IB/AP US History
Unit IV – Causes, Course, and Aftermath of the Civil War
Chapter 16 Study Questions
Begins on p. 338
A * next to a question denotes a more detailed answer is required
1. Compare the change in the beliefs about the future of slavery before and after the invention of Eli
Whitney’s cotton gin.
2. **Cotton Kingdom: How did large-scale cotton growing and slavery grow together? How and
why did the South, the North, and England all profit from “King Cotton?”
3. Briefly discuss the Planter “Aristocracy.”
4. Why was the plantation system financially unstable?
5. Why were Southerners resentful of the North?
6. Why was European immigration to the South repelled by the Cotton Kingdom?
7. *Contrast the different slaveholding and non-slaveholding whites in the South between 18501860. Why were the non-slaveholders some of the stoutest defenders of the slave system?
8. Discuss the mountain whites and their resentment towards planters and their gangs of blacks.
9. What were the three groups of free blacks in the South? Under what conditions/rules did they
live?
10. Describe how blacks were treated in the North.
11. What did the suppression of the international slave trade create?
12. Why were slaves spared certain forms of work work?
13. What was the plot of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
14. Where was the “black belt” of the Deep South?
15. Along the Mississippi River in the Deep South, blacks accounted for what percentage of the
population?
16. What is the responsorial style of preaching?
17. Why were slaves denied an education?
18. How did slaves quietly and discreetly (passive-aggressively) rebel (furtive resistance) against
their bondage? (Find additional examples online)
19. List three specific slave rebellions in the South?
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20. Describe the events surrounding the slave ship Amistad.
21. What was the American Colonization Society? What was the response to its objectives?
22. Identify the following:
 William Wilberforce
 Theodore Dwight Weld
 William Lloyd Garrison
 American Anti-Slavery Society
 David Walker
 Frederick Douglass
23. *Describe the similarities and differences between William Lloyd Garrison anf Frederick
Douglass.
24. What is the Mason-Dixon line?
25. *How did the South lash back at the anti-slavery/abolition movement?
26. What was the so-called Gag Resolution and what happened with it?
27. Why were abolitionists unpopular even in the North?
28. What happened to some northern abolitionists?
29. What was position of free-soilers?
30. Write a brief synopsis of The Struggle to Abolish Slavery on pp. 354-355 & Varying
Viewpoints on pp. 357-358