-          Passed in Congress in 1820, it dealt with the regulation of slavery in the Western territories.

-          It prohibited slavery in the northern part of the former Louisiana Territory except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri.

-          The Compromise began disputes about the future formation of states. When Missouri itself was admitted as a slave state, it tipped the Senate in favor of the slave states, so to provide balance, Maine was admitted as a free state.

-          The Compromise was effectively repealed with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

-          A group formed in 1816 that supported the return of free slaves to colonies in Africa set up by the Americans. It helped to found the colony of Liberia.

-          The ACS was important because it attracted people from all different ends of the spectrum of slavery: Quakers who were generally abolitionists supported it. Anti-slavery whites who were racist and felt that blacks would never be able to be productive members of society in America supported it. Slaveholders who understood that unpaid labor wouldn’t last forever also supported it.

Economically, it wasn’t really feasible to organize a colony in Africa and beyond that, many slaves didn’t want to go there because many of them were born in America and not Africa, so they had no desire to go to a place they didn’t know.

-          Globalization started to become a reality. Prior to the War of 1812, roads were just muddy paths that could become completely impassable in inclement weather. Toll roads were made with logs, which was easier to travel on than mud but were extremely bumpy. 5-6mph was considered a pretty quick pace on those roads.

-          Shipping goods by land was extremely expensive – shipping 30 miles inland would cost roughly the same as shipping by boat from America to England.

-          Rivers were the best means of transportation, but that they flowed one direction proved to be a flaw. A cheap way of shipping by river was to use flatboats that they took downstream and when they reached their destinations, they’d break them up and sell for scrap wood.

-          Canals were constructed using water from existing bodies of water – they ran parallel to the original water sources and connected various rivers, allowing ships to flow upstream. Erie Canal in New York brought economic success to the state in the 1820s. It was built mainly by Irish labor under horrendous conditions.

-          The steam engine development was a major benefit for quick travel/shipping. The only downfall was that rivers froze in the winter and were impassable.

-          The first locomotive, Tom Thumb, was built in 1830. It got its name because it was very narrow. It was pitted against a horse drawn wagon in a race – the horse won because the engine in Tom Thumb malfunctioned.

-          Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: 1828, had 23 miles of track. The trains were pulled by horses. They bought multiple steam engines once they were produced.

-          3200 miles of track were built in the 1830s. It brought down the cost of shipping on land dramatically. Also, passenger travel increased majorly. By 1846, is took only 4 days to travel by train from Lexington, KY to Washington D.C. whereas previously it would have taken three weeks by wagon.

-          In 1850, rails were mostly in New England due to the manufacturing of goods. Within 5 years, they had ventured some more to the Midwest and South.

Steam engines were loud, dangers, very polluting, and would often blow up.

-          This was the idea that Americans held in the 19^th century that they were destined to spread across the continent. 

-          Americans believed that America was a “city on a hill,” intended to be an example for the rest of the world.

-          The idea of Manifest Destiny was used as reasoning for a variety of political actions during the 19^th century, including the Mexican War and the expansion of land acquisition beyond the Louisiana Territory.

The theme of Manifest Destiny has somewhat stayed popular into modern American politics.

-       1805-1879  

-        American abolitionist, journalist, the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

-          Garrison was an Immediatist, meaning that he supported the immediate ending of slavery with no regard to how it would affect slaveholders economically. He heavily criticized slaveholders and had no concern for their wellbeing.

-          He saw slavery as the great moral issue of the time and felt that slaves should have equal rights to everyone else in the country. He was criticized for his radical viewpoints of slavery.

He formed the idea of Moral Suasion, which was the idea that politics wouldn’t solve the problem of slavery. Garrison felt that people would have to have something of a religious awakening to see the evils of slavery and have the desire to abolish it

-          Freed black slave from Maryland who became an American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman.

-          He escaped slavery in 1838 and eventually became William Lloyd Garrison’s right hand man.

-          In 1845, his narrative about life as a slave was published. It was important not only because of the first-hand insight it gave people to the institution of slavery, but also because it showed that blacks were capable of being intelligent, eloquent people. Most whites believed that blacks were incapable of any form of higher-level thinking, but his narrative proved otherwise. Some people argued that it was dictated to a white man who wrote for him, but Douglass’ impressive speaking skills further proved nonbelievers wrong. He ended up being an exceptional public speaker.

-          In the 1840s, he took the stance that the anti-slavery movement would be furthered through politics and in doing so, he broke away from Garrison, who didn’t feel that politics needed to mix with slavery.

-          Douglass also eventually became involved in women’s suffrage in addition to his involvement in black suffrage.

-          Women were a stabilizing moral guide to their families and were seen as teachers of civic virtue.

-           Women who practiced Republican Motherhood often raised their sons to be patriotic and to see jobs in the government or politics, and raised their daughters to be like them, morally wholesome and the caretakers of their homes, too.

-          Within Republican Motherhood was the Cult of Domesticity, which was the ideal that women were the queens of their households and were to be treated as so.

-          American abolitionist. 1800-1859

-          He was born in Connecticut to a family of religious abolitionists. He failed at just about every business venture he went into and had about 20 children with 2 different wives. He was considered a zealot by most. He felt that the sin of slavery should end with the shedding of blood.

-          In 1854 under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Kansas was to be opened to statehood with slavery decided by popular sovereignty. A lot of people in favor of slavery that came into Kansas were from Missouri and they walked into many violent confrontations from abolitionists who had also gone to Kansas. Brown and six of his sons went to Kansas to promote a free constitution. Brown formed a militia. In May 1856, Brown and his militia were heading to Lawrence, KS and received word that pro-slavery forces attacked Lawrence and killed 5 anti-slavery men. Brown decided there needed to be 5 pro-slavery deaths to pay. Pottawatomie Creek – Brown went to houses after dark and dragged 5 men out of their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords.

-           Because he was wanted by federal authorities for killing the 5 pro-slavery men, he went into hiding and grew a very long beard. He began to study guerilla warfare and started to come up with a plan for the slaves to start an uprising in the South. He received funding for the plan from wealthy Northerners and tried to bring on Frederick Douglass on board but Douglass said Brown could certainly take the armory but he never would be able to get out and told him the plan was a suicide mission.

Harper’s Ferry, VA didn’t have a particularly large slave population. Brown only had about 20 men with him. The attack was October 16, 1859 and they captured the armory (there was only one guard). They took some prisoners, one of whom was a relative of George Washington. The first casualty was a black baggage handler on a train coming through the area. The train was stopped but they let it go on so everyone found out about it. The citizens of Harper’s Ferry mounted an attack against Brown and his men. Brown was tried in court and was hung on December 2, 1859, so he was effectively martyred, which was what he really wanted. The South reacted very strongly to the fact that some Northerners celebrated him as a hero and their churches rang their bells at the time of his execution. Brown was widely criticized in the North and was considered insane for what he did. At trial, Brown was remarkably eloquent and even Southerners talked about how zealous and eloquent he was. He was able to convince Northerners that he wasn’t really trying to incite a slave uprising but that he was trying to help slaves protect themselves. Northerners didn’t particularly like blacks all that much but they were embarrassed by the institution of slavery. His martyrdom was likened to the sacrifice Christ made on the cross.

-          This election was monumental because there was concern over whether or not the Union would stay intact after it.

-          The Democratic Party faced a large problem: it had both Northern and Southern factions to it. Democrats favored Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas (a big supporter of popular sovereignty). The candidate that seemed most likely to be elected was Senator William Seward of New York (Republican – new party formed out of the collapse of the Whig party). Seward was seen as very corrupt. The new Republicans were very outwardly hostile to slavery and were considered the party of the abolitionists.

-          By early 1860, the election situation was so toxic that Southern legislature was ordering the gathering of weapons if need be. In April 1860, Nominating Democratic Convention was held in Charleston, SC.  Southerners did not trust Douglas. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (Sitting Vice President under Buchanan) was a slaveholder and was seen as a candidate who would push for the extension of slavery in the territories, so many Southerners supported him instead of Douglas.

-          1860 Republican Convention in Chicago: Abraham Lincoln went to New England and began to build some notoriety. He received the support of the PA and IN delegations. He was referred to as Honest Abe even during his lifetime due to his solid reputation of being a very standup politician.

-          John Bell of Tennessee: Candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, which was a made up party that never existed before and never existed after. It was made up of older, conservative people who had previously been in the Whig party. They supported the preservation of the Union. He only won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky in the election. Douglas was only able to win one state, Missouri. Breckinridge took the South, but it wasn’t enough to beat Lincoln, who swept the North.

-          The Election of 1864 was the biggest threat to a Union victory in the Civil War. If Lincoln was reelected, it meant a victory for the Union. Lincoln ran against Democrat candidate George McClellan.

-          Going into the election, it looked like McClellan had a legitimate chance of winning because Lincoln wasn’t particularly popular at the time. In the end, though, the results weren’t nearly as close as expected, with Lincoln winning all but four states.

-          25 states participated in the election, including three new states: West Virginia, Kansas, and Nevada. The 11 seceded states did not participate.

-          McClellan only won 3 states, with Lincoln sweeping the rest of the country.

-          This was one of the most controversial elections in American history.

-          Republican candidate was Rutherford B. Hayes; Democratic candidate was Samuel J. Tilden.

-          Tilden won the popular vote but the Electoral College was split. A deal was struck with Hayes to resolve the issue: If he was granted the uncounted electoral votes to effectively win the election, he had pull troops out of the South to effectively end the Reconstruction. The deal was agreed upon.

-          A group of 5 bills passed in 1850.

-          1. Texas surrendered its claim to New Mexico as well as land above the Missouri Compromise line, though retaining its panhandle.

-          2. California’s application for admission as a free state was approved.

-          3. The Wilmot Proviso was not adopted, allowing the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide if they would prohibit slavery or not by popular sovereignty.

-          4. The Fugitive Slave Act was passed, outraging Northerners and allowing for continued slavery in DC.

-          5. The slave trade was banned in DC despite slavery remaining legal there.

-          Henry Clay formed the Compromise of 1850.

-          The Compromise generally postponed the Civil War for a decade because it made many people on both sides of slavery satisfied for the time being. Beyond that, it allowed the North to continuously industrialize, giving them the upper hand when war finally did break out.

-          Passed with the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act heightened the Northern belief that there was a Southern conspiracy about slavery. The act declared that if a runaway slave was captured, they were to be returned to their owner.

-          The act also made Federal marshals or any officials responsible for fines if they did not arrest a runaway slave, giving officials the right to arrest anyone solely on a claimant’s word without any evidence whatsoever.

-          At their trials, captured slaves could not testify to their defense.

-          The FSA was particularly loathsome to the Northerners who were abolitionists because it effectively made them legally required to take part in slavery to avoid punishment for not doing so.

-          This is the 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.

In the 1850s, in the buildup to the Civil War, Northern Democrats led by Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois promoted popular sovereignty as a middle position on the slavery issue. It said that actual residents of territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed in the territory. The federal government did not have to make the decision, and by appealing to democracy Cass and Douglas hoped they could finesse the question of support for or opposition to slavery. Douglas applied popular sovereignty to Kansas in the Kansas Nebraska Act which passed Congress in 1854. The Act had two unexpected results. By dropping the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which said slavery would never be allowed in Kansas), it was a major boost for the expansion of slavery. Overnight outrage united anti-slavery forces across the North into an "anti-Nebraska" movement that soon was institutionalized as the Republican Party, with its firm commitment to stop the expansion of slavery. Second, pro- and anti-slavery elements moved into Kansas with the intention of voting slavery up or down, leading to a raging civil war, known as "Bleeding Kansas." Abraham Lincoln targeted popular sovereignty in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, leaving Douglas in a position that alienated Southern pro-slavery Democrats who thought he was too weak in his support of slavery. The Southern Democrats broke off and ran their own candidate against Lincoln and Douglas in 1860.

-          1794-1851 An early advocate of dietary reform, anti-alcoholism, anti-masturbation, and anti-sex-for-anything-but-reproduction. He was also the inventor of the graham cracker.

-          He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

-          In the 1830s, he developed ideas that alcohol irritated the stomach. In 1832, he was in NY and gave a series of lectures on how to ensure good health and spoke of eating healthy, bland diets of grains, vegetables, and fruits and cutting out alcohol, coffee, tea. He created the graham cracker, and in its original form was very bland and dense. He taught of the importance of cleanliness and bathing regularly and also the importance of exercise. Talked about wearing loose-fitting clothes and opening windows. He wasn’t a doctor, but that wasn’t a big issue because there was no AMA. Under his theories, the absolutely worst thing a person could do was have sex. It sent all the energy of the body to their genitals and there wasn’t enough energy for the brain to function properly. Suggested that people should only have sex in order to reproduce, about once a month.

-          The Reconstruction was the process after the Civil War ended of bringing the 11 seceded states back into the Union.

-          Lincoln spoke of the Reconstruction at his inaugural speech in March 1865 but didn’t live to do anything about it. Andrew Johnson took over as president after Lincoln’s assassination.

-          Andrew Johnson (Tennessee Unionist) disliked much of the elite Southern leadership, but he was also a slaveholder who was deeply racist. His opposition to secession had nothing to do with race/slavery but rather had to do with breaking the Union. He granted amnesty to participants in the Civil War upon swearing allegiance to the Constitution. High-ranking Confederate officers needed to have amnesty personally granted by the president. Presidential Reconstruction happened between Johnson taking office and Congress coming back into session at the end of 1865.

-          The US military was dispatched to the South to keep peace between whites and newly-freed blacks.

-          As state governments in the South reentered the Union, they created Black Codes, which were directed at former slaves.

-          Vagrancy Laws were laws against being somewhere in public without having any visible means of economic support. There were very few jobs in the South after the war, and for most blacks, it meant working in agriculture on plantations. Sharecropping was when a person entered into an agreement with a landowner where they can grow crops there and often live there, and at the end of the season they had to give a portion of the crops to the landowner. Without a contract with the landowner, a black person could be thrown into jail as a vagrant. Vagrants had to stay in jail until they could pay fines, which generally they couldn’t afford, so the plantation owners could go pay the fines and they would get that person to work for the growing season for free to pay them back for getting them out of jail. It was basically a form of legal slavery.

The Reconstruction was basically a failure because it made the South poverty-stricken with whites re-establishing their supremacy and keeping blacks as second-class citizens.

-          It was somewhat similar to the first, although it mainly began on the frontier. The message was different from the first Great Awakening – they still taught the importance of salvation and belief in Christ, but instead taught that God was kind and generous and wanted nothing more than to step forward and accept Jesus instead of the previous teachings that God was vengeful. Charles Grandison Finney was one of the leading preachers of the Second Great Awakening. Most of the preachers were millenialists (had a strong sense of human history being played out in the here and now).

-          Americans thought that if they were good, it would bring about the second coming of Christ. They had the goal of reforming all of society.

Americans wanted to help improve prisoners so that when they were released into society, they would be successful citizens.

-          The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, and then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities

-          The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six veterans of the Confederate Army.

-           Although there was no organizational structure above the local level, similar groups arose across the South adopted the same name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes. Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing blacks' voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to segregationist white Democrats regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.

-          Written by Harriett Beecher Stowe. Her father was an evangelical preacher and President of the Seminary in Cincinnati. She went with her father there and met her husband. She saw slavery in the area and wasn’t fond of it. She went back to New England, where she was from, and the Fugitive Slave Act made her see the moral implications of slavery. It was then that she wrote the novel. Applied an explicitly Christian critique to the institution of slavery by using Uncle Tom, a Christ-like figure who suffers tremendous abuse and doesn’t become bitter or angry and is very forgiving. His demeanor is what changed the people assisting in his abuse into seeing the error of their ways. Stowe’s hope was that Christians would see this parallel and experience a similar conversion. Published in Spring 1852 and became a huge bestseller and ended up translated into several languages. Within the first ten years, over 2 million copies were made. It surprisingly sold well in the South, although some parts of the South called for its ban. At least 15 novels were written in the South in response to the book trying to show that slaves were better off than wage workers in factories and that their lives weren’t really terrible. It was a popular stage play, touring America in the 1850s. Allegedly, when Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he said: “So you’re the little woman who started this great big war.”

-          In 1790, slave populations were mostly close to the East Coast. Cotton growth after 1790 explains the tremendous Westward migration of slaves. Colonial-era cotton was only along the coast because they grew long-staple cotton, which required heat, humidity, and lots of rainfall. It was high-quality cotton and it was easier to separate the seeds from the fiber. Short-staple cotton, which was not as good quality and the seeds were more difficult to separate, became huge because it could grow anywhere in the South

Eli Whitney, born in 1765 in Massachusetts. Went South working on a Georgia plantation as a tutor for the plantation-owner’s children. He had gotten acquainted with machinery in New England and created the cotton gin to separate the seeds from short-staple cotton fibers. 1 machine could do the work of 50 people. He tried to patent them but they were so easy to copy, he couldn’t get a patent and therefore didn’t make any money off them. He eventually did well financially mass-producing parts of firearms.

-          Emancipation Proclamation was to be issued January 1863. It freed the slaves in territory controlled by the Confederates. It was symbolically huge because it made the war officially about slavery.

-          It was based on the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief of the armed forces; it was not a law passed by Congress. It proclaimed all slaves in Confederate territory to be forever free; that is, it ordered the Army to treat as freemen the slaves in ten states that were still in rebellion, thus applying to 3.1 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. The Proclamation immediately resulted in the freeing of 50,000 slaves, with nearly all the rest (of the 3.1 million) actively freed as Union armies advanced. The Proclamation did not compensate the owners, did not itself outlaw slavery, and did not make the ex-slaves (called freedmen) citizens. It made the destruction of slavery an explicit war goal, in addition to the goal of reuniting the Union.

-          Born in North Carolina to a slave father and free mother. At the time, the mother’s slavehood status determined the offspring’s slavehood. He went north and became a relatively successful merchant in Boston. In 1829, he published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that said if America didn’t end slavery, events of apocalyptic proportions would happen and he called on slaves to take matters into their own hands. He tried to get his pamphlet in to the hands of slaves in the South via freed black men traveling in shipping.

-          Pennsylvania member of the House of Representatives. Racist – believed blacks were inferior as well as people from Europe. Not an abolitionist, he was perfectly fine with slavery in the Southern states. But despite that, he feared that if slavery went to the West territories, it would choke off the Northerner’s options for Westward movement and growth. The Proviso said that no land that comes to America as a result of the Mexican War should have slavery. Ultimately, the House of Representatives passed it, but the Senate stopped it because the Senate was mainly controlled by the South.

-          7-2 Supreme Court Decision handed down in 1857. His wife was Harriett. 1834: Dred Scott was owned by and Missourian Army doctor, Emerson. He was assigned to a post in Illinois (a free state) and Scott went with him and worked for him for a few years, and was then transferred to Minnesota Territory (also a free region under the Missouri Compromise). Emerson bought Harriett and she and Dred Married in the late 1830s. When Emerson went back to Missouri, he took the Scotts with him as slaves. There, the Scotts filed an action claiming that their time in Illinois and the Minnesota Territory made them free. The judge was angry about the case because it had long been Missouri law that if a slave was taken out of the state to an area that was free for a given period of time, they would be rendered free. The local court rules that the Scotts were free. The decision was appealed by Dr. Emerson and the case went before the Missouri Supreme Court. They issued a ruling in 1852 that said the Scotts were not free basically as a public policy matter. In the meantime, Dr. Emerson had died and his widow gave their slaves to a relative of his, Mr. Sandford, who was a resident of the state of NY. Under the Constitution, the Federal courts would hear this case under diversity jurisdiction. If a person is from one state and the person they want to take legal action against is from another state, it can be dealt with under Federal courts. The Scotts took advantage of this loophole. The Federal judge was faced with a petition by Sanford saying that they shouldn’t take the case because as slaves, they’re not actually citizens so their statehood doesn’t matter. The judge allowed the Scotts to get into Federal court to argue the case. Unfortunately, the Federal court ruled against the Scotts also because they followed Missouri law. The case was then appealed to the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney took a specific interest in this case. He was a former slaveholder from Maryland, though he wasn’t particularly pro-slavery (he had freed his own slaves). He recognized that what the lower Federal court had done by letting the Scotts into court by admitting their citizenship would open the floodgates for cases of runaway slaves using that loophole to get freedom. He took the case. He argued that they had no jurisdiction, no citizenship, and therefore the case should have ended. One of the arguments the Scotts had made was that slavery was forever prohibited above the Missouri Compromise line. Taney responded by saying that if Congress didn’t have the authority to enact the Missouri Compromise, then it would be unconstitutional. He said it was unconstitutional to deny someone their right to slaves as property if they’re in a territory. Within a few months of the decision, Sandford was institutionalized with a mental illness; the Scotts were sent back to their original owner’s widow. She then sent them to the son of the person who sold them to her husband who then decided to free them. Dred Scott died of tuberculosis and she died not too much longer after him. It reinforced the Northern sense that there was a slave owner political conspiracy against the North and they felt increasingly that it would come to a violent political end.

-          The Adams-Onis Treaty: Set the boundary between America and Spain. Basically gave all of Florida to America. Made the Southwest mostly part of Spain’s territory.

-          Monroe Doctrine of 1823: US said to Europe that if they didn’t mess around with things here, we wouldn’t mess around with things there. This didn’t prevent Europe from dealing with Mexico, which became its own country in 1821.

-          Stephen F. Austin: Father, Moses Austin, cut a deal with Spanish gov’t right before they lost control. Deal was that he would bring settlers to Texas and they would give him a ton of land. The land became Mexican land, not Spanish, and Austin picked up the deal from his father. The problem was that any settlers Austin took to Mexico (present-day Texas) were to become Mexican citizens and become Roman Catholics (though the Catholic thing wasn’t very enforced). They were successful in populating the Texas area, and it was about 2:1 Anglican to Hispanic, by 1836 it was about 10:1. The Mexican gov’t tried to stop slavery but for Americans, this wasn’t an option because it was more land to grow cotton. Austin suggested that instead of slaves, they have workers there on 99-year contracts. Austin wasn’t actually a fan of slavery himself, but understood the economic value. In the 1830s, the Mexicans wanted to stop the immigration of Americans to Mexico. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was in command of the Mexican troops.

-          Battle of the Alamo: 1836. Texans had split up their troops into two sections in the Alamo. Santa Anna’s troops suffered more casualties than hoped for, but they took the Alamo and killed many of the Texans, including Congressman David Crockett (who didn’t like being called Davy). A certain amount of Americans were taken prisoner and hacked to death on Santa Anna’s orders. Texas gov’t declared independence – Eastern part of Texas (strongest desire for independence) led by Sam Houston. East Texas was more forested than other parts of Texas. They defeated Santa Anna’s troops in San Jacinto in 1836 and Santa Anna surrendered. Texans claimed that Santa Anna granted Texas independence and set a border. Mexican gov’t said that the grant was not binding because was Santa Anna was under distress. New gov’t in Texas had Sam Houston as president, and there were some talks about joining the US. Allied themselves with England and interacted in trade with the British. Southern US politicians had a strong desire to bring Texas into the US – they had no desire to have a country on their border that was an ally to Great Britain. Northern politicians saw Texas as a massive slave state in the US unappealing as well as having a country allied with Great Britain along the border.

-          A lot of territory was gained at the end of the Mexican War, including CA, NV, UT, AZ, and part of NM (1848). As the population began to move out to these territories, it was apparent that they would become states.

-          1808-1865. Born in Hardin County, KY. Had very poor, illiterate parents. His family moved to IN and life there was very difficult. He was put to work on their family farm. It was there that he received some very basic education (enough to read and do rudimentary math). He taught himself most of what he knew. 1830, the family moved to Macon County, IL near Decatur. By this point, he was fed up with his father using him for heavy labor. He decided to move to New Salem, IL, not terribly far from his parents.

-          He was a very well-liked guy who was witty. In 1832, he was elected captain of a militia in the Indian Blackhawk War. He served as a local postmaster. 1834, he was elected to state legislature. After this, he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He became a very successful lawyer.

-           In 1842, he married Mary Todd Lincoln. She came from a well-off slaveholding family from Lexington, KY. The marriage was, by most accounts, volatile. Lincoln suffered from a variety of mood issues that would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder now.

-          1846, Lincoln was elected to the US Congress, serving one term as a member of the Whig party.

-          He wasn’t a Christian and never really belonged to a church although he was extremely knowledgeable about the Bible and read it daily.

-           He got the reputation of being a vigorous opponent to the Mexican War. Lincoln voted in favor of the Wilmot Proviso (which said that any territory gained from the Mexican War would not be subject to slavery). Opposed the gag rule in Congress that said abolition couldn’t be discussed. He also supported a ban on slavery in DC. He wasn’t really an abolitionist because he really only wanted to keep slavery out of the territories but was fine with letting slavery be in the South. He was racist in the sense that he didn’t believe that people of African descent were equal. For him, the preservation of the Union was infinitely more important than freeing slaves. Went back to IL after his term in Congress and continued his law practice. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was what ultimately drew him back into politics. The creation of the Republican Party also drew him in. He finally agreed to run against Douglas in 1858. Lincoln’s critique was that Kansas-Nebraska Act, popular sovereignty, and the Dred Scott Decision were leading American increasingly to be a country where slavery could exist anywhere and that the country was heading toward a civil war. He was elected as a Republican President in November 1860.

-          General Ulysses Grant – son of a tanner. He didn’t want to go to West Point, where he had a horrible career. Wasn’t interested in studying and was at the bottom of his class. Ended up in the Mexican War and actually did very well. He was stationed in California and was lonely without his wife nearby and drank a good bit. When the war started, he was working as a clerk in the family tannery. He joined up in the army and quickly was given a command. Grant was involved in the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862) in Tennessee. It wasn’t particularly decisive, but it was important because it tipped off the public as to just how bloody the war was going to be.

-          Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – recreated Custer’s Last Stand, complete with Indians who actually fought Custer himself. Recreated an Indian raid on a farm, Indians performing sacred ritual dances, etc. Buffalo Bill also took Sitting Bull with him For Americans being told that they’ve lost connections to the West and all it stood for; perhaps Buffalo Bill’s show would bring them back to that. Edward Zane Carroll Judson AKA Ned Buntline – wanted to interview Bill Cody to write a Western novel. Cody served in the Civil War and was a great storyteller. Buntline wrote a novel about Cody which was popular and then wrote a play about him. He asked Cody to come to Chicago to play himself in the play, which was dreadful but nonetheless, it was incredibly popular. Cody did everything he could to look like Custer for his show. He made the Indians central to his story, making the Indians seem like they’re always in the wrong and they keep acting as the aggressors against the Americans. Boy Scouts and Western literature were created to try to continue to retain the ideals of the West.