General 19th Century History

Question 1

Alexis de Tocqueville

Answer 1

Wrote in “Democracy in America” about the “holy cult of freedom” he encountered in the United States in the early 1830s. His key insight was that democracy by this time meant far more than either the right to vote or a particular set of political institutions. It was a “habit of the heart,” a culture that encouraged individual initiative, belief in equality, and an active public sphere populated by numerous voluntary organizations that sought to improve society.

Question 2

Impact of War of 1812

Answer 2

1. the spread of market relations
2. the westward
   movement of the population
3. the rise of a vigorous political democracy

Question 3

The Erie Canal (1825)

Answer 3

• 363-mile long canal that allowed goods to flow between the Great Lakes and New York City
• Spurred other states to try and match New York’s success via canals and other internal approvements

Question 4

Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819

Answer 4

• Andrew Jackson
  led troops into Florida in 1818
• Spain, aware that it could not defend the territory,
  sold it to the United States in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 negotiated by John
  Quincy Adams

Question 5

Northwest Ordinance of 1787

Answer 5

Prohibited slavery in the Old

Northwest; thus the Ohio River came to mark a boundary between free and slave societies

Question 6

Rise of the Cotton Kingdom

Answer 6

Around 1 million slaves were shifted from the older

slave states to the Deep South between 1800 and 1860 in order to feed demand for Cotton production

Question 7

Nativism

Answer 7

Resulted from rise in immigration. Nativists contended that the Irish, supposedly
unfamiliar with American conceptions of liberty and subservient to the Catholic
Church, posed a threat to democratic institutions, social reform, and public
education. Became a national political movement in 1850.

Question 8

The Second Great Awakening

Answer 8

Charles Grandison Finney, 1820s- 1830s was its peak. Democratized American Christianity, making it a truly mass enterprise.

Question 9

Cult of Domesticity

Answer 9

Evolution of Republican Motherhood. Virtue came to be redefined as a personal moral quality associated more and more closely with women rather than with men. Virtue for a woman meant sexual purity, beauty, frailty, and dependence on men.

Question 10

The American System (1815)

Answer 10

Term coined by Henry Clay to describe system for government-promoted economic development outlined by President James Madison. The plan rested on three pillars: a new national bank, a tariff on imported manufactured goods to protect American industry, and federal financing of improved roads and canals.

Question 11

Panic of 1819

Answer 11

The demand for land plummeted as a result of European demand for American farm products plummeting, as a result speculators lost millions as the price of western land fell. Reduced trust in the second B.U.S.

Question 12

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

Answer 12

Marshall declared the Bank a legitimate exercise of congressional authority under the Constitution’s clause that allowed Congress to pass “necessary and proper” laws.

Question 13

Era of “Bad” Feelings

Answer 13

In the absence of two-party competition, politics was organized along
lines of competing sectional interests.

Question 14

James Tallmadge

Answer 14

A Republican congressman from New York, moved that the introduction of more slaves in Missouri be prohibited and that children of those already in Missouri be freed at age twenty-five.

Question 15

Missouri Compromise (1820)

Answer 15

Missouri would be authorized to draft a constitution without Tallmadge’s restriction. Maine, which prohibited slavery, would be admitted to the Union to maintain the sectional balance between free and slave states. And slavery would be prohibited in all remaining territory within the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′ (Missouri’s southern boundary).

Question 16

Second Missouri

Compromise

Answer 16

Orchestrated by Henry Clay, modified original compromise to instruct Missouri that it could not deny citizens of their rights within the state (speaking about Free Blacks).

Question 17

“Liberty Is Power”

Answer 17

Quincy Adams’ view that an expansive and powerful federal state would be able to better ensure liberty than a weak and disparate one.

Question 18

Cherokee Nation

v. Georgia (1831)

Answer 18

In 1831 the Cherokee nation attempted to stop Georgia encroachment through the Supreme Court. The court side-stepped the issue by a 4-2 vote, with Marshall writing that the Cherokee were not a sovereign state but a “domestic dependent nation,” and thus that they could not lobby the supreme court for assistance.

Question 19

Maysville Road Veto

Answer 19

Doomed any comprehensive national transportation program. Indicative of Jackson’s willy-nilly policy of approving and disapproving internal improvement laws based on a nebulous logic of whether a bill was “national” or “local.” Contrast with Quincy Adams’ much more liberal internal improvement policy.

Question 20

Tariff of Abominations (1828)

Answer 20

Designed to protect the U.S. industry from cheaper British commodities. Sparked the Nullification crisis led by Calhoun and South Carolina.

Question 21

Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne”

Answer 21

Laid out a nationalist doctrine of
constitutional origin and interpretation. The Constitution had not been
created by the states, he declared, but by the people of the Union as a
whole, who had distributed their sovereign powers among both state and federal agencies. These ideas were later drawn upon by Lincoln.

Question 22

The Reconstruction Acts of 1867

Answer 22

Created military districts in the South. Superseded Andrew Johnson by calling for new state constitutional conventions. Like the 14th amendment, noted that suffrage should not be limited by race, but like the 14th amendment it left it up to the states to fulfill that (which the 15th amendment would fix). However, the Reconstruction Acts were harsher in that any southern state that didn’t enforce suffrage rights would be denied any representation in Congress.

Question 23

United States v. Reese

Answer 23

In an 8-1 decision authored by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, the Court concluded that the relevant sections of the Enforcement Act lacked the necessary, limiting language to qualify as enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Chief Justice first stated that the Fifteenth Amendment “does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one,” but “prevents the States, or the United States, however, from giving preference…to one citizen of the United States over another on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In examining the language of the Enforcement Act, the Court noted that, while the first two sections of the act explicitly referred to race in criminalizing interference with the right to vote, the relevant third and fourth sections refer only to the “aforesaid” offense. According to the Court, this language does not sufficiently tailor the law to qualify as “appropriate legislation” under the Enforcement Clause of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Question 24

The Great Bank War (1832-1837)

Answer 24

The outcome of the Bank War represented a symbolic victory for the president and the Democrats, but it brought little if any tangible benefit to the plain folk who constituted the party’s most faithful followers. The influence of wealth on American politics was not lessened, nor the opportunity for speculation decreased, by Jackson’s destruction of the Bank. It was America’s misfortune that the future of the national bank could not have been resolved through compromise and a larger measure of government supervision. Jackson and Biddle were both too headstrong for the country’s good. The great Bank War turned out to be a conflict both sides lost. The government ended up without the services of a central bank, with an uncontrolled and fluctuating paper currency, and powerless to mitigate the swings of the business cycle. The Bank of the United States ended up with a far inferior Pennsylvania charter and on a road that led to bankruptcy. Not until the National Banking Act of the Lincoln administration did the government issue paper currency of its own, and not until the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 did the United States have a central bank in the modern sense to which Nicholas Biddle aspired.

Question 25

What ended the Nullification Crisis?

Answer 25

Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s Compromise Tariff of 1833 ended the Nullification Crisis

Question 26

Wilmot Proviso of 1846

Answer 26

Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed a
resolution prohibiting slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico, dissolving traditional Democrat and Whig party lines and renewing sectional tensions. Wilmot did not have any sympathy for black slaves; like other free soilers he saw slaves as an impediment to white laborers.