Terms : Hide Images
| 15905001787 | 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. |  | 0 |
| 15905001788 | Californios | The elite Mexican ranchers in the province of California. | 1 | |
| 15905001789 | "Fifty-four forty or fight" | Democratic candidate James K. Polk's slogan in the election of 1844 calling for the opening up of lands for American settlement in Texas and sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country. |  | 2 |
| 15905001790 | conscience Whigs | Whig politicians who opposed the Mexican War (1846-1848) on moral grounds, maintaining the the purpose of the war was to expand and perpetuate slavery. They feared that the addition of more slave states would ensure the South's control of the national government. | 3 | |
| 15905001791 | Wilmot Proviso | 1846 proposal that outlawed slavery in any territory gained from the War with Mexico |  | 4 |
| 15905001792 | free-soil movement | A political movement that opposed the expansion of slavery. In 1848 the free-soilers organized the Free-Soil Party, which depicted slavery as a threat to republicanism and to the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder society, arguments that won broad support among aspiring white farmers. |  | 5 |
| 15905001793 | squatter sovereignty | A plan promoted by Democratic candidate Senator Lewis Cass under which Congress would allow settlers in each territory to determine its status as free or slave. | 6 | |
| 15905001794 | forty-niners | The more than 80,000 settlers who arrived in California in 1849 as part of that territory's gold rush. |  | 7 |
| 15905001795 | "slavery follows the flag" | The assertion by John C. Calhoun that planters could by right take their slave property into new territories. | 8 | |
| 15905001796 | Compromise of 1850 | Laws passed in 1850 that were meant to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in the territories. Key elements include the admission of California as a free state and the Fugitive Slave Act. |  | 9 |
| 15905001797 | personal-liberty laws | Laws enacted in many northern states that guaranteed to all residents, including alleged fugitives, the right to a jury trial. | 10 | |
| 15905001798 | Gadsden Purchase | A small slice of land (now part of Arizona and New Mexico) purchased by President Franklin Pierce in 1853 for the purpose of building a transcontinental rail line from New Orleans to Los Angeles. |  | 11 |
| 15905001799 | Kansas-Nebraska Act | 1854 - Created Nebraska and Kansas as states and gave the people in those territories the right to chose to be a free or slave state through popular sovereignty. | 12 | |
| 15905001800 | American, or 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. | 13 | |
| 15905001801 | "Bleeding Kansas" | Term for the bloody struggle between proslavery and antislavery factions in Kansas following its organization as a territory in the fall of 1854. |  | 14 |
| 15905001802 | Dred Scott v. Sandford | The 1857 Supreme Court Decision that ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The Court ruled against salve Dred Scott who claimed that travels with his master into free states and territories made him and his family free. The decision also denied the federal government the right to exclude slavery from the territories and declared that African Americans were not citizens. |  | 15 |
| 15905001803 | Freeport Doctrine | Doctrine developed by Stephen Douglas that said the exclusion of slavery in a territory could be determined by the refusal of the voters to enact any laws that would protect slave property. |  | 16 |
