Chapter 13 & 14 Test

Poster advertising the sale of “millions of acres” in Iowa and Nebraska by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad Co., 1872. Source: Library of Congress

This poster was intended to:

• promote the settlement of western lands

• argue in favor of war with Mexico to acquire new territory

• advocate for the expansion of the transcontinental railroad

• protest the displacement of Native Americans

An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain [Homestead Act], 1862

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands . . .”

A historian would most likely use this passage to illustrate which of the following?

• the efforts of Radical Republicans to punish former Confederates

• the barriers of land ownership for women and African-Americans

• the Free Soil Party's fulfillment of its campaign promises

• the US government's support for westward migration

“A higher than any earthly power still guards and directs our destiny, impels us onward, and has selected our great and happy country as a model and ultimate centre of attraction for all the nations of the world.”

-Robert J. Walker, “Report as Secretary of the Treasury for Fiscal Year 1846-1847,” 1847

The excerpt best reflects which of the following?

• the growing social and cultural ties between the United States and Great Britain after the Second Great Awakening

• the ongoing economic problems caused by Andrew Jackson’s war on the national bank

• the rising tensions in northern cities caused by rising immigration from Ireland and Germany

• the widespread belief that the United States was superior to other nations and bound to expand

“East and West shaking hands at the laying of the last rail” of the Union Pacific Railroad, 1869. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Which of the following most directly led to the circumstances illustrated by the image?

• restrictions preventing Chinese immigrants from entering the United States

• population increase in California following the discovery of gold

• legislation promoting western transportation and economic development

• extinction of the American bison from overhunting

“The great vice of the government is our violent party spirit; that vice which Washington foresaw, and against which his last warning was given; that which was the prominent evil of Rome, of Greece, of Holland, of all ancient and modern Republics, is our great calamity. This spirit of party, sordid, blind and selfish when carried to extremes, finds its choicest aliment in the local interests and sectional prejudices with which every country abounds. Those interests and prejudices necessarily increase with every extension of territory, and it is in this light that every great augmentation of the Union becomes formidable.”

-Source: Theodore Sedgwick, Thoughts on the Proposed Annexation of Texas to the United States, 1844

The author’s ideas in the excerpt emerged most directly in response to which of the following developments in the United States?

• the end of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republican Party

• the use of government funds to support Henry Clay’s American System

• the conflict over the renewal of the charter for the national bank

• the increased efforts to expand westward and acquire new land

“In the long run, the most significant division of American opinion exacerbated by the war in Mexico was that between the North and South. The doctrine of America’s manifest destiny had not sprung originally from a slave power conspiracy but from policies with nationwide appeal and deep cultural roots. When James Knox Polk came into office, territorial expansion did not constitute a sectional issue but a party one. . . . Polk did not share Calhoun’s disposition to view all matters in terms of their impact on the slavery question. Nevertheless, as his term went by, his administration increasingly appeared narrowly southern in outlook. The president’s imperialist objectives came to prompt a bitter sectional dispute over slavery’s extension, bearing out Calhoun’s foreboding.”

-Source: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, 2007

The pattern described in the excerpt most directly contributed to which of the following long-term developments?

• the economic differences between regions

• the United States’ efforts to develop the West

• the regional divisiveness within political parties

• the renewed commitment to Manifest Destiny

“Strike out the term white, and what will be the result? Hordes of Mexican Indians may come in here from the West and may be more formidable than the enemy you have vanquished. Silently they will come moving in; they will come back in thousands to Bexar, in thousands to Goliad, perhaps to Nacogdoches, and what will be the consequence? Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand may come in here and vanquish you at the ballot box though you are invincible in arms . . .

“Talk not to me of democracy which brings the mean, grovelling yellow race of Mexico . . . upon an equality of rights and privileges with the freeborn races of Europe. The God of nature has made them inferior; he has made the African and the red man inferior to the white.”

-Source: Remarks from the Texas Constitutional Convention, as printed in Distant Horizon: Documents from the Nineteenth-Century American West (2000), 1845

The ideas in the excerpt were most directly motivated by the:

• tensions created by the outcome of the Mexican-American War

• desire to institute a literacy test for all state and federal elections

• concerns about the legal status of non-white people in acquired territory

• support for the ratification of an amendment to define citizenship

“[A]nnexing Texas had meant the addition to the Union of a huge southwestern state where slavery was legal, and slavery’s spread was something to which large numbers of Northerners were emotionally and politically opposed. This opposition increased and began to be more strident during the War with Mexico, which many in the North regarded as a war brought on largely by southern expansionists. Hostilities officially ended in February of 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as a result of which approximately one-fifth of the United States of 1849 was acquired by the victors. . . .”

-Source: Holman Hamilton, historian, Prologue to Conflict, 1964

According to the passage, which of the following best explains the most important political effect of the annexation of Texas?

• It led to debates about the extension of slavery to the newly acquired territory

• It led to an era of mass migration with the discovery of gold in the state

• It led to racial conflicts between Mexicans, Native Americans, and white settlers

• It led to the expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean

“The agitation on the subject of Slavery, now raging through the breadth of the land, presents a most extraordinary spectacle. Congress, after a protracted session of nearly ten months, succeeded in passing a system of measures, which are believed to be just to all parts of the Republic, and ought to be satisfactory to the People. The South has not triumphed over the North, nor has the North achieved a victory over the South. Neither party has made any humiliating concessions to the other.”

-Source: Senator Stephen A. Douglas, in a speech, 1851

The excerpt is best understood as a response to which of the following historical developments?

• the creation of the reservation system in the West

• the sale of land in the Midwest at a low cost

• the passage of the Compromise of 1850

• the end of the Mexican-American War

“That any attempts by congress to interfere with the institution of slavery in any of the territories of the United States would create just grounds of alarm in many of the States of the union; and that such interference is unnecessary, inexpedient, and in violation of good faith; since, when any such territory applies for admission in to the union as a state, the people thereof alone have the right, and should be left free and unrestrained, to decide such question for themselves.”

-Source: State Senator Broderick, Journal of the California Legislature, 1850

The ideas about slavery in the territories expressed in the excerpt are most consistent with which of the following?

• the belief in Manifest Destiny

• the ideas of the Second Great Awakening

• the principle of popular sovereignty

• the theory of nullification