Answer 26

Booth Case