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Unit 5
10–17% of examFrom 1844 to 1877 the United States expanded to the Pacific, then nearly broke apart over whether slavery could spread into the new land. You'll follow the failed compromises of the 1850s, the Civil War that ended slavery, and Reconstruction, which rewrote the Constitution but left many of its promises to Black Americans unfulfilled.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
This opening topic sets the scene for 1844–1877. Rapid westward expansion in the 1840s raised a question the country could not settle peacefully: would slavery spread into the new land? That fight led to secession, a devastating civil war and Reconstruction, which remade the Constitution.
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In 1845 the editor John O'Sullivan coined 'Manifest Destiny', the belief that the U.S. was meant to spread across the continent. Hopes for land, gold and trade drove the annexation of Texas (1845), the Oregon agreement with Britain (1846), the California Gold Rush and new trade ties with Asia, while Mormons and other settlers moved west too.
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A border dispute after the annexation of Texas led to war with Mexico (1846–1848). In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico gave up about half its territory (counting Texas), including California and the rest of the Mexican Cession. The Wilmot Proviso's failed attempt to ban slavery there reopened the slavery fight, and many Mexican Americans and American Indians in the new lands lost land and rights.
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California's request to join the Union as a free state set off a crisis that Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas settled with the Compromise of 1850. California came in free, the slave trade (but not slavery) was banned in Washington, D.C., popular sovereignty would decide slavery in Utah and New Mexico, and a tougher Fugitive Slave Act angered many Northerners.
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The North's economy rested on free wage labor and the South's on slavery, and abolitionists' moral arguments and books like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) clashed with Southern claims that slavery was a 'positive good' protected by the Constitution. Many Northerners also backed 'free soil', keeping slavery out of the West, while the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings targeted Irish and German immigrants.
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The Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854) let settlers vote on slavery and erased the Missouri Compromise line, leading to violence in 'Bleeding Kansas'. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, John Brown raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, and the new Republican Party rose as the Whigs collapsed.
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Abraham Lincoln won the four-way election of 1860 on a Republican platform of keeping slavery out of the territories, without carrying a single Southern state. South Carolina seceded in December 1860, other Deep South states followed and formed the Confederacy, and after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 more Southern states left while the border slave states stayed in the Union.
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The Confederacy won early battles with bold generals like Robert E. Lee, but the Union had more people, factories and railroads and slowly wore it down with a naval blockade and campaigns in the West. Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, Sherman's march through Georgia, and around 180,000 Black soldiers helped lead to Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865.
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Lincoln began the war to save the Union, but the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) made ending slavery a war goal and opened the Union army to Black soldiers. With Southern members gone, Congress also passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act, while both sides used drafts and Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
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Andrew Johnson's lenient plan let Southern states pass Black Codes, so Radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction, put the South under military districts and impeached Johnson. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, the 14th made Black Americans citizens with equal protection of the laws, and the 15th barred denying the vote because of race, though it split women's rights activists by leaving women out.
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Without land of their own, many freedpeople became sharecroppers trapped in debt, and the Ku Klux Klan and other groups used terror to stop Black political power. Northern interest faded, and in the Compromise of 1877 Rutherford B. Hayes became president and federal troops left the South. Still, the 14th and 15th Amendments stayed on the books and later became the basis for the civil rights movement.
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This skill topic asks you to compare developments across Period 5, such as the Northern free-labor economy and the Southern slave economy, Lincoln's and Johnson's plans for Reconstruction versus Congress's, or how the war changed what it meant to be an American. Practice naming both similarities and differences and explaining why they matter.
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