United States History- Honors Final Exam Study Guide Semester 1 2011
Study Questions – Chapter 6
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Why was the Plan of Union proposed by the Albany Conference rejected by the colonial assemblies?
What does the failure of the Albany Conference to bring greater unity to the colonies indicate?
What were the three principal flash points of conflict in North America?
What were the areas of conflict between the British and French in North America during the Seven Years’ War?
What did the Indian peoples of the Ohio River valley hope for in the Seven Years’ War?
What policies of William Pitt led to ultimate British victory in the Seven Years’ War
Who were the Cajuns?
How did the colonists respond to the Proclamation of 1763?
How were ties among the colonies increased after the French and Indian War?
Why was British North America fertile ground for the growth of republican principles?
Who were John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift?
What was the Sugar Act, and why did the colonists find the Sugar Act particularly onerous?
To what does the term “virtual representation” refer?
To what does the term “actual representation” refer?
How did the Virginia House of Burgesses respond to Patrick Henry and his Stamp Act Resolutions?
Who were the Sons of Liberty?
What territory did the British gain as a result of the Seven Years’ War?
What did John Dickinson argue in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania?
What was the main way the colonists protested the Townshend Revenues Acts?
How did the Daughters of Liberty aid the nonimportation movement?
What did the Massachusetts Circular Letter do?
What resulted from the Boston Massacre?
What was the purpose of the Tea Act of 1773?
Why was the Boston Tea Party held?
What sanctions were imposed by the Declaration and Resolves passed by the First Continental Congress, in 1774?
What did the Quartering Act legalize?
Why were the colonists alarmed by the Quebec Act?
How were members of the Second Continental Congress chosen, and why was this process extralegal?
Why was Georgia not represented at the Second Continental Congress?
Why did Ethan Allen’s campaign to take Fort Ticonderoga anger the New York delegation to the Second
Constitutional Congress?
31. What did the Englishman Thomas Paine argue in Common Sense?
32. What events led to the Declaration of Independence?
Chapter 7
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What was one the keys to the Americans gaining their independence?
What were the militias, and how reliable were they?
What was the most important role of the Patriot militias?
What roles did women play in the War for Independence?
Who were the Loyalists, and how many colonists were Loyalists?
What types of people tended to be Loyalists?
How many Loyalists fled the United States during and after the Revolution, and why did they flee?
Who was the most infamous American supporter of the British cause, and why did he betray his American
military post?
What was the British plan in 1776?
What happened in battles in New York and New Jersey in the summer and fall of 1776?
What battles did the British win after arriving in New York City in July 1776?
What happened at the Battle of Trenton, and what new strategy did Washington adopt after that battle?
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What was the biggest British defeat until Yorktown?
Why was the Battle of Saratoga important?
What traditional enemies of Great Britain loaned the Americans money during 1777 and 1778?
What Indian peoples joined the British during the Revolutionary War?
Who was George Rogers Clark?
Where did the British enjoy victory after victory in the South between 1778 and 1780, and what was their
biggest victory?
19. What was the British policy in the South?
20. Which side did African Americans fight for during the Revolutionary War?
21. Who was Nathaniel Greene?
22. Who was General Charles O’Hara?
23. Who offered the motion for independence to the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, and what type of
government did the motion propose?
24. What was the first written constitution of the United States?
25. What did the three-year delay in the ratification of the Articles of Confederation reveal?
26. What authority did Congress have under the Articles of Confederation?
27. Why was the United States threatened with bankruptcy in 1781?
28. To what does the term “Not worth a Continental” refer?
29. Who were the members of the American peace commission?
30. What did the United States gain from the peace negotiations?
31. What was the Newburgh conspiracy?
32. What legislation provided for the survey and sale of western lands?
33. What legislation provided for the organization and government of the territory north of the Ohio River?
34. How was the Northwest Ordinance revised to try to prevent squatters?
35. What had been the traditional Tory and Whig positions in British politics?
36. What was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and who wrote it?
37. Documents, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights, set the precedent for what future document?
Chapter 8
1. What happened to Daniel Shays as a result of the rebellion?
2. What were the causes of Shays’ Rebellion?
3. During the inflationary period of the Revolutionary War, which year saw the most rapid loss of value for
Continental currency?
4. What was the name of the convention at which a resolution passed requesting that states send delegates to
later convention to develop a national constitution?
5. Who is known as the “Father of the Constitution?”
6. To what social class did most of the delegates who met in Philadelphia in 1787 belong
7. What type of government did the majority of the delegates at the Philadelphia convention advocate?
8. What did the Virginia Plan and New Jersey Plan include?
9. What did the Great Compromise include?
10. What did the Constitution do in regard to the issue of slavery?
11. What were some of the significant things which occurred during the Constitutional Convention?
12. What did the Anti-Federalists believe?
13. What did Madison argue for in the Federalist essays?
14. What primary protection does the Bill of Rights provide?
15. Which state was the linchpin in the Federalist campaign for the Constitution to be ratified?
16. How did the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Jay strengthen its own role?
17. What did Hamilton’s fiscal program of 1790 include?
18. Over what issue did Hamilton and Madison first begin to disagree?
19. What fear was the basis of the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson?
20. What did Washington’s cabinet all agree on in regard to the war between France and Britain?
21. Why did Washington issue a proclamation of neutrality in April 1793
22. What did the Intercourse Act of 1790 do?
23. Following the end of the war for independence, why did the United States have trouble gaining control of the
land granted to it under the Treaty of Paris?
24. What did the British hope to do by retaining the northwest posts around the Great Lakes?
25. What did the suppression of the “Whiskey Rebellion” indicate?
26. What resulted from the battle of Fallen Timbers?
27. What did Jay’s Treaty and Pinckney’s Treaty together allow the United States to do?
28. What did the Judiciary Act of 1789 establish?
29. What did Washington argue for in his Farewell Address?
30. What did the first two-party system include?
31. Why did the Federalist-controlled Congress pass the Alien and Sedition Acts?
32. What did the Jeffersonian Republicans do in reaction to the Alien and Sedition Acts?
33. What did the election of 1800 mark?
Chapter 9
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How did the French Revolution aid the American economy?
Why was Jefferson’s inauguration important in American history?
Why did Jefferson advocate a policy of national expansion?
Why did Jefferson succeed in reducing the cost of the federal government?
Why was the case of Marbury v. Madison important?
Why did Napoleon sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States?
How did Jefferson explain buying the Louisiana Territory?
How did the revolution to free Mexico from Spain begin?
How could the Embargo Act be characterized?
What economic measures were used by Jefferson and Madison to try to stop Britain and France from interfering
with the neutral rights of the United States?
What was Jefferson’s Indian policy like?
Why did Tecumseh reject treaties?
What resulted from the battle of Tippecanoe?
What did the War Hawks want to do?
Why did the American attacks on Canada during the war of 1812 fail?
What did the Treaty of Ghent settle?
After 1815 why did many people soon move west of the Appalachians?
What did the Land Act of 1820 do?
What does Monroe’s adoption of the American system in 1816 show?
What does the fact that the Second Bank of the United States was chartered show?
What was the Adams-Onis Treaty?
What did John Quincy Adams do as Secretary of State?
What did the Monroe Doctrine do?
What were the causes of the Panic of 1819?
What did the Missouri Compromise allow the South to do?
Chapter 10
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Why was the cotton gin important?
For what reasons were the land booms and rapid movement into the Old Southwest important?
To what did the profitability of cotton production contribute?
What did the development of the South as a slave society do in regard to the master-slave relationship?
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From what word is the term “gin” in “cotton gin” derived?
To what did the profitability of cotton lead?
In what year did the United States officially end its participation in the international slave trade?
To what did the increase in cotton production in the Lower South lead?
How would you characterize the internal slave trade after 1820?
How did African Americans regard the internal slave trade?
What were house servants often able to gain?
By law, slaves were property and could be treated in what ways?
What strategies did enslaved African Americans generally use to survive or strike back at their masters?
How was marriage for slaves different for slaves than for whites?
Which escaped slave made 12 rescue missions, eventually freeing between 60 and 70 slaves?
What did free black people have to wear in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, after 1848?
How did well-to-do southern whites see poor whites?
What characterized the life of yeoman farmers in the South?
Chapter 11
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With what phrase did the election of 1824 become identified in the public mind?
Who were the presidential candidates in 1824?
Why was the election of 1824 controversial?
What type of candidates were favored by the new popular democratic culture of the 1820s and 1830s?
Why was Jackson elected in 1828?
To what does the phrase “King Mob” refer?
What was the “Kitchen Cabinet?”
What does the Eaton affair show in regard to Jackson?
Who was the politician with the nickname “Cast-iron Man?”
What did Henry Clay’s American System include?
Which politician became known as the great advocate for the West?
What issue of the 1820s and 1830s came to represent conflicting sectional interests most
What was the protective Tariff of 1828 called?
Why were southerners particularly angry about this tariff?
Why did southern planters generally oppose tariffs?
Why did Calhoun support the doctrine of nullification?
In what case did Chief Justice John Marshall rule in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and against Georgia?
What was the forced removal of the Cherokee from the East to Indian Territory known as?
What did the removal of the Indians to west of the Mississippi reveal?
What was the purpose of Henry Clay’s American System?
After the veto of the Maysville Road Bill, how were internal improvements such as roads and canals built?
Why did the Second Bank of the United States become a divisive political issue?
Why did the new political party of the 1830s call itself the Whig Party?
What name did the Whigs attach to Jackson?
What was the popular name for the economic theory that says economic decisions should be made by market
forces?
How did Jackson make the Bank of the United States’ death certain?
What was the financial collapse that followed the speculative boom after Jackson killed the Second Bank of the
United States called?
What was the Specie Circular?
What nickname was given to Martin Van Buren?
What caused the financial collapse of 1837?
What did the Whigs favor?
Why did the Whigs win the presidency in 1840?
33. Who took over after Harrison died, and what were his policies like?
Chapter 12-14
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How did the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts forge a new ground for factory life?
Why was the transportation revolution important?
What parts of the country were tied together by the National Road?
What was true of the Erie Canal? (stats, results, effect on economy for this and #5)
What was true of the railroads?
What interrelated developments did the market revolution involve?
Who was employed by the putting-out system, and what type of labor did they do?
What was true of interchangeable parts and mass production?
What was the purpose of the Seneca Falls Convention?
Who were the primary organizers of this convention?
Who founded the Shakers?
What name was given to the routes by which slaves were ushered out of the South to freedom?
What was the Amistad?
What was it necessary for Angelina and Sarah Grimke to do in order for them to speak out as equals against
slavery?
Chapter 15
1. What were the debates on slavery between the Illinois Republican and Democratic candidates for the U.S.
Senate that occurred in seven towns from mid-August to mid-October 1858 known as?
2. What was one of the best-selling novels in American history, who wrote it and what did it critique?
3. What did John C. Calhoun argue in the debate preceding the Compromise of 1850?
4. What does the emergence of the Free Soil Party in 1848 suggest in regard to its supporters?
5. What did Southerners argue in support of the slave system?
6. What did the Compromise of 1850 include?
7. What law of 1850, promised in the Compromise of 1850, put the full authority of the federal government behind
southern efforts to capture escaped slaves?
8. What impact did the Fugitive Slave law have on blacks and on northern whites, and how rigorously did the
federal government enforce it?
9. The efforts of Commodore Matthew Perry led to an 1854 treaty that opened trade with what previously
isolationist Asian nation?
10. What legislation, sponsored by Stephen A. Douglas, in effect repealed the Missouri Compromise in return for
southern support for a transcontinental railroad to be built west of Chicago?
11. Who were the “Border ruffians?”
12. To what does the term “Bleeding Kansas” refer?
13. Who intentionally contributed to the rising violence in Kansas?
14. Who were the presidential candidates in the 1856 election?
15. Who beat Charles Sumner senseless on the Senate floor in 1856?
16. What resulted from the Dred Scott decision?
17. What resulted from John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry?
18. What did the Republican platform of 1860 include?
19. What was the first state to secede on December 20, 1860?
20. How were Southerners divided when the southern states began to secede?
21. When the Lower South seceded, what did Lincoln believe he should do?
22. What does the constitution of the Confederate States of America suggest in regard to the primary reason that
the South seceded?