Period 4 Review

Question 1

Judiciary Act of 1789

Answer 1

Act that established a federal district court in each state and three circuit courts to hear appeals from the districts, with the Supreme Court serving as the highest appellate court in the federal system.

Question 2

Bill of Rights

Answer 2

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, officially ratified by 1791. The amendments safeguarded fundamental personal rights, including freedom of speech and religion, and mandated legal procedures, such as trial by jury.

Question 3

Report on the Public Credit

Answer 3

Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 report recommending that the federal government should assume all state debts and fund the national debt — that is, offer interest on it rather than repaying it — at full value. Hamilton’s goal was to make the new country creditworthy, not debt-free.

Question 4

Bank of the United States

Answer 4

A bank chartered in 1790 and jointly owned by private stockholders and the national government. Alexander Hamilton argued that the bank would provide stability to the American economy, which was chronically short of capital, by making loans to merchants, handling government funds, and issuing bills of credit.

Question 5

Report on Manufactures

Answer 5

A proposal by treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791 calling for the federal government to urge the expansion of American manufacturing while imposing tariffs on foreign imports.

Question 6

Proclamation of Neutrality

Answer 6

A proclamation issued by President George Washington in 1793, allowing U.S. citizens to trade with all belligerents in the war between France and Great Britain.

Question 7

French Revolution

Answer 7

A revolution in France (1789–1799) that was initially welcomed by most Americans because it began by abolishing feudalism and establishing a constitutional monarchy, but eventually came to seem too radical to many.

Question 8

Whiskey Rebellion

Answer 8

A 1794 uprising by farmers in western Pennsylvania in response to enforcement of an unpopular excise tax on whiskey.

Question 9

Haitian Revolution

Answer 9

An uprising against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) involving gens de coleur and liberated slaves from the island and armies from three European countries. In 1803, Saint-Domingue became the independent black republic of Haiti, in which former slaves were citizens.

Question 10

XYZ Affair

Answer 10

A 1797 incident in which American negotiators in France were rebuffed for refusing to pay a substantial bribe. The incident led the United States into an undeclared war that curtailed American trade with the French West Indies.

Question 11

Naturalization, Alien and Sedition Acts

Answer 11

Three laws passed in 1798 that limited individual rights and threatened the fledgling party system. The Naturalization Act lengthened the residency requirement for citizenship, the Alien Act authorized the deportation of foreigners, and the Sedition Act prohibited the publication of insults or malicious attacks on the president or members of Congress.

Question 12

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

Answer 12

Resolutions by the Virginia and Kentucky state legislatures in 1798 condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts. The resolutions tested the idea that state legislatures could judge the legitimacy of federal laws.

Question 13

Treaty of Greenville

Answer 13

A 1795 treaty between the United States and various Indian tribes in Ohio. American negotiators acknowledged Indian ownership of the land, and, in return for various payments, the Western Confederacy ceded most of Ohio to the United States.

Question 14

Marbury v. Madison

Answer 14

A Supreme Court case that established the principle of judicial review in finding that parts of the Judiciary Act of 1789 were in conflict with the Constitution. For the first time, the Supreme Court assumed legal authority to overrule acts of other branches of the government.

Question 15

Louisiana Purchase

Answer 15

The 1803 purchase of French territory west of the Mississippi River that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and nearly doubled the size of the United States. The purchase required President Thomas Jefferson to exercise powers not explicitly granted to him by the Constitution.

Question 16

Embargo Act of 1807

Answer 16

An act of Congress that prohibited U.S. ships from traveling to foreign ports in an attempt to deter Britain and France from halting U.S. ships at sea. The embargo caused grave hardships for Americans engaged in overseas commerce.

Question 17

Battle of Tippecanoe

Answer 17

An attack on Shawnee Indians and their allies at Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe River in 1811 by American forces headed by William Henry Harrison, Indiana’s territorial governor. The governor’s troops traded heavy casualties with the confederacy’s warriors and then destroyed the holy village.

Question 18

Treaty of Ghent

Answer 18

The treaty signed on Christmas Eve 1814 that ended the War of 1812. It retained the prewar borders of the United States.

Question 19

McCulloch v. Maryland

Answer 19

A Supreme Court case that denied the right of states to tax the Second Bank of the United States, thereby asserting the dominance of national over state statutes.

Question 20

Adams-Onis Treaty

Answer 20

An 1819 treaty in which John Quincy Adams persuaded Spain to cede the Florida territory to the United States. In return, the American government accepted Spain’s claim to Texas and agreed to a compromise on the western boundary for the state of Louisiana.

Question 21

Monroe Doctrine

Answer 21

The 1823 declaration by President James Monroe that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any further colonization or interference by European powers. In exchange, Monroe pledged that the United States would not become involved in European struggles. (

Question 22

Neomercantilist

Answer 22

A system of government-assisted economic development embraced by state legislatures in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in the Northeast. This system of activist government encouraged entrepreneurs to enhance the public welfare through private economic initiatives.

Question 23

Panic of 1819

Answer 23

First major economic crisis of the United States. Farmers and planters faced an abrupt 30 percent drop in world agricultural prices, and as farmers’ income declined, they could not pay debts owed to stores and banks, many of which went bankrupt.

Question 24

Commonwealth System

Answer 24

The republican system of political economy implemented by state governments in the early nineteenth century that funneled aid to private businesses whose projects would improve the general welfare.

Question 25

Eire Canal

Answer 25

A 364-mile waterway connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The Erie Canal brought prosperity to the entire Great Lakes region, and its benefits prompted civic and business leaders in Philadelphia and Baltimore to propose canals to link their cities to the Midwest

Question 26

Market Revolution

Answer 26

The dramatic increase between 1820 and 1850 in the exchange of goods and services in market transactions. The Market Revolution reflected the increased output of farms and factories, the entrepreneurial activities of traders and merchants, and the creation of a transportation network of roads, canals, and railroads.

Question 27

Industrial Revolution

Answer 27

A burst of major inventions and economic expansion based on water and steam power, reorganized work routines, and the use of machine technology that transformed certain industries, such as cotton textiles and iron, between 1790 and 1860.

Question 28

Cotton Complex

Answer 28

The economic system that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century binding together southern cotton production with northern clothmaking, shipping, and capital.

Question 29

Mechanics

Answer 29

A term used in the nineteenth century to refer to skilled craftsmen and inventors who built and improved machinery and machine tools for industry.

Question 30

Waltham-Lowell System

Answer 30

A labor system employing young farm women in New England factories that originated in 1822 and declined after 1860, when immigrant labor became predominant. The women lived in company boardinghouses with strict rules and curfews and were often required to attend church.

Question 31

Gradual Emancipation

Answer 31

The practice of ending slavery in the distant future while recognizing white property rights to the slaves they owned. Gradual emancipation statutes only applied to enslaved laborers born after the passage of the statute, and only after they had first labored for their owners for a term of years.

Question 32

Manumission

Answer 32

The legal act of relinquishing property rights in slaves. Worried that a large free black population would threaten the institution of slavery, the Virginia assembly repealed Virginia’s 1782 manumission law in 1792.

Question 33

Coastal Trade

Answer 33

The domestic slave trade with routes along the Atlantic coast that sent thousands of slaves to sugar plantations in Louisiana and cotton plantations in the Mississippi Valley.

Question 34

Inland System

Answer 34

The slave trade system in the interior of the country that fed slaves to the Cotton South.

Question 35

"positive good"

Answer 35

In 1837, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued on the floor of the Senate that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good “indispensable to the peace and happiness” of blacks and whites alike.

Question 36

Paternalism

Answer 36

The ideology held by slave owners who considered themselves committed to the welfare of their slaves.

Question 37

Machine tools

Answer 37

Machines that made standardized metal parts for other machines, like textile looms and sewing machines. The development of machine tools by American inventors in the early nineteenth century accelerated industrialization.

Question 38

Artisan Republicanism

Answer 38

An ideology of production that celebrated small-scale producers and emphasized liberty and equality. It flourished after the American Revolution and gradually declined as a result of industrialization.

Question 39

Labor theory of value

Answer 39

The belief that human labor produces economic value. Adherents argued that the price of a product should be determined not by the market but by the amount of work required to make it, and that most of the price should be paid to the person who produced it.

Question 40

Gang-labor

Answer 40

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

Question 41

Middle class

Answer 41

An economic group of prosperous farmers, artisans, and traders that emerged in the early nineteenth century. Its rise reflected a dramatic increase in prosperity. This surge in income, along with an abundance of inexpensive mass-produced goods, fostered a distinct middle-class urban culture.

Question 42

Self-made man

Answer 42

A nineteenth-century ideal that celebrated men who rose to wealth or social prominence from humble origins through self-discipline, hard work, and temperate habits.

Question 43

Franchise

Answer 43

The right to vote. Between 1820 and 1860, most states revised their constitutions to extend the vote to all adult white males. Black adult men gained the right to vote with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment granted adult women the right to vote.

Question 44

Notables

Answer 44

Northern landlords, slave-owning planters, and seaport merchants who dominated the political system of the early nineteenth century.

Question 45

Political Machines

Answer 45

A highly organized group of insiders that directs a political party. These complex, hierarchical party organizations, such as New York’s Tammany Hall, kept power through the strength of their political organization and their personal relationship with voters, especially working-class immigrants. Political machines were replaced by disciplined political parties usually run by professional politicians.

Question 46

caucus

Answer 46

A meeting held by a political party to choose candidates, make policies, and enforce party discipline

Question 47

Demographic transition

Answer 47

The sharp decline in birthrate in the United States beginning in the 1790s that was caused by changes in cultural behavior, including the use of birth control. The migration of thousands of young men to the trans-Appalachian west was also a factor in this decline.

Question 48

Republican motherhood

Answer 48

The idea that the primary political role of American women was to instill a sense of patriotic duty and republican virtue in their sons and husbands and mold them into exemplary citizens.

Question 49

American Colonization Society

Answer 49

Founded by Henry Clay and other prominent citizens in 1817, the society argued that slaves had to be freed and then resettled, in Africa or elsewhere.

Question 50

Missouri Compromise

Answer 50

A series of political agreements devised by Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Maine entered the Union as a free state and Missouri followed as a slave state, preserving a balance in the Senate between North and South. Farther west, it set the northern boundary of slavery at the southern boundary of Missouri.

Question 51

American System

Answer 51

The mercantilist system of national economic development advocated by Henry Clay and adopted by John Quincy Adams, with a national bank to manage the nation’s financial system; protective tariffs to provide revenue and encourage industry; and a nationally funded network of roads, canals, and railroads.

Question 52

Internal improvements

Answer 52

Government-funded public works such as roads and canals

Question 53

Corrupt bargain

Answer 53

When Speaker of the House Henry Clay used his influence to select John Quincy Adams as president in 1824, and then Adams appointed Clay secretary of state, Andrew Jackson’s supporters called it a corrupt bargain.

Question 54

Tariff of Abominations

Answer 54

A tariff enacted in 1828 that raised duties significantly on raw materials, textiles, and iron goods. It enraged the South, which had no industries that needed protection and resented the higher cost of imported goods.

Question 55

Spoils System

Answer 55

The widespread award of public jobs to political supporters after an electoral victory. In 1829, Andrew Jackson instituted the system on the national level, arguing that the rotation of officeholders was preferable to a permanent group of bureaucrats.

Question 56

Nullification

Answer 56

The constitutional argument advanced by John C. Calhoun that a state legislature or convention could void a law passed by Congress.

Question 57

Second bank of the US

Answer 57

National bank with multiple branches chartered in 1816 for twenty years. Intended to help regulate the economy, the bank became a major issue in Andrew Jackson’s reelection campaign in 1832.

Question 58

Indian Removal Act of 1830

Answer 58

Act that directed the mandatory relocation of eastern tribes to territory west of the Mississippi. Jackson insisted that his goal was to save the Indians and their culture. Indians resisted the controversial act, but in the end most were forced to comply.

Question 59

Classical Liberalism, or laissez-faire

Answer 59

The political ideology of individual liberty, private property, a competitive market economy, free trade, and limited government. The ideal is a laissez faire or “let alone” policy in which government does the least possible.

Question 60

Whig Party

Answer 60

The Whig Party arose in 1834 when a group of congressmen contested Andrew Jackson’s policies and conduct. The party identified itself with the pre-Revolutionary American and British parties — also called Whigs — that had opposed the arbitrary actions of British monarchs.

Question 61

Panic of 1837

Answer 61

Triggered by a sharp reduction in English capital and credit flowing into the United States, the cash shortage caused a panic while the collapse of credit led to a depression — the second major economic crisis of the United States — that lasted from 1837 to 1843.

Question 62

Specie Circular

Answer 62

An executive order in 1836 that required the Treasury Department to accept only gold and silver in payment for lands in the national domain.

Question 63

Second Great Awakening

Answer 63

A series of evangelical Protestant revivals extending from the 1790s to the 1830s that prompted thousands of conversions and widespread optimism about Americans’ capacity for progress and reform.

Question 64

Benevolent Empire

Answer 64

A web of reform organizations, heavily Whig in their political orientation, built by evangelical Protestant men and women influenced by the Second Great Awakening.

Question 65

Maine Law

Answer 65

The nation’s first state law for the prohibition of liquor manufacture and sales, passed in 1851.

Question 66

American Renaissance

Answer 66

A literary explosion during the 1840s inspired in part by Emerson’s ideas on the liberation of the individual.

Question 67

Romanticism

Answer 67

A European philosophy that rejected the ordered rationality of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, embracing human passion, spiritual quest, and self-knowledge. Romanticism strongly influenced American transcendentalism

Question 68

Transcendentalism

Answer 68

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

Question 69

Utopias

Answer 69

Communities founded by reformers and transcendentalists to help realize their spiritual and moral potential and to escape from the competition of modern industrial society.

Question 70

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons

Answer 70

Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. After Smith’s death at the hands of an angry mob, in 1846 Brigham Young led many followers of Mormonism to lands in present-day Utah.

Question 71

Plural Marriage

Answer 71

The practice of men taking multiple wives, which Mormon prophet Joseph Smith argued was biblically sanctioned and divinely ordained as a family system.

Question 72

Minstrel shows

Answer 72

Popular theatrical entertainment begun around 1830 in which white actors in blackface presented comic routines that combined racist caricature and social criticism.

Question 73

Penny Paper

Answer 73

Sensational and popular urban newspapers that built large circulations by reporting crime and scandals.

Question 74

Free African Societies

Answer 74

Organizations in northern free black communities that sought to help community members and work against racial discrimination, inequality, and political slavery. (

Question 75

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Answer 75

Church founded in 1816 by African Americans who were discriminated against by white Protestants. The church spread across the Northeast and Midwest and even founded a few congregations in the slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

Question 76

David Walker's Appeal

Answer 76

The radical 1829 pamphlet by free African American David Walker in which he protested slavery and racial oppression, called for solidarity among people of African descent, and warned that slaves would revolt if the cause of freedom was not served.

Question 77

Abolitionism

Answer 77

The social reform movement to end slavery immediately and without compensation that began in the United States in the 1830s.

Question 78

American Anti-Slavery Society

Answer 78

The first interracial social justice movement in the United States, which advocated the immediate, unconditional end of slavery on the basis of human rights, without compensation to slave masters.

Question 79

Underground Railroad

Answer 79

An informal network of whites and free blacks in the South that assisted fugitive slaves to reach freedom in the North.

Question 80

Liberty Party

Answer 80

An antislavery political party that ran its first presidential candidate in 1844, controversially challenging both the Democrats and Whigs.

Question 81

Domesticity

Answer 81

A middle-class ideal of “separate spheres” that celebrated women’s special mission as homemakers, wives, and mothers who exercised a Christian influence on their families and communities; it excluded women from professional careers, politics, and civic life.

Question 82

Female Moral Reform Society

Answer 82

An organization led by middle- class Christian women who viewed prostitutes as victims of male lust and sought to expose their male customers while “rescuing” sex workers and encouraging them to pursue respectable trades.

Question 83

Married women's property laws

Answer 83

Laws enacted between 1839 and 1860 in New York and other states that permitted married women to own, inherit, and bequeath property.

Question 84

Seneca Falls convention

Answer 84

The first women’s rights convention in the United States. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, it resulted in a manifesto extending to women the egalitarian republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence.

Question 85

Slave society

Answer 85

A society in which the institution of slavery affects all aspects of life.

Question 86

Republican aristocracy

Answer 86

The Old South gentry who envisioned themselves as an American aristocracy and feared federal government interference with their slave property.

Question 87

Republican Aristocracy

Answer 87

The Old South gentry who envisioned themselves as an American aristocracy and feared federal government interference with their slave property.

Question 88

Great American Desert

Answer 88

A term coined by Major Stephen H. Long in 1820 to describe the grasslands of the southern plains from the ninety-fifth meridian west to the Rocky Mountains, which he believed was “almost wholly unfit for cultivation.”

Question 89

Almo

Answer 89

The 1836 defeat by the Mexican army of the Texan garrison defending the Alamo in San Antonio. Newspapers urged Americans to “Remember the Alamo,” and American adventurers, lured by offers of land grants, flocked to Texas to join the rebel forces.

Question 90

Secret ballot

Answer 90

Form of voting that allows the voter to enter a choice privately rather than making a public declaration for a candidate.

Question 91

Gullah dialect

Answer 91

A Creole language that combined English and African words in an African grammatical structure. It remained widespread in the South Carolina and Georgia low country throughout the nineteenth century and is still spoken in a modified form today.

Question 92

Task System

Answer 92

A system of labor common in the rice-growing regions of South Carolina in which a slave was assigned a daily task to complete and was allowed to do as he wished upon its completion.

Question 93

German coast uprising

Answer 93

The largest slave revolt in nineteenth-century North America, it began on January 8, 1811, on Louisiana sugar plantations and involved more than two hundred enslaved workers. About ninety-five slaves were killed in the fighting or executed as a result of their involvement.

Question 94

Manifest Destiny

Answer 94

A term coined by John L. O’Sullivan 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.

Question 95

Oregon Trail

Answer 95

An emigrant route that originally led from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, a distance of some 2,000 miles. Alternate routes included the California Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the Bozeman Trail. Together they conveyed several hundred thousand migrants to the Far West in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.

Question 96

Californios

Answer 96

The elite Mexican ranchers in the province of California.

Question 97

Fifty-four fort or fight!

Answer 97

Democratic candidate Governor James K. Polk’s slogan in the election of 1844 calling for American sovereignty over the entire Oregon Country, which stretched from California to Russian-occupied Alaska and at the time was shared with Great Britain.

Question 98

Bear Flag Republic

Answer 98

A short-lived republic created in California by American emigrants to sponsor a rebellion against Mexican authority in 1846.