All of these men are considered Founding Fathers or Constitutional Framers, except Henry Clay, who was a prominent politician for a few decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Henry Clay was a longtime Speaker of the House and also served as Secretary of State from 1825 until 1829. 

Poor Richard’s Almanack was written and published by Benjamin Franklin. The almanac made Franklin rich and famous, and it helped spread Enlightenment ideas to the common people.

A charter was a legal document granted by the English King, or British government, that granted an individual or corporation the right to establish a colony in the New World in the years before independence. There were different types of charters—proprietary charters gave control of land to one man, who was effectively autonomous but owed allegiance to the British crown; a joint stock charter allowed a corporation, or group of individuals, collectively to own land and establish a colony; royal charters created colonies directly controlled by the crown.

The Barbary Wars, first in 1801, during the administration of Thomas Jefferson, and again in 1815, during the presidency of James Madison, were fought to ensure safe and free passage for American merchant ships in North Africa. At the time American merchant ships were subject to harassment and capture by pirate ships in the Mediterranean, near North Africa. The Barbary Wars were fought by the United States Navy against these pirates and resulted in an American victory.

The Proclamation of 1763 was issued by the British government very shortly after the French-Indian War ended. It stated that the American colonists were now prohibited from settling beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was done mostly to appease the Native-American allies of the British government, but it greatly angered the colonists. The end of the French-Indian War is considered the turning point that led to the American Revolution. Because the victory of the British over the French removed the threat of French invasion of the American colonies, the colonists no longer had to rely on British protection; furthermore, the British government felt that the colonists ought to be paying the cost of defending their lands, whereas the colonists felt that the British government had no right to tax them without allowing them representation in government. This situation led to a rapid and significant loss of faith between the two peoples, and revolution broke out a little more than a decade later.

The Intolerable Acts were passed by the British Empire in the wake of the Boston Tea Party and were designed to deter future potential rebels from contemplating revolution; however, this only served to heighten the angered feelings of the colonists and contributed directly to the calling together of the First Continental Congress.

The Wilmot Proviso was first proposed in 1847 as a provision on a larger bill. It was an attempt at banning the extension of slavery into any territories acquired from the Mexican-American War; however, it was blocked in Congress by Southern opposition in the Senate. It is considered a major moment in the attempts to unify the disparate economies and social systems of the North and South by compromising on the issue of slavery prior to the Civil War.

Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were generals in the Union Army. Robert E. Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The leadership of the Confederate army was considered one of the strengths of the South during the Civil War.

The Underground Railroad is a metaphor for a system of known routes and safe houses used by slaves escaping from the South to the North. The Railroad was used by several tens of thousands of escaped slaves in the years immediately before and during the Civil War.

The American Civil War took place from 1861 to 1865. The war broke out between the North and the South over a series of issues. Popular history tends to remember the issue of slavery as being the most important, but the primary reason why the South seceded from the Union was that they no longer felt they could be adequately represented in government. The population of the North at the time was almost three times as large as the South, and the economic and industrial interests of the country were all rooted in the North.