CM6: the westward expansion and the pre-civil War years

Question 1

Andrew Jackson

Answer 1

• lawyer, businessman
• Battle of New Orleans
• man and myth

Question 2

Andrew Jackson’s relationship with the Indians

Answer 2

• Native Americans in 1830’s
• The Indian Problem
• 5 civilized tribes
• 1830: Indian Removal Act
• 1831: the Trail of Tears
• 1832: Worcester v. Georgia
• 1835: Treaty of New Echota (Cherokee)
• Legacy of the Trail of Tears

Question 3

Expansion of the US

Answer 3

• 1803: Louisiana purchase
• 1818: invasion of Florida
• 1820’s and 1830’s

Question 4

Mexican-American War

Answer 4

• 1846-1848
• Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: Arizona, California, western Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas & Utah

Question 5

Prelude to war 1850-1860

Answer 5

• Loosely structured American society
• Improvements in transportation and printing press
• Abrupt change:
  - from a rural, slow-moving, fragmented society in 1800s
  - to a bustling, integrated and national social order in 1850s
• Rise of nativist movements (the Know-Nothings in 1854)

Question 6

Sectionalism and slavery

Answer 6

• New Englanders, the West and the South
• Slavery in the south: planter society
• Slave rebellions (Nat Turner, 1831, in Virginia)
• Decade of political crises

Question 7

Popular sovereignty

Answer 7

• 1850s: series of measures proposed by Henry Clay of Kentucky to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the dissolution of the Union
• 1854: Kansas Bill

Question 8

Polarization over slavery

Answer 8

• sectional differences appeared in all American institutions
• the major national religious denominations split over the slavery question
• The Whig Party disappeared after the election of 1852 (Democrat Franklin Pierce defeated Whig Winfield Scott)
• Northerners started to organize an antislavery political party = the Republican Party
• Kansas = battlefield between free and slave states
• Various violent incidents in 1856
• 1856 presidential election reinforced sectional lines
• the Dred Scott decision
• 1860: presidential election under great tension; victory of A. Lincoln