Jackson + Van Buren 1829 - 1840

Question 1

What is important to remember about the 3rd phase of the 2nd Great Awakening?

Answer 1

Religions like the Millerites and Mormons were created.

Charles Grandison Finney, who was a Presbyterian minister, would reach fame during the 1830s as he moved his camp revivalist to the city (New York City) where tens of thousands would hear him preach about God.

Question 2

Define:

Kitchen Cabinet

Answer 2

Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet was a group of informal advisors upon whose counsel Jackson relied, breaking the tradition of consulting formal Cabinet ministers.

Question 3

Define:

Spoils System

Answer 3

Under the Spoils System, the newly elected President appointed those who’d helped him to federal office, such as Postmaster.

Jackson believed that no training was necessary for any federal office. He also rotated federal officeholders after his first term, so as to provide jobs to as many Democrats as possible.

Question 4

Who founded The Liberator, the first radical abolitionist newspaper, in 1833?

Answer 4

William Lloyd Garrison

Taking inspiration from Thoreau, Garrison declared “that which is not just is not law.”

Question 5

What organization was the first radical abolitionist group in the United States?

Answer 5

The American Anti-Slavery Society

Based in New York City and founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society demanded the immediate abolition of slavery.

The American Anti-Slavery Society issued pamphlets, petitions to Congress, and sponsored speeches, including many by Frederick Douglass.

Question 6

What’s Nat Turner known for?

Answer 6

Nat Turner was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation where his enslaver taught him how to read and write while also introducing him to religion. As a result, Nat Turner became an enslaved preacher.

Believing in signs and hearing voices in his head, Nat became convinced that God chose him to free the enslaved after witnessing a solar eclipse. With the help of 4 other enslaved men, he became infamous during the 1830s to free enslaved people, from which he successfully freed 80 enslaved people, during a slave uprising on August 21, 1831. Unfortunately, this rebellion against their slavery resulted in the death of 55 white people, mostly women, and children since the men were in a revival meeting in North Carolina.

Question 7

Explain the major effects of Nat Turner’s Rebellion

Answer 7

Nat Turner was captured and executed with 17 other enslaved Black people, while the other enslaved escaped.

Broadly speaking, it affected southern slavery by making laws with harsher punishments for people who taught their enslaved people how to read. Southern states, starting with Virginia, would also make it illegal for enslaved people to preach Christianity.

Question 8

Define:

The Underground Railroad

Answer 8

A network to guide escaped slaves to safe houses.

The Underground Railroad, directed by enslaved people themselves, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, was a network that guided escaped enslaved peoples along secret routes and to safe houses until they reached freedom. Most often, these railroads ended in Canada, where enslaving people was already illegal.

Southern laws had harsh punishments for people who helped anyone along on the Underground railroad. Southern slave catchers were always a danger for enslaved peoples and their liberators, even in northern “free” states.

Question 9

What were the Gag Rule Debates?

Answer 9

Between 1831-1836, William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists sent anti-slavery petitions to Congress. Rather than hear the petitions, in 1836 Congress voted to table any anti-slavery petition without debate, known as a gag rule. From 1836 until the gag rule was repealed in 1844, Congress repeatedly debated whether to keep the gag rule in place.

Question 10

What was the Indian Removal Act (1830)?

Answer 10

The Indian Removal Act forcibly ejected Indians from lands east of the Mississippi.

Signed by Andrew Jackson and carried out during Martin Van Buren’s presidency, the Native Americans followed the 1,000-mile long Trail of Tears, forced to by the United States military, where 15,000 men, women, and children died, due to hunger, disease, and exhaustion.

Some Native American men had to walk with shackles on their hands and feet.

Question 11

Explain what the Nullification Crisis was about.

Answer 11

South Carolina told the US government that it didn’t have to follow federal law anymore, specifically, the Tariff of Abominations.

By doing this, South Carolina was, in effect, “nullifying” the law/tariff. According to the John Marshall Supreme Court, Federal power had always been favored over State power. So when South Carolina was still unwilling to follow the law, it caused a crisis since a state was being disloyal to the union by refusing to follow the federal law, which had already been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Question 12

How did Andrew Jackson respond to South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the Tariff of Abominations?

Answer 12

Jackson considered South Carolina’s actions to be treason.

After asking Congress for a Force Bill, Jackson mobilized the Army, and threatened to hang John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina politician and his former Vice President, from the nearest tree. This was because John C. Calhoun had been responsible for the crisis. Jackson, although in favor of states’ rights, considered South Carolina’s actions to be treason.

After heated debate, cooler heads prevailed, and South Carolina backed down, thus ending the Nullification Crisis.

Question 13

What did Andrew Jackson call the “Hydra of Corruption”?

Answer 13

The Second Bank of the United States

Jackson felt that the Bank was unconstitutional, and only served the wealthy. Jackson declared war on the Bank, and on its President, Nicholas Biddle. It did not help the Bank’s public image that Biddle was arrogant and unpopular.

Question 14

How did Henry Clay respond to Jackson’s hatred towards the Bank of the United States?

Answer 14

Although the Bank’s charter still had a few years left, Clay pushed a recharter bill through Congress, which Jackson promptly vetoed.

Clay had hoped that Jackson’s veto of the recharter bill would swing the election to the Whigs, but the move backfired, and Jackson defeated Clay handily in the 1832 election.

Question 15

Define:

Pet banks

Answer 15

Pet banks were local banks, rather than the Second Bank of the United States. Following his reelection in 1832, Jackson had withdrawn the United States’ funds from the Bank of the United States, and deposited them in pet banks.

Question 16

Explain what scrip is.

Answer 16

Scrip was currency printed by a bank.

Banks had an option to accept another bank’s scrip in repayment for a loan, or to demand gold or silver instead. This gold and silver is called “specie”.

When the Pet Banks were loaded with cash, those banks began to issue scrip.

Side note: Today, your (American) money is not printed by Banks, but it’s printed by a part of our U.S. government called the Federal Reserve.

Question 17

What do Land Speculators do?

Answer 17

​Land speculators:

• Purchase land
• Don’t live on it themselves
• Sell it to other people when the value of their land goes up

Some people still do this today, they buy property in an area they think will develop really nicely, so that when the area starts to develop, they can sell it and make a big profit.

Back in the 1830s, just like today, in order to be a land speculator, you need a lot of money. And if you don’t have that money, then you’ll need to go to a bank and get a loan.

Question 18

What was the effect on the economy of Jackson’s depositing federal money in pet banks?

Answer 18

It helped to create inflation but made it harder to save money.

With a plentiful supply of money, Jackson’s Pet banks were eager to loan their money out to people so that they (Jackson’s Pet banks) could collect interest from the loans they gave out to people, thus making more money.

The first people to come to Jackson’s Pet Banks were land speculators, so the Pet Banks lent money to loads of land speculators.

Then, when lots of people who now had money started buying up the land at around the same time, it drove up the price of the land, helping to create inflation. This also made it harder for people who had no money to buy a property and make a home since it became harder to save.

Question 19

How did Jackson attempt to deal with the rising inflation that followed his deposit of federal funds in pet banks?

Answer 19

Jackson issued his Specie Circular, which required that purchases of government land be made in gold and silver, rather than paper currency from his Pet Banks.

Since banks were more willing to lend scrip, rather than gold and silver, this led to a sudden curtailment of credit, resulting in the Panic of 1837.

Question 20

Who was blamed for the Panic of 1837?

Answer 20

The Panic of 1837 was a direct result of Jackson’s Specie Circular, which significantly handicapped the Pet Banks’ ability to lend money since people valued specie greater than the Pet Bank Scrip. The devaluation of the scrip in the economy led to the Panic of 1837, slowing economic growth.

However, the blame for the Panic and the depression which followed fell squarely upon President Martin van Buren, Jackson’s chosen successor, even though the Panic was largely due to Jackson’s withdrawal of funds from the Second Bank of the United States and the resulting Specie Circular.

Question 21

What was Jacksonian Democracy?

Answer 21

Jacksonian Democracy centered upon the participation of the white male public in elections and the government. Under Jackson’s view, any white man could fill any office in the federal government. Jacksonian Democracy favored a strong Presidency and a weak Congress.

The era of Jacksonian Democracy lasted until the 1850s when slavery once more loomed large as a national political issue.

Question 22

How did new farming innovations such as Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1831 and John Deere’s steel plow (1837) fuel the growth of urban centers?

Answer 22

New farming implements (and larger farms in the American West) meant that for the first time, farmers were able to produce surplus goods, beyond merely what they needed to sustain themselves and their families.

These surplus goods were shipped to the new urban centers that were springing up along canals and railroads.

Question 23

Why did the new states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas experience an influx of Southerners from other states?

Answer 23

Much of the farmland in areas such as Georgia and South Carolina had been exhausted by years of cotton farming and poor crop management. The lands in these new states proved fertile and ideal for cotton growing.

The new arrivals typically brought their enslaved people with them, and the price for buying an enslaved person doubled between 1825 and 1845.

Question 24

What was the role of unions in the rapidly growing urban manufacturing areas during the Antebellum Period?

Answer 24

To the extent that they existed, unions focused on efforts to limit the workday to 10 hours.

Several factors limited any pressure that unions were able to exert in the economy:

• the depression that followed the Panic of 1837, which led to a surplus of labor
• the constant influx of immigrants, who provided an inexpensive pool of non-union labor.

Question 25

Which group was on top of the Southern class structure?

Answer 25

Plantation Owners

To be considered in the upper echelon of the South’s plantation economy, one needed 1,000 acres of land and have at least possess 100 enslaved people.

Question 26

Although plantation owners had large tracts of land, who was responsible for most cotton production?

Answer 26

Most cotton was produced by smaller farmers. Many small farmers had two or three enslaved people, with landholdings of up to 40 acres.

Question 27

Who was at the bottom of the white class structure in the South?

Answer 27

Of the three classes in the Southern farming society, the “bukra” were the lowest class and the strongest advocates of slavery. Slavery kept them from falling to the bottom rung of the social structure.

The bukra comprised some 75% of the white population in the South.

Question 28

How much education did the average enslaved person get?

Answer 28

None

It was actually against the law to teach slaves to read or write, although a few managed to learn clandestinely.

Question 29

Who were the Millerites?

Answer 29

The Millerites, located primarily in New York, were followers of William Miller, who predicted that Christ would return to Earth sometime between 1843 and 1844. Although Christ did not appear (an event known as “The Great Disappointment”), the heartbroken Millerites founded their own Christian sect, now known as Seventh Day Adventism.

Question 30

Complete the sentence:

Another religion begun in upstate New York was Mormonism, founded by ________ ________.

Answer 30

Joseph Smith

Smith claimed to have found golden plates containing a third Testament (in addition to the Old and New Testaments), under the direction of the angel Moroni.

Question 31

Although Mormonism began in upstate New York, most Mormons ended up settling in Utah. Why?

Answer 31

Mormonism, especially the Mormon practice of polygamy, evoked great hostility. Mormons were driven from New York to Missouri and then to Illinois, where Joseph Smith was killed. Brigham Young led the Mormons to Utah, where it was hoped that their isolated location in the Utah desert would provide some degree of protection.

Polygamy is the practice of taking multiple wives.

Question 32

What was the Second Great Awakening’s impact on the South?

Answer 32

The Second Great Awakening had a very minimal impact on the South; it was almost solely a Northern phenomenon.

Question 33

What did the Shakers believe about relationships between the sexes?

Answer 33

The Shakers were a religious group that grew significantly during the Second Great Awakening, and believed in equality of the sexes. They preached complete celibacy, and relied on conversion for new members of their sect.

Question 34

Define:

Transcendentalism

Answer 34

Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that started in the early 1800s but peaked in interest during the 1830s and 1840s. People who were followers of this movement criticized organized religion, industrial society, slavery, and the subjugation of women.

Transcendentalists argued that when individual people were self-reliant, they could be at their best, and ideal communities could be formed from such self-reliant people.

Brooks Farm was one attempt at creating a type of transcendentalist community “utopia”.

Question 35

Complete the sentence:

_______ _______ _______, the author of Nature and Self-Reliance, argued in favor of individualism and contended that America should develop its own literary style and culture distinct from Europe.

Answer 35

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is considered one of the founders of Transcendentalism, and was an extremely popular lecturer from the 1830s onward. Emerson influenced writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

Question 36

What was the subject of George Caleb Bingham’s most stirring paintings?

Answer 36

Bingham specialized in painting the Frontier, and his most famous paintings are of evocative scenes of the lives of fur traders and pioneers, and of political activities in rural areas.

Question 37

Instead of paintings of American Revolutionary scenes, or commissioned portraits, what did painters of the Hudson River School typically depict?

Answer 37

The Hudson River School artists primarily painted nature and wilderness scenes of the Hudson River Valley and the nearby Adirondack and Catskill Mountains. Artists such as Thomas Cole and Frederick Church specialized in depicting the grandeur of nature.

Question 38

Who was John James Audubon?

Answer 38

Audubon was a French-American ornithologist and painter who specialized in illustrating birds. Audubon’s The Birds of America was the result of years of painstaking labor to draw, in color, every bird in the United States.

Only 120 first-edition copies of The Birds of America exist, and they sell for millions.

Question 39

What was the first institute of higher learning to admit women?

Answer 39

Oberlin College

Higher education for women was still unusual. Those women who learned more than mere reading and writing were typically upper class, and attended institutions that specialized in teaching social graces, rather than significant higher education.

Oberlin College was founded in 1833.

Question 40

What was the goal of the Liberty Party which ran James G. Birney for President in 1840?

Answer 40

The Liberty Party wanted to use the political process to end the institution of slavery. Although the party never received many votes, its mere existence was an irritant to the South.