US History Final Exam

Arthur Brisbane promoted the concepts of cooperative work and the phalanx in

"The Society Destiny of Man".

Total war

A form of warfare, new to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that engaged all of a society's resources--economic, political, and cultural--in support of the military effort. Governments mobilized massive armies of conscripted civilians rather than small forces of professional soldiers. Moreover, they attacked civilians and industries that supported the war efforts of their enemies. Witness Sherman's march through Georgia in the Civil War, and the massive American bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo during World War II and of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Transcendentalism

A nineteenth-century intellectual movement that posited the importance of an ideal world of mystical knowledge and harmony beyond the world of the senses. As articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalism called for the critical examination of society and emphasized individuality, self reliance, and nonconformity.

Free-soil movement

A political movement of the 1840s that opposed the expansion of slavery. Motivating its members--mostly white yeomen farmers--was their belief that slavery benefited "aristocratic men." They wanted farm families to settle the western territories and install democratic republican values and institutions there. The short-lived Free-Soil Party (1848-1854) stood for "free soil, free labor, free men," which subsequently became the program of the Republican Party.

Gang-labor system

A system of work discipline used on southern cotton plantations in the mid-nineteenth century. White overseers or black drivers constantly supervised gangs of enslaved laborers to enforce work norms and achieve greater productivity.

Manifest Destiny

A term coined by John L.O' Sullivan in 1845 to describe the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Adding geographical and secular dimensions to the Second Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny implied that the spread of American republican institutions and Protestant churches across the continent was part of God's plan for the world. In the late nineteenth century, the focus of the policy expanded to include overseas expansion.

Separate spheres

A term used by historians to describe the nineteenth-century view that men and women have different gender-defined characteristics and, consequently, that the sexes inhabit--and should inhabit--different social worlds. Men should dominate the public sphere of politics and economics, while women should manage the private spheres of home and family. In mid-nineteenth-century America, this cultural understanding was both sharply defined and hotly contested.

"King Cotton"

A term used to describe the importance of raw cotton to the nineteenth-century economy. More specifically, the Confederate belief during the Civil War that their cotton was so important to the British and French economies that those governments would recognize the South as an independent nation and supply it with loans and arms.

Socialism

A theory of social and economic organization based on the common ownership of goods. Utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century envisioned small planned communities; later socialists campaigned for state ownership of railroads and large industries.

In 1835, in Charleston, South Carolina, a mob attacked a post office for what reason?

Abolitionist pamphlets were being delivered by the post office.

Individualism

Alexis de Tocqueville coined this work to describe the condition and values of native-born white Americans--Americans were "no longer attached to each other by any tie of caste, class, association or family" and lived solitary lives.

Utopia

An ideal and perfect place or state where everyone lives in harmony and everything is for the best.

Secret ballot

Before 1890 most Americans voted "in public." That is, voters either announced their vote to a clerk or handed in a ballot that had been printed by--and so was recognizable as the work of--a political party. Voting "in private" or "in secret" was first used on a wide scale in Australia. When the practice was adopted in the United States, it was known as the Australian ballot.

Why did the discovery of gold in California affect the national debate on slavery?

California sought statehood as a free state in 1850, which would have blocked slavery in the West.

Emerson's ideas most closely resembled

Charles Grandison Finney's "moral free agency."

Many northerners were troubled by abolitionist tactics for all of the following reasons except

Christian doctrine appeared to support slavery. (They were troubled because freed slaves might take the jobs of northern wage earners, abolitionists actively involved women in the movement, and many northerners feared race-mixing.)

Texas was annexed after

Congress approved a joint resolution.

"Conversations on Common Things (1824)" was written by

Dorothea Dix.

Seneca Falls Convention

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a gathering that outlined a coherent statement for women's equality.

All of the following people gained fame during the Texas independence movement except

Frederick Douglass. (Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Stephen Austin did gain fame during this movement.)

Which of the following nations did not claim title to lands in North America in the 1820s?

Germany.

The Great Plains in the 1820s and 1830s were known as the

Great American Desert.

Why did President Van Buren refuse to annex Texas?

He feared a war with Mexico.

An early public education reformer was

Horace Mann.

All of the following were common ways to die on the overland migration westward except

Indian attack. (These were common ways to die: disease, exposure, and childbirth.)

Free blacks faced all of the following dangers except

Indian massacre. (They feared being kidnapped and sold, being legally forced back into slavery, and denial of a jury trial.)

The Liberty Party in the 1844 presidential election ran

James G. Birney

Which eastern abolitionist, inflamed by the sack of the free-soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, led the vigilantes who took revenge on proslavery settlers in the Pottawatomie massacre?

John Brown.

The United States dispatched which of the following men to lead a heavily armed "exploring" party to California in 1845?

John C. Fremont

The event that proved to the be the last nail in the coffin of the Second Party System and contributed directly to the emergence of the Republican Party was the

Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Republican Party drew the least support from which of the following groups?

Know-Nothing Party members.

Habeas corpus

Latin for "bring forth the body," a legal writ forcing government authorities to justify their arrest and detention of an individual. Rooted in English common law, habeas corpus was given the status of formal privilege in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 9), which also allows its suspension in cases of invasion or insurrection. During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to stop protests against the draft and other anti-Union activities. The USA Patriot Act (2001) likewise suspends this privilege in cases of suspected terrorism, but the constitutional legitimacy of this and other provisions of the act has yet to be decided by the courts.

Personal-liberty laws

Laws enacted in many northern states to protect free blacks and fugitive slaves from southern slave catchers. Early laws required a formal hearing before a local court. When these kinds of provisions were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), new laws prohibited state officials from helping slave catchers.

All of the following are true about the election of 1860 except

Lincoln won a majority of the popular vote but a plurality of the electoral vote. (These are true: Lincoln received no support in the slave states, the only northern state Lincoln failed to win was New Jersey, and the Republicans won.)

Greenbacks

Paper money issued by the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War to finance the war effort. Greenbacks had the status of legal tender in all public and private transactions. Because they were issued in large amounts and were not backed by gold or silver, the value of a greenback dollar fell during the war to 40 cents (but much less than the notes issued during the Revolutionary War, which became virtually worthless) and recovered only as the Union government won the war and proceeded to reduce its war-related debt.

In 1854, politically speaking, Abraham Lincoln was a

Republican and former Whig who supported a moderate gradualist view on abolition.

Which of the following free black men headed the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC)?

Richard Allen

Which of the following locations provided legal freedom to African American slaves in the Lower South until 1819?

Spanish Florida

Great American Desert

The name given to the drought-stricken Great Plains by Euro-Americans in the early nineteenth century. Believing the region as unfit for cultivation or agriculture, Congress designated the Great Plains as permanent Indian country in 1834.

Popular sovereignty

The republican principle that ultimate power resides in the hands of the electorate. Popular sovereignty dictates that voters directly or indirectly (through their elected representatives) ratify the constitutions of their state and national governments and amendments to those fundamental laws. During the 1850s the U.S. Congress applied the principle to western lands by enacting legislation that gave residents there the authority to determine the status of slavery in their own territories.

An American merchant who lived in California under the Mexican regime in the early 1820s was

Thomas Larkin.

What book did Harriet Beecher Stowe write that increased northern agitation against slavery?

Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The most determined abolitionist of the era was

William Lloyd Garrison.

All of the following tribes are considered part of the the Great Plains tradition except

Yuki. (These were considered part of the Great Plains tradition: Crees, Blackfeet, and Assinboines.)

The New South in the early 1800s was characterized by

a high geographical mobility and a desire to make the West into a slave society.

All of the following describe the urban sex scene in NYC in the early 1800s except

a homosexual subculture did not exist. (These describe it: men and women engaged in serial dating until they found an ideal mate, men and women dressed in the latest fashions to enhance their allure, and men and women were freed from parental oversight.)

Shakers

accepted the common ownership of property and a strict government by the church and pledged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, politics, and war. Shakers also believed that God was both male and female. They eliminated marriage and were committed to a life of celibacy.

Lincoln's ambition propelled him into politics after having been raised by

an impoverished yeoman farming family.

In the 1820s and 1830s, Americans settling in California differed from settlers in Texas because they

assimilated into Mexican culture.

Because the Shakers believed that God was both male and female, they

attempted to eliminate gender distinctions.

Perfectionists believed that freedom from sin was possible

because the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred.

Margaret Fuller's greatest contribution to transcendental philosophy was her

belief that men and women were equally capable of transcendence.

A number of Whigs opposed the Mexican War because they

believed it was part of an immoral conspiracy by southerners to expand the institution of slavery.

Arthur Brisbane and Fourierism

believed that cooperative work groups called phalanxes would replace capitalist wage labor with socialism and liberate both men and women.

Perfectionism

believed that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred and that people could therefore aspire to perfection in their earthly lives and attain complete freedom from sin.

As a congressman during the Mexican War, Lincoln supported

both the war and the Wilmot Proviso.

The indigenous animal that sustained many Great Plains tribes in the 1800s was the

buffalo.

Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged listeners and readers to seek transcendence to a higher reality because he wanted them to

celebrate individualism and energize the American spirit.

John Humphrey Noyes wanted to liberate individuals and reform relations between men and women and so embraced the concept of

complex marriage.

Ideas that the Shakers supported included all of the following except

complex marriage. (They supported celibacy, abstention from alcohol, and abstention from politics and war.)

The domestic slave trade impacted African American families by

destroying one in four slave marriages.

All of the following describe Nat Turner except that he

did not experience separation from his loved ones and family. (He was a slave who led a slave revolt in South Hampton County, Virginia, he taught himself to read and write as a child, and he became a devout evangelical Protestant.)

Middle-class planters were characterized by all of the following criteria except they

did not play a substantial role in slave society. (They made up a fifth of the slave-owning population, owned from six to twenty slaves each, and owned almost 40 percent of the slave population.)

William Lloyd Garrison's insistence on broadening the abolitionist agenda split the organization by pushing out those who

did not support women's rights.

John L.O' Sullivan's term Manifest Destiny

embodied the dreams of American expansionists.

The Mormons differed from other communal experiments in their

emphasis on traditional patriarchal authority.

Moral reform was primarily a women's movement to

end prostitution.

Southerners responded to the abolitionist movement and to fears of slave rebellion in all of the following ways except

ending the foreign slave trade. (They responded by toughening slave codes, removing abolitionist pamphlets from the mail, and limiting slave movements and prohibiting slaves from being taught to read.)

African American slaves utilized all of the following methods of escape except

enlisting in the U.S. Army. (They used these methods: flight, manumission, and gradual emancipation laws.)

Brook Farm failed in large part because it

failed economically.

James K. Polk pursued all of the following plans to acquire Mexico's far northern provinces except

fomenting rebellions by American settlers in each province. (He pursued these plans: declaring war on the basis of national defense, having American troops invade central Mexico and seize Mexico City, and negotiating with the Mexicans to fulfill his territorial ambitions in the Southwest.)

Joseph Smith

founder of Mormon community; believed he received a special revelation of divine truth--The Book of Mormon.

The Compromise of 1850, hammered out by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas, included all of the following except the

granting to Texas of all the land west of Texas as far as the Rio Grande. (It included the Fugitive Slave Act, admission of California to the Union as a free state, and abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.)

Emerson had his greatest impact on the middle class because they

had already accepted the idea of moral perfection and moral free agency.

Where did most free southern blacks live?

in coastal cities.

Prominent transcendentalists rejected all of the following except

individual communion with nature. (They rejected modern industrial life, organized religion, and tradition and custom.)

The federal government played a major role in the expansion of slavery to the New South through all of the following ways except

investing in railroads and other industrial development projects in the 1810s. (They played a major role in the expansion of slavery by removing Native Americas from the southeastern states in the 1830s, annexing Texas and Mexican territories in the 1840s, and securing Louisiana from the French in 1803.)

The domestic slave trade impacted the institution of slavery in all of the following ways except

it helped to slow the expansion of slavery over geographical space. (It impacted the institution of slavery by helping to extend the black population further south and west, contributing to the expansion of the cotton industry in the South, and by bringing large numbers of Irish immigrants to the South.)

The free-soil concept achieved significant popular support because

it stressed protection of white economic opportunity.

The gang system of slave labor in the New South was characterized by

large work crews supervised by a black driver and a white overseer to work on plantations.

Arthur Brisbane believed the phalanx would

liberate women.

Between 1836 and 1844, the federal government responded to abolition by

limiting the debate in Congress of antislavery petitions.

Democrats built up support for the annexation of Texas in 1844 by

linking Texas to the Oregon question.

Herman Melville came to the conclusion that extreme individualism led to

madness and death.

The most successful tactic of Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society in affecting public opinion was to

mail abolitionist pamphlets throughout the country.

In 1849, most of the immigrants who came to California by land and sea to mine for gold were

men.

The most important form of urban entertainment in the U.S. between 1820 and 1860 was

minstrel shows.

The southern convention considered secession in 1850, but southern states did not secede then because

moderates convinced them to support the Compromise of 1850 with the understanding that secession would receive widespread support in the case of future slavery restrictions.

What approximate amount of the present-day continental United States in the hands of other nations in 1830?

more than half.

All of the following are true regarding women teachers and public education in the mid-1800s except

most teachers were men by the 1850s. (These are true: women were considered morally superior to men as teachers, women were paid lower salaries than men as teachers, and local school boards favored women teachers over men.)

All of the following were provision of the Fugitive Slave Act except

no free northern blacks were reenslaved through the act. (Provisions included: federal magistrates in the northern states determined the status of alleged runaway slaves, the law denied a jury trial to accused blacks, and the laws denied the right of blacks to testify.)

The most common response of white Americans to the abolition movement was

opposition to the movement.

The Wilmot Proviso did all of the following except

pass through Congress with the support of an antiwar coalition. (It won the support of many northern free-soil Democrats, prohibited slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, and appeased the conscience Whigs.)

The Treaty of Gladalupe Hidalgo ensured

payment to Mexico of $15 million from the United States.

In response to federal passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, northern states passed

personal-liberty laws.

In which of the following ways did the federal government not restrict free black people?

prohibition against living in the northern states. (They restricted free black people by denial of a U.S. passport, prohibition against working for the postal service, and prohibition against claiming public lands.)

The abolitionist strategies to eliminate slavery in America included all of the following except

purchasing slaves' freedom through a massive program of remuneration to southern masters. (They included assisting slaves who had escaped to the North, convincing people of the evil slavery through mass propaganda and publicity, and using political pressure in order to pursue antislavery legislation.)

By the 1840s, approximately one thousand escaped slaves reached freedom in northern states or Canada each year by

receiving aid from the Underground Railroad.

"Oregon fever" was the result of

reports of potential harbors and fertile soil.

The Chesapeake region contributed to the domestic slave trade by

selling surplus African American slaves to the New South.

All of the following are examples of passive resistance except

slave rebellion. (Examples are feigning illness, losing or breaking tools, and non-compliance with orders.)

John Brown intended to end which of the following institutions by his raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859?

slavery.

Brook Farm appealed primarily to

teachers, writers, and students.

James K. Polk won the presidential election of 1844 because

the Liberty Party took votes away from the Whig candidate.

What was the name of the written statement, issued by American diplomats in Europe, that justified the U.S. seizure of Cuba,?

the Ostend Manifesto.

Abolitionism drew upon which of the following movements?

the Second Great Awakening.

Free blacks in the North sought to encourage emancipation and race equality through all of the following except

the bribing of southern slaveholders. (They stressed temperance and education for free blacks, justified violent slave revolts, and encouraged legal resistance.)

Instead of agreeing to Pierce's annexation bid for more Mexican territory, Mexican officials agreed to sell a small amount of land earmarked by James Gadsden for

the construction of a southern-based transcontinental railroad.

The direct results of the Fugitive Slave Act included all of the following except

the formation of the Republican Party. (Results of the Fugitive Slave Act included the passage of personal-liberty laws in northern states, abolitionist attempts to help runaway slaves, and the popularity of "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

Walt Whitman went beyond Emerson's teaching in his belief that

the individual was divine.

Critics of transcendentalism such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville focused on

the perils of excessive individualism.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney argued all of the following except

the platform of the Republican Party was unconstitutional. (They argued that slaves were not citizens and did not have the right to sue for their rights in the federal court system; southern masters' property, including slaves, was protected by the Fifth Amendment and thus a slaveholder could not be prohibited from taking his property into the territories; any laws passed by Congress to control the ownership of slaves in the territories were unconstitutional because Congress could not give to territorial governments powers that it did not possess.)

Urban popular culture was based on

the thousands of young rural people who flocked to the city in search of fortune and adventure.

The domestic slave trade was

the transportation and economic system that brought black slaves to the New South.

Average whites responded to the abolitionist movement in all of the following ways except

they embraced African American people. (They attacked mixed-race brothels and bars, they killed white abolitionists, and they attacked the U.S. postal service for distributing antislavery pamphlets.)

Tobacco-growing elite planters were characterized by all of the following criteria except

they experienced historical changes similar to the rice planters of South Carolina. (They were characterized by these criteria: they increasingly interfered in the lives of their slaves during the 1800s, they defended slavery as a "positive good", and they lived lives of a genteel aristocracy.)

Yeoman farmers were characterized by all of the following criteria except

they were not influenced by the patriarchal ideology of the South. (They ruled their holdings with an iron hand, most lived and died hard-scrabble farmers, and they worked alongside slaves in their fields.)

Events in Kansas seemed to demonstrate that popular sovereignty would lead

to violence.

The Whigs selected Zachary Taylor as their candidate for the presidency in1848 because he

was a war hero.

The Mormon practice of polygamy

was opposed by some within their church as well as non-Mormon Christians outside it.

All of the following describe historical aspects of the Underground Railroad except

whites did not assist in helping slaves escape and secure freedom. (Free black sailors sometimes loaned their freedom papers to escaped slaves, Frederick Douglass secured his freedom though the Underground Railroad, and Harriet Tubman repeatedly went back to the South to help African Americans escape slavery.)

Bowery Boy

young working urban boy who worked in the factory by day and enjoyed the city by night; participated in the latest fashions and commercialized sex.