gov ch 2

12. What was the Mayflower Compact?

, an agreement to govern themselves according to the laws created by the male voters of the colony.

59. How many times has the Constitution been amended?

27 times

35. Who was president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787?

george washington

15. What were the opposing sides in the Seven Years War?

great britain and france

8. According to Locke, who created government?

human beings

Which document declared that God had given everyone "the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"

Declaration of independence

52. What are reserved powers?

All powers not expressly given to the national government, however, were intended to be exercised by the states.

54. What process was used to ratify the new Constitution?

Article VII, the final article of the Constitution, required that before the Constitution could become law and a new government could form, the document had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen states. Eleven days after the delegates at the Philadelphia convention approved it, copies of the Constitution were sent to each of the states, which were to hold ratifying conventions to either accept or reject it.

32. Why did the Articles of Confederation prove inadequate?

Articles had created a central government too weak to function effectively -couldnt impose taxes and states were negligent to pay -couldnt raise sufficient funds to compensate for losses from american revolution -overhwlming debt from poor banking -lacked poiwer to raise an army or navy -The national government could not regulate foreign trade or interstate commerce. -Each state had only one vote in Congress regardless of its size.Populous states were less well represented. - The Articles could not be changed without a unanimous vote to do so. - There was no national judicial system.

56. Who were the Federalists? Who were the Anti-Federalists?

CAMPAIGN On the question of ratification, citizens quickly separated into two groups: Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists supported it. They tended to be among the elite members of society—wealthy and well-educated landowners, businessmen, and former military commanders who believed a strong government would be better for both national defense and economic growth. A national currency, which the federal government had the power to create, would ease business transactions. The ability of the federal government to regulate trade and place tariffs on imports would protect merchants from foreign competition. Furthermore, the power to collect taxes would allow the national government to fund internal improvements like roads, which would also help businessmen. Support for the Federalists was especially strong in New England. Opponents of ratification were called Anti-Federalists. Anti-Federalists feared the power of the national government and believed state legislatures, with which they had more contact, could better protect their freedoms. Although some Anti-Federalists, like Patrick Henry, were wealthy, most distrusted the elite and believed a strong federal government would favor the rich over those of "the middling sort." This was certainly the fear of Melancton Smith, a New York merchant and landowner, who believed that power should rest in the hands of small, landowning farmers of average wealth who "are more temperate, of better morals and less ambitious than the great."14 Even members of the social elite, like Henry, feared that the centralization of power would lead to the creation of a political aristocracy, to the detriment of state sovereignty and individual liberty.

25. Who declared independence in 1776?

Congress

46. What are some examples of checks and balances?

Congress was given the power to make laws, but the executive branch, consisting of the president and the vice president, and the federal judiciary, notably the Supreme Court, were created to, respectively, enforce laws and try cases arising under federal law. Neither of these branches had existed under the Articles of Confederation. Thus, Congress can pass laws, but its power to do so can be checked by the president, who can veto potential legislation so that it cannot become a law. Later, Other examples of checks and balances include the ability of Congress to limit the president's veto. Should the president veto a bill passed by both houses of Congress, the bill is returned to Congress to be voted on again. If the bill passes both the House of Representatives and the Senate with a two-thirds vote in its favor, it becomes law even though the president has refused to sign it.

42. What was the Great Compromise?

Congress, it was decided, would consist of two chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state, regardless of size, would have two senators, making for equal representation as in the New Jersey Plan. Representation in the House would be based on population. Senators were to be appointed by state legislatures, a variation on the Virginia Plan. Members of the House of Representatives would be popularly elected by the voters in each state. Elected members of the House would be limited to two years in office before having to seek reelection, and those appointed to the Senate by each state's political elite would serve a term of six years. Congress was given great power, including the power to tax, maintain an army and a navy, and regulate trade and commerce. Congress had authority that the national government lacked under the Articles of Confederation. It could also coin and borrow money, grant patents and copyrights, declare war, and establish laws regulating naturalization and bankruptcy. While legislation could be proposed by either chamber of Congress, it had to pass both chambers by a majority vote before being sent to the president to be signed into law, and all bills to raise revenue had to begin in the House of Representatives. Only those men elected by the voters to represent them could impose taxes upon them. There would be no more taxation without representation.

7. What was the English Bill of Rights?

English Bill of Rights, heavily influenced by Locke's ideas, enumerated the rights of English citizens and explicitly guaranteed rights to life, liberty, and property. This document would profoundly influence the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

5. According to Locke, what was the source of the people's rights of life, liberty, and property?

God

51. What are enumerated powers?

Great or explicit powers, called enumerated powers, were granted to the federal government to declare war, impose taxes, coin and regulate currency, regulate foreign and interstate commerce, raise and maintain an army and a navy, maintain a post office, make treaties with foreign nations and with Native American tribes, and make laws regulating the naturalization of immigrants.

61. What is the Bill of Rights?

Having drafted nineteen proposed amendments, Madison submitted them to Congress. Only twelve were approved by two-thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and sent to the states for ratification. Of these, only ten were accepted by three-quarters of the state legislatures. In 1791, these first ten amendments were added to the Constitution and became known as the Bill of Rights.

22. What were the Coercive Acts?

In the early months of 1774, Parliament responded to this latest act of colonial defiance by passing a series of laws called the Coercive Acts, intended to punish Boston for leading resistance to British rule and to restore order in the colonies. These acts virtually abolished town meetings in Massachusetts and otherwise interfered with the colony's ability to govern itself.

24. What was the Second Continental Congress?

In May 1775, delegates met again in the Second Continental Congress. By this time, war with Great Britain had already begun, following skirmishes between colonial militiamen and British troops at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Congress drafted a Declaration of Causes explaining the colonies' reasons for rebellion.

21. What was the Boston Tea Party?

Massachusetts. In December 1773, a group of Boston men boarded a ship in Boston harbor and threw its cargo of tea, owned by the British East India Company, into the water to protest British policies, including the granting of a monopoly on tea to the British East India Company, which many colonial merchants resented.

9. What was the social contract?

People sacrificed a small portion of their freedom and consented to be ruled in exchange for the government's protection of their lives, liberty, and property. . Should government deprive people of their rights by abusing the power given to it, the contract was broken and the people were no longer bound by its terms. The people could thus withdraw their consent to obey and form another government for their protection.

39. What were the most important issues at the Constitutional Convention of 1787?

Perhaps the greatest division among the states split those who favored a strong national government and those who favored limiting its powers and allowing states to govern themselves in most matters.

55. What was the greatest source of dissatisfaction with the new Constitution?

Perhaps the greatest source of dissatisfaction with the Constitution was that it did not guarantee protection of individual liberties. State governments had given jury trials to residents charged with violating the law and allowed their residents to possess weapons for their protection. Some had practiced religious tolerance as well. The Constitution, however, did not contain reassurances that the federal government would do so. Although

60. What are the procedures for amending the Constitution?

States have two ways to ratify or defeat a proposed amendment. First, if three-quarters of state legislatures vote to approve an amendment, it becomes part of the Constitution. Second, if three-quarters of state-ratifying conventions support the amendment, it is ratified. A second method of proposal of an amendment allows for the petitioning of Congress by the states: Upon receiving such petitions from two-thirds of the states, Congress must call a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments, which would then be forwarded to the states for ratification by the required three-quarters. All the current constitutional amendments were created using the first method of proposal (via Congress).

19. What did the Townshend Act do?

imposed taxes on many everyday objects such as glass, tea, and paint.

40. How was the Constitution structured?

The Constitution consists of a preamble and seven articles. The first three articles divide the national government into three branches—Congress, the executive branch, and the federal judiciary—and describe the powers and responsibilities of each.

63. What is the significance of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments?

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified at the end of the Civil War, changed the lives of African Americans who had been held in slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and equal protection under the law regardless of race or color. It also prohibited states from depriving their residents of life, liberty, or property without a legal proceeding. Over the years, the Fourteenth Amendment has been used to require states to protect most of the same federal freedoms granted by the Bill of Rights. The Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments extended the right to vote. The Constitution had given states the power to set voting requirements, but the states had used this authority to deny women the right to vote. Most states before the 1830s had also used this authority to deny suffrage to property-less men and often to African American men as well. When states began to change property requirements for voters in the 1830s, many that had allowed free, property-owning African American men to vote restricted the suffrage to white men. The Fifteenth Amendment gave men the right to vote regardless of race or color, but women were still prohibited from voting in most states. After many years of campaigns for suffrage, as shown in Figure 2.15, the Nineteenth Amendment finally gave women the right to vote in 1920.

65. What was the significance of the Twenty-Third Amendment?

The Twenty-Third Amendment (1961) allowed residents of Washington, DC to vote for the president.

10. Why were Locke's ideas attractive to the American colonists?

The belief that government should not deprive people of their liberties and should be restricted in its power over citizens' lives

How did the aftermath of the Seven Years War affect the relationship between Great Britain and the colonists?

The colonists had fought on behalf of Britain, and many colonists expected that after the war they would be allowed to settle on land west of the Appalachian Mountains that had been taken from France. However, their hopes were not realized. Hoping to prevent conflict with Indian tribes in the Ohio Valley, Parliament passed the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade the colonists to purchase land or settle west of the Appalachian Mountains. To pay its debts from the war and maintain the troops it left behind to protect the colonies, the British government had to take new measures to raise revenue. Among the acts passed by Parliament were laws requiring American colonists to pay British merchants with gold and silver instead of paper currency and a mandate that suspected smugglers be tried in vice-admiralty courts, without jury trials. What angered the colonists most of all, however, was the imposition of direct taxes: taxes imposed on individuals instead of on transactions.

36. What is a bicameral legislature?

The number of a state's representatives in each house was to be based on the state's population. In each state, representatives in the lower house would be elected by popular vote. These representatives would then select their state's representatives in the upper house from among candidates proposed by the state's legislature. Once a representative's term in the legislature had ended, the representative could not be reelected until an unspecified amount of time had passed.

26. Who drafted the Declaration of Independence?

Thomas Jefferson

41. Which article dealt with Congress? The executive branch? The federal judiciary?

each. In Article I, ten sections describe the structure of Congress, the basis for representation and the requirements for serving in Congress, the length of Congressional terms, and the powers of Congress. The national legislature created by the article reflects the compromises reached by the delegates regarding such issues as representation, slavery, and national power.

What was Shays' Rebellion and why was it important to the eventual replacement of the Articles of Confederation?

farmers marched to courthouse demanding relief that the congress had promised but never provided After several months, Massachusetts crushed the uprising with the help of local militias and privately funded armies, but wealthy people were frightened by this display of unrest on the part of poor men and by similar incidents taking place in other states.6 To find a solution and resolve problems related to commerce, members of Congress called for a revision of the Articles of Confederation.

What is a republic?

a regime in which the people, not a monarch, held power and elected representatives to govern according to the rule of law.

2. Who was John Locke?

a seventeenth-century English philosopher, were his ideas regarding the relationship between government and natural rights, which were believed to be God-given rights to life, liberty, and property.

3. What did Locke believe about the relationship between government and natural rights?

a seventeenth-century English philosopher, were his ideas regarding the relationship between government and natural rights, which were believed to be God-given rights to life, liberty, and property.

66. What was the significance of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment?

abolished the use of poll taxes.

43. What was the Three Fifths Compromise?

anyone. For purposes of Congressional apportionment, slaveholding states were allowed to count all their free population, including free African Americans and 60 percent (three-fifths) of their enslaved population. To mollify the north, the compromise also allowed counting 60 percent of a state's slave population for federal taxation, although no such taxes were ever collected. Another

37. What was the Virginia Plan? Who supported it and why?

bicameral legislature, representation is based on population, national government can legislate for states and veto state laws. big states supported it because they had more power based on population

44. How did the Constitution deal with the slave trade and fugitive slaves?

collected. Another compromise regarding the institution of slavery granted Congress the right to impose taxes on imports in exchange for a twenty-year prohibition on laws attempting to ban the importation of slaves to the United States, which would hurt the economy of southern states more than that of northern states. Because the southern states, especially South Carolina, had made it clear they would leave the convention if abolition were attempted, no serious effort was made by the framers to abolish slavery in the new nation, even though many delegates disapproved of the institution.

30. What is a confederation?

created—an entity in which independent, self-governing states form a union for the purpose of acting together in areas such as defense.

23. What was the First Continental Congress?

delegates from all the colonies except Georgia formed the First Continental Congress to create a unified opposition to Great Britain. Among other things, members of the institution developed a declaration of rights and grievances.

45. What is separation of powers?

dividing the national government into three separate branches and assigning different responsibilities to each one- executive, judicial, legislative

17. What was the Proclamation of 1763?

forbade the colonists to purchase land or settle west of the Appalachian Mountains.2

14. How did Americans feel about their relationship with Great Britain prior to 1763?

legislature. Taxes imposed by England were low, and property ownership was more widespread than in England. People readily proclaimed their loyalty to the king. For the most part, American colonists were proud to be British citizens and had no desire to form an independent nation.

67. What was the significance of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment?

o the United States Constitution says that if the President becomes unable to do their job, the Vice President becomes the President

34. What city hosted the Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution?

philadelphia

50. What is a federal system?

power is divided between the federal (or national) government and the state governments.

What were the Articles of Confederation?

ratified a constitution providing for a republican form of government in which political power rested in the hands of the people, although the right to vote was limited to free (white) men, and the property requirements for voting differed among the states. Each state had a governor and an elected legislature. In the new nation, the states remained free to govern their residents as they wished. The central government had authority to act in only a few areas, such as national defense, in which the states were assumed to have a common interest (and would, indeed, have to supply militias). This arrangement was meant to prevent the national government from becoming too powerful or abusing the rights of individual citizens. In the careful balance between power for the national government and liberty for the states, the Articles of Confederation favored the states. Congress, formerly the Continental Congress, had the authority to exchange ambassadors and make treaties with foreign governments and Indian tribes, declare war, coin currency and borrow money, and settle disputes between states. Each state legislature appointed delegates to the Congress; these men could be recalled at any time. Regardless of its size or the number of delegates it chose to send, each state would have only one vote. Delegates could serve for no more than three consecutive years, lest a class of elite professional politicians develop. The nation would have no independent chief executive or judiciary. Nine votes were required before the central government could act, and the Articles of Confederation could be changed only by unanimous approval of all thirteen states.

31. What powers did the Confederation Congress have?

see earlier

57. What were the Federalist Papers? Who wrote them?

series of essays written by alexander hamilton, james madison, and john jay opposing the constitution. addressed issues from citizens and criticized the constitution

53. What is the supremacy clause?

sovereignty, the supremacy clause in Article VI of the Constitution proclaimed that the Constitution, laws passed by Congress, and treaties made by the federal government were "the supreme Law of the Land." In the event of a conflict between the states and the national government, the national government would triumph.

48. What was the significance of Marbury v. Madison?

the U.S. Supreme Court established its own authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws, a process called judicial review.

18. What British action angered the American colonists the most?

the imposition of direct taxes: taxes imposed on individuals instead of on transactions.

62. What was the significance of each of the ten provisions of the Bill of Rights?

the right to bear arms for protection (Second Amendment), the right not to have to provide shelter and provision for soldiers in peacetime (Third Amendment), the right to a trial by jury (Sixth and Seventh Amendments), and protection from excessive fines and from cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment) are taken from the English Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment, which requires among other things that people cannot be deprived of their life, liberty, or property except by a legal proceeding, was also greatly influenced by English law as well as the protections granted to Virginians in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were intended to provide yet another assurance that people's rights would be protected and that the federal government would not become too powerful. The Ninth Amendment guarantees that liberties extend beyond those described in the preceding documents. This was an important acknowledgment that the protected rights were extensive, and the government should not attempt to interfere with them. The Supreme Court, for example, has held that the Ninth Amendment protects the right to privacy even though none of the preceding amendments explicitly mentions this right. The Tenth Amendment, one of the first submitted to the states for ratification, ensures that states possess all powers not explicitly assigned to the federal government by the Constitution. This guarantee protects states' reserved powers to regulate such things as marriage, divorce, and intrastate transportation and commerce, and to pass laws affecting education and public health and safety.

49. How does Richard Neustadt describe checks and balances?

the system of separation of powers and checks and balances does not so much allow one part of government to control another as it encourages the branches to cooperate. Instead of a true separation of powers, the Constitutional Convention "created a government of separated institutions sharing powers."10 For example, knowing the president can veto a law he or she disapproves, Congress will attempt to draft a bill that addresses the president's concerns before sending it to the White House for signing. Similarly, knowing that Congress can override a veto, the president will use this power sparingly.

What is the world's oldest national constitution still in existence?

the us constitution

20. The Boston Massacre occurred during a protest over what British policy?

townshend act

38. What was the New Jersey Plan? Who supported it and why?

unicameral legislature, smaller states had same representation as larger, national government provides defense but does not override state authority. delegates from small states supported it because they have more representation

13. Who had the right to vote in colonial America?

white men

64. What was the significance of the Nineteenth Amendment?

women vote

4. What was the Magna Carta?

—a promise to his subjects that he and future monarchs would refrain from certain actions that harmed, or had the potential to harm, the people of England. Prominent in Magna Carta's many provisions are protections for life, liberty, and property.