| A | B |
|---|
| Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo | Ended Mexican-American War; Mexico gave up all claims to land from Texas to California for $15 million |
| Popular sovereignty | political doctrine that the people who lived in a region should determine for themselves the nature of their government |
| Free-Soil Party | active from 1848 to 1854, when it merged into the Republican Party. The party was largely focused on the single issue of opposing the expansion of slavery into the western territories of the United States. |
| California Gold Rush | began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California |
| Compromise of 1850 | passed in September 1850 that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of territories acquired in the Mexican–American Wa |
| Fugitive Slave Act | A law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, which provided southern slaveholders with legal weapons to capture slaves who had escaped to the free states |
| Gadsden Purchase | Treaty, was an agreement between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1854, in which the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico |
| Kansas-Nebraska Act | an 1854 bill that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. Proposed by Stephen A. Dougla |
| Caning of Charles Sumner | occured when Preston Brooks used his can to beat unconscious Charles Sumner for his "Crimes against Kansas" speech |
| Republican Party | founed in 1854, consisted of an coalition of anti-slavery groups. |
| Abraham Lincoln | 16th President of the United States; saved the Union during the American Civil War and emancipated the slaves; was assassinated by Booth |
| Dred Scott v. Sandford | Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories. |
| Lincoln-Douglas Debates | A series of debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, when both were campaigning for election to the United States Senate from Illinois. Much of the debating concerned slavery and its extension into territories such as Kansas. |
| Freeport Doctrine | slavery could be excluded from territories of the United States by local legislation |
| Harpers Ferry | n a small town in northeastern West Virginia that was the site of a raid in 1859 by the abolitionist John Brown and his followers who captured an arsenal that was located there |
| Crittenden Compromise | was an unsuccessful proposal to permanently enshrine slavery in the United States Constitution, and thereby make it unconstitutional for future congresses to end slavery |
| Jefferson Davis | was a Mexican War hero, U.S. senator from Mississippi, U.S. secretary of war and president of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the American Civil War (1861-1865). |
| Fort Sumter | where the first battle of the Civil War began on April 12, 1861 |
| Border States | were those states that during the American Civil War did not leave the Union. |
