LearningCurve Ch. 11

Why did southerners eschew investing in industry by, for example, not building many factories between 1820 and 1860?

Cotton farming was too profitable. "We have no cities—we don't want them," boasted U.S. senator Louis Wigfall of Texas in 1861. "We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. . . . As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want."

In which region of the antebellum South was slave ownership likely to be lowest?

Hilly western North Carolina In some cotton-rich counties, 40 percent of the white families owned slaves; in the hill country near the Appalachian Mountains—such as western North Carolina—the proportion dropped to 10 percent.

Who coined the term Manifest Destiny in 1845 to describe the United States God-given right to control the North American continent?

James L. O'Sullivan John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, coined the term in 1845 to express the idea that Euro-Americans were fated by God to settle the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Which of the following describes the placement of dominant Native peoples on the Great Plains from north to south around 1860?

Lakota Sioux; Kiowas; Comanches The Lakota Sioux dominated the northern Great Plains; the Kiowas, along with the Cheyennes and Arapahos, were one of the dominant peoples in the central Great Plains, between the Arkansas and Red rivers; the Comanches dominated the southern Great Plains into Texas.

What name is given the belief in a god-given American cultural and racial superiority that lay behind the desire to make the entire continent part of American democracy?

Manifest Destiny The belief in American cultural and racial superiority that lay behind the desire to make the entire continent part of American democracy was called Manifest Destiny.

While mass uprisings among slaves were rare in the antebellum South, who did attempt one in 1831?

Nat Turner Turner led an unsuccessful slave revolt in 1831 in Virginia.

How did tax policy in Alabama differ from tax policy in other southern states between roughly 1830 and 1860?

Slave property was taxed to a greater extent in Alabama. Because the 1819 Alabama Constitution granted the vote to all white men, politicians there had to pander to a wider political audience. As such, taxes in Alabama focused more on slaves than they did in other states.

In the generation before the Civil War, wealthy southern planters were able to co-opt poor freemen to support the slave system, which accorded the latter group little respect, by

emphasizing white supremacy. As Alfred Iverson, a U.S. senator from Georgia, explained: a white man "walks erect in the dignity of his color and race, and feels that he is a superior being, with the more exalted powers and privileges than others." To reinforce that sense of racial superiority, planter James Henry Hammond told his poor white neighbors, "In a slave country every freeman is an aristocrat."

American settlement of Oregon differed from American settlement of Texas because Oregon's settlement was based on

an intergovernmental agreement. Unlike with Texas, where the Spanish and later the Mexican governments agreed to American settlement with private individuals like Stephen F. Austin, the U.S. government and the British government agreed to divide Oregon.

The wives of small freeholders joined churches in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s South because churches

offered a temporary escape from southern patriarchy. Women especially welcomed the message of spiritual equality preached in evangelical Baptist and Methodist churches, and they hoped that the church community would hold their husbands to the same standards of Christian behavior to which they conformed.