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| Missouri Compromise | An agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. |
| Compromise of 1850 | A package of five bills, passed in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). |
| Kansas Nebraska Act | Created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to determine through Popular Sovereignty if they would allow slavery within each territory. |
| Popular Sovereignty | Is the political principle that the legitimacy of the state is created and sustained by the will or consent of its people, who are the source of all political power. |
| Dred Scott 1860 | A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants,[2] whether or not they were slaves) were not protected by the Constitution and could never be U.S. citizens. |
| Election of 1860 | A quadrennial election, held on November 6, 1860, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. |
| Secede | The act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals. |
| Habeas Corpus | Is a writ, or legal action, through which a prisoner can be released from unlawful detention, that is, detention lacking sufficient cause or evidence. |
| Reconstruction | The entire nation in the period 1865–1877 following the Civil War; the second one, used in this article, covers the transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, with the reconstruction of state and society in the former Confederacy. |
| Lincoln's 10% Plan | Only 10% of the state's electorate had to take the loyalty oath in order for the state to be readmitted into U.S. Congress. |
| Radical Republican Plan | Proposed an "ironclad oath" that would prevent anyone who supported the Confederacy from voting in Southern elections. |
| Scalawags/Carpetbaggers | Derogatory nickname for southern whites who supported Reconstruction following the Civil War/ term Southerners gave to Northerners (also referred to as Yankees) who moved to the South during the Reconstruction era. |
| Black Codes | Laws put in place in the United States after the Civil War with the effect of limiting the basic human rights and civil liberties of blacks. |
| Jim Crow Laws | State and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. |
| Plessy v. Ferguson | A landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of "separate but equal". |
| Sharecropping | A system of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land (e.g. 50% of the crop). |
| Freedman's Bureau | A U.S. federal government agency that aided distressed freedmen (freed slaves) in 1865–1869, during the Reconstruction era of the United States. |
| Homestead Act | Gave an applicant freehold title to an area called a "homestead" – typically 160 acres (65 hectares or one-fourth section) of undeveloped federal land west of the Mississippi River. |
| Dawes Act | Authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian tribal land and divide the land into allotments for individual Indians. |
