| A | B |
|---|
| agitator | someone who tries to stir up public feelings about a controversial issue |
| arsenal | a stockpile of weapons and military equipment or the building in which they are stored |
| Compromise of 1850 | measures passed by Congress in 1850 to admit California into the Union as a free state, to divide the rest of the Southwest into the New Mexico and Utah territories, with the people there determining for themselves through popular sovereignty whether or not to accept slavery, to ban slavery in Washington, D.C., and to establish a new, stronger fugitive slave law |
| Dred Scott decision | the 1857 ruling of the Supreme Court in the case Scott v. Sandford that legalized slavery in the territories and declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional |
| faction | a group of people who form a minority within a larger group and that have interests or beliefs that do not entirely agree with those of the larger group |
| Fort Sumter | a federal fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, at which the first battle of the Civil War took place on April 12, 1861 |
| Fugitive Slave Law | a law first passed by Congress in 1793 to allow the seizure and return of slaves who escaped into another state or a federal territory; Congress passed a second version of the law in 1850 to establish fines on federal officials who refused to enforce the law or from whom a runaway slave escaped, to establish fines on individuals who helped slaves escape, to ban runaway slaves from testifying on their own behalf in court, and to give special commissioners power to enforce the law |
| John Brown’s raid | a raid led by abolitionist John Brown in 1856 in hopes of seizing the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in order to distribute the weapons to slaves in the area and spark a slave revolt; the attempt failed when federal troops captured the men, leading to Brown's execution for treason |
| Kansas-Nebraska Act | a law passed by Congress in 1854 to establish Kansas and Nebraska as territories with popular sovereignty |
| Missouri Compromise | measures passed by Congress in 1820 to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state while also setting a line at latitude 36° 30' (Missouri's southern border) north of which all Louisiana Purchase territory would be free |
| popular sovereignty | a political practice, common in the United States before the Civil War, in which the people living in a newly organized territory had the right to vote on whether to allow slavery in the territory |
| Republican Party | one of the two major U.S. political parties; founded in 1854 by antislavery opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act |
| secession | formal withdrawal from a group; in U.S. history, the formal withdrawal of 11 Southern states from the Union in 1860-1861, leading to the Civil War |
| sectionalism | strong concern for local interests |
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin | an 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe that described the cruelties of slavery so clearly that it increased the fervor with which both proslavery and antislavery Americans supported their causes |
| urban | characteristic of or relating to a city |
