Chapter 13 Questions

1. What was the most important southern export crop in the United States in the mid-19th century? . By 1849 what was the most important crop in Virginia? Why was this so important?

2. What was the United States' single most important export product in the mid-19th century?

3. What was introduced by Edmund Ruffin to improve soil fertility? What is Peruvian Guano?

4. 4. How had the cost of slaves changed by 1850? What did it mean to be sold "down the river?"

5. Why were Isaac Franklin and John Armfield important?

6. Approximately how many slaves were forcibly transferred from the seaboard states to the to the rich soil areas of the deep South?

7. What was the most efficient size of a slave plantation?

8. Just before the Civil War, what percent of white families in the south owned slaves?

9. In the decade before the Civil War, how much did it typically cost to house, feed, and clothe a slave for year?

10. In the decade before the Civil War, what percent of white Southerners were illiterate? How did this compare with New Englanders?

11. How did white southern women from slave holding familes live? What was the life of a "southern lady" who was the wife of a plantation owner like?

12. What age was typical for slave children to be put to work doing their first tasks? Did slave children and white children associate? How did infant mortality compare among slaves and southern whites?

13. By the Civil War, approximately how many slaves had been imported into the area that would become the U.S.? How many blacks lived in the U.S. around 1860?

14. What sorts of interactions existed between slaves and their owners?

15. What was "slave religion" and what did do for slaves and their owners?

16. Who were Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner? 31. How did Denmark Vesey use the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and tales of Haiti?

17. Why did freeing slaves become unpopular?. Out of a population of four million how many slaves were released in 1859?

18. In the South, what was the relationship between the proportion of slaves in the general population and the local slaves?

19. How many slaves were imported into the U.S. after the slave trade was outlawed in 1808? What is special about this year?

20. What do the names Sambo, Buck, Jezebel and Mammy mean? What is the importance of these terms?

21. What percentage of slaves were fathered by whites?

22. What was the most valuable manufactured product in the United States in 1860?

23. Who attempted to dispel the southern prejudice against manufacturing and established a factory at Graniteville, South Carolina?

24. By 1860, what percent of manufactured goods in the U.S. came from the South?

25. What was the total value of manufactured goods produced in the United States in 1859?

26. Why was steam power very important in the years before the Civil War?

27. By 1850 in what types of manufactured goods did the United States lead? What type of factory did the Americans help build in England after 1851?

28. When was the National Academy of Science bill passed? What did it establish?

29. How did no internal tariffs, improvements in transportation, population growth, and high per capita wealth help stimulate the American market for manufactured goods?

30. What did Elias Howe invent 1846? Which industries did this revolutionize?

31. What ethnic group made up more than 50% of the workforce in New England's mills by 1860?

32. How did immigrants, such as the Irish, often react to Free blacks? How did religion and ethnicity affect workers?

33. Which newspaper, published by Horace Greeley, examined the typical working family budget in an article from 1851? According to this newspaper what was the typical weekly budget for a family of four?

34. During the 1840s and 1850s how long was the typical workday?

35. What did Commonwealth v. Hunt establish? What disrupted the labor union movement?

36. Why in the years just before the Civil War did many believe that wage labor was almost un-American?

37. How many people in New York received some form of public relief in 1848?

38. As the United States industrialized and developed a high standard of living in comparison with Europe, what were the lives of workers actually like?

39. By the 1850s was the United States an importing or exporting nation?

40. After textiles what was the United States' second most important import?
41. Just before the Civil War which country was the United States' best customer and leading supplier?

42. What were "square-riggers on schedule?"

43. When new port cities replaced New England cities as America's most important commercial ports, how did some southern New England towns saved their prosperity?

44. What type of ship was famous for great speed in the 1850's?
45. What was the Flying Cloud?

46. Why did steam ships began to capture most of the passenger traffic, mail contracts, and first-class freight on the Atlantic?

47. The United States had an advantage over Great Britain in building what kind of ships?

48. When was the Erie Canal finished? Following a canal building boom, how many miles of canal were there approximately in the U.S. by 1840? The Erie Canal had its greatest impact on which state?

49. What was the name of the first American railroad line built in 1830? Approximately how many miles of railroad track did the U.S. have by 1860? What was the longest rail road in the world by 1851?

50. About how much was invested in the railroads in the 1850s?

51. Which railroad was the main beneficiary of the land grant bills passed in 1850? How did railroad capitalists often make their money?

52. Who invented a steel plowshare that could plow the prairie sod?

53. Who developed the horse-drawn reaper?

54. What city was most profoundly affected by the railroad?

55. What caused the Erie Canal to reduce it rates?

56. What created a boom for agricultural products, primarily wheat, in the Midwest during the 1850s?

57. What effect did the linking of the East and West by railroads have on abolition and sectionalism?

58. What effect did the Panic of 1857 have on the South and the West?

Chapter 14 Questions

1. What was the connection between the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and persons such as James Hamlet, Euphemia Williams, William and Ellen Craft, and Frederick Jenkins?

2. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional yet the U.S. Supreme Court reversed this decision but in what court case?

3. Who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin? Why was this book important?

4. Who was Louis Koussuth?

5. What was "Young America?"

6. What were William Walker and George Bickley examples of?

7. What did Secretary of State Clayton and British minister Bulwer negotiate in 1850?

8. What was the Ostend Manifesto? Why did it anger abolitionists?


9. What was the accomplishment of Commodore Matthew Perry?

10. Who is considered to be the most important spokesman of the "Young America" movement?

11. What did Stephen A. Douglas seek in 1851?

12. Who was elected President in 1852?

13. Who proposed the bill that would organize the Kansas territory?

14. Who arranged the purchase of land from Mexico near the Gila River?

15. What part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act proved a "fateful concession?"

16. What was the formal name of the Know-Nothing party? What was the primary concern of the party?

17. What relationship existed between Free-Soilers, Conscience Whigs and "Anti-Nebraska" Democrats and the nascent Republican party?

18. What was the Kansas-Nebraska Act supposed to settle?

19. What were "Border Ruffians?" Where did they come from?

20. Which man could be seen as the trigger for "Bleeding Kansas" by encouraging pro-slavery settlers? What was "Bleeding Kanas?"

21. Which Senator 'loosed a dreadful blast titled "The Crime Against Kansas."' Which Senator was "caned" by a member of Congress?

22. Which party adopted their objectives by this slogan "Free soil, free speech, and Fremont?"

23. Who was the "Pathfinder?" Who would the "Pathfinder" run against for President?

24. What did the Dred Scott decision decide?

25. What constitution did James Buchanan find acceptable as the constitution for the state government of Kansas?

26. What was the result of Stephen A. Douglas' and James Buchanan's struggle over the Lecompton Constitution?

27. In which political positions did Abraham Lincoln first serve before being elected President?

28. What man arose to challenge Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the Senate and later in a contest for the Presidency?

29. What term best describes the man who debated Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate.

30. When was the first Republican national convention?

31. When did the Lincoln-Douglas Debates begin?

32. During their debates of what did Stephen A. Douglas accuse Abraham Lincoln?

33. During their debates of what did Abraham Lincoln Stephen A. Douglas?

34. What concept may have enabled Stephen A. Douglas to keep his senate seat?

35. What was the Freeport Doctrine?

36. Who gave the "House Divided" speech?

37. What was the purpose of John Brown's on Harper's Ferry?

38. In which year did John Brown make his raid on Harper's Ferry?

39. What was Harper's Ferry? Who was John Brown?

40. What was the purpose of The Impending Crisis of the South?

41. Who was chosen as the Southern Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1860?

42. What was the Constitutional Union party ?

43. .When Stephen A. Douglas became certain that he would lose the election of 1860 what did he do?

44. Which party took second place in the votes cast in the election of 1860?

45. Which state was the first to secede from the Union?

46. When did this the first southern state secede?

47. Stephen A, Douglas had once reminded James Buchanan that he was not Andrew Jackson was this a fair statement and why?

48. Where was the provisional government of the Confederate States of America established?

49. What was the purpose of the Crittenden Compromise? What did Abraham Lincoln think of this compromise?

50. Who did the Confederacy choose as its president?