APUSH Unit 5

• Manifest Destiny


  The notion that Americans have a God-given right to have a nation that extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans
• The Mexican-American War caused tension with respect to the expansion of slavery
• The Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in any territory won in the Mexican-American War, was narrowly defeated in Congress
• Major positions held by those in power with respect to the expansion of slavery

  • Southern Position
  • Free Soil Movement
  • Popular Sovereignty
• Southern Position


  Argued that slavery was a constitutional right and that the question about where slavery could and could not exist had already been decided in the Missouri Compromise
• Free Soil Movement


  Wanted any new territories acquired to be the dominion of free laborers, not enslaved ones
• Popular Sovereignty


  Argued that the people living in each territory should decide the slavery question for themselves
• The three positions regarding the expansion of slavery were fundamentally incompatible with one another and compromise between them proved impossible
• The admission of California and New Mexico as free states tipped the balance in the Senate towards the free states, which was a contentious issue for the South
• Compromise of 1850


  • Further divided the Mexican Cession into the Utah and New Mexico territories, where each would decide the slavery question by popular sovereignty
  • Admitted California as a free state
  • Banned the slave trade in Washington D.C.
  • Passed a stricter Fugitive Slave Law
• In the years prior to the Civil War, a huge number of immigrants, mostly Irish and German, arrived on the American shores seeking a new home
• The Fugitive Slave Law, which required the North to arrest and return escaped enslaved people, was difficult to enforce and ended up breaking apart any calm that the Compromise of 1850 accomplished
• Many of the Irish immigrants settled in New York City, and more to the point, New York's Five Points neighborhood
• For the most part, they lived in slums where diseases ran rampant, unemployment was the growing norm, and infant mortality rates were among the worst in the country
• Some of the German immigrants settled in urban locations on the coast, but a greater proportion of them moved west in search of land to farm
• Nativism


  A policy of protecting the interests of native-born people against the interests of immigrants
• A group of folks even organized a political party around opposition to immigration, called the Know-Nothing Party
• The nativist sentiment was essentially concerned with limiting immigrants' cultural and political influence
• The economies of the north and the south were moving in dramatically different directions during this time period
• Northern economy


  Fueled by free wage laborers largely working manufacturing jobs in factories
• Southern economy


  Largely fueled by enslaved labor working agricultural plantations
• The North was growing much more rapidly than the south in population
• Every attempt at compromise regarding slavery failed to solve the problem
• Many northerners didn't object to the expansion of slavery on moral grounds, but rather on economic grounds
• America kept gathering up new lands in the west, and every time that happened, the question of whether slavery could exist in those new territories erupted all over again
• If a new territory entered the Union as a slave state then that would make it near impossible for free wage laborers to compete for jobs
• Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854


  1. Divided the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase into two parts: the Kansas territory and the Nebraska Territory

  2. Proposed that each territory decide by popular sovereignty whether to allow slavery or not
• The Free Soil Movement and later the Free Soil Party aimed to keep the lands gained by the Mexican Cession free of slavery
• The proposal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act enraged some Americans, especially those of the Northern persuasion, as it effectively overturned the Compromise of 1820
• Abolitionists in the north were actually a minority in that region, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in volume
• Violence erupted in Kansas between pro-slavery and anti-slavery folks due to the popular sovereignty decision
• Abolitionists used words, assisted fugitive slaves escape, and used violence to make their message heard
• In the 1855 election for the Kansas territorial legislature, there were around 1500 eligible voters but over 6000 votes cast, indicating voter fraud by pro-slavery Missourians
• William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator


  Extremely influential in the abolitionist community
• Two rival state legislatures were established in Kansas, with the pro-slavery government recognised as legitimate by President Franklin Pierce
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin


  Depicted the dehumanization and brutality of slavery in graphic detail
• Dred Scott Decision of 1857


  Dred Scott, an enslaved man, sued his master for his freedom after living in free territory, but the Supreme Court ruled against him, stating that as a slave he was not a citizen and that slave owners could take their "property" anywhere they wanted
• Frederick Douglass


  Gave sheer beauty and precision in his abolitionist speeches
• The Dred Scott Decision effectively opened any territory or state in the Union to slavery
• Underground Railroad


  A series of trails and safehouses by which people enslaved in the South could find safe passage to the North