Chapter 18 Multiple Choice

Under the terms of the Compromise of 1850

California was admitted to the Union as a free state, and the issue of slavery in Utah and New Mexico territories would be left up to popular sovereignty.

The proposed direct admission of California into the Union, without passing through territorial status, was dangerously controversial because

California's admission as a free state would destroy the equal balance of slave and free states in the U.S. Senate.

Southerners seeking to expand the territory of slavery undertook filibustering military expeditions to acquire

Nicaragua and Cuba.

It appeared that the Compromise of 1850 would fail to be enacted into law when

President Zachary Taylor suddenly died and the new president Filmore backed the compromise.

The most significant effect of the Fugitive Slave Law, passed as a part of the Compromise of 1850, was

a sharp rise in northern antislavery feeling.

In the election of 1848, the response of the Whig and Democratic parties to the rising controversy over slavery was

an attempt to ignore the issue by shoving it out of sight.

The conflict over slavery following the election of 1852 led shortly to the

death of the Whig party.

Southerners hated the Underground Railroad and demanded a stronger federal Fugitive Slave Law especially because

northern toleration of slave runaways reflected a moral judgement against slavery.

The primary goal of the Treaty of Kanawaga, which Commodore Matthew Perry signed with Japan in 1854, was

opening Japan to American trade.

The Gadsden Purchase was fundamentally designed to

permit the construction of a transcontinental railroad along a southern route.

Northerners especially resented Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act because it

repealed the Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery in northern territories.

The greatest winner in the Compromise of 1850 was

the North.

Popular sovereignty was the idea that

the government of each new territory should be elected by the people.

Rapid formation of an effective state government in California seemed especially urgent because

there was no legal authority to suppress the violence and lawlessness that accompanied the California gold rush.

Senator Daniel Webster's fundamental view regarding the issue of slavery expansion into the West was that

there was no need to legislate because climate and geography guaranteed that plantation slavery could not exist in the West.