Period 4: 1800–1848

"Our population is increasing with a rapidity that outruns all our institutions for moral and religious instruction... If we do not make a vigorous and united effort to diffuse the principles of the Gospel, by means of the press and the living voice, our country will be overrun with infidelity, vice, and ruin."

— American Tract Society, Annual Report, 1826

Which of the following historical developments of the early nineteenth century best explains the perspective expressed in the excerpt?

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the relocation of work from the home to the factory or office radically altered family life. For the growing middle class, the home was no longer a site of economic production but rather a refuge from the competitive business world.

The social shift described in the passage most directly contributed to which of the following cultural developments?

Read the following excerpt from the Supreme Court's majority opinion in a landmark 1803 decision:

"So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution, disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty."

Which of the following constitutional principles was established by the Supreme Court decision excerpted above?

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example."
— Thomas Jefferson, *Notes on the State of Virginia*, 1785

Which of the following best describes how the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 served to achieve the goal described in the excerpt?

"During the late Presidential Jubilee, as the Bostonians have fitly named the visit of the President of the United States, we have had quite as much reason to admire the citizen as the magistrate... the heart-felt gratification of a fusion of parties, the members of which have lost their individual antipathies in their common regard for the patriot..."

— *Columbian Centinel* (Boston newspaper), 1817

Which of the following historical developments most directly contributed to the "fusion of parties" described in the excerpt?

In $1801$, inventor Eli Whitney demonstrated a new manufacturing method to government officials. He presented ten muskets, disassembled their parts, mixed the pieces in a pile, and then quickly assembled complete muskets from the randomized parts.

Which of the following was a direct result of the manufacturing innovation demonstrated in this event?

Source: William Gilmore Simms, Southern writer, *The Morals of Slavery*, 1837

'The negro has been civilized, socialized, and Christianized under the domestic institution of the South. In physical condition, he is incomparably better off than the voluntary laborer of Europe or the Northern states... Our system of society is a stable one, presenting a barrier to the levelling and radical doctrines that threaten the peace of free-labor societies where the interests of capital and labor are in constant conflict.'

The arguments expressed in the excerpt were most directly a response to which of the following historical developments?

"Brothers—We must be united. We must smoke the same pipe. We must fight each other's battles; and more than all, we must love the Great Spirit... The white men are not friends to the Indians... they wish to destroy us. The King of England will send us arms and ammunition. He is angry with the Americans, and his soldiers will stand by us."

— Tecumseh, Shawnee leader, speech to the Choctaw and Chickasaw, 1811

Which of the following best explains how the sentiments expressed in the excerpt contributed to the outbreak of the War of 1812?

Read the excerpt below.

"I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."
— President Andrew Jackson, Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, 1832

The arguments expressed in the excerpt most directly register a conflict over which of the following issues?

"Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men have the same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. . . . If rights are founded in the nature of our moral being, then the mere circumstance of sex does not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to woman. To suppose that it does, would be to deny the self-evident truth, that 'all men are created equal'..."
— Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catherine Beecher, 1837

Based on the excerpt, which of the following historical developments during the early nineteenth century best explains the perspective expressed by Grimké?

Our country is undergoing a silent but rapid transformation. The introduction of steam-propelled vessels on our western waters has not only shortened the distance between our agricultural fields and southern markets, but it has stimulated a spirit of enterprise. Farmers who once looked only to local consumption now cultivate crops with the certainty of a foreign or domestic market in the East. The wilderness is rapidly yielding to the plow, and our towns are becoming centers of bustling commerce.

—Adapted from a western journal, 1828

Which of the following trends of the early nineteenth century is most directly reflected in the developments described in the excerpt?

"The question is, shall we preserve that system under which we have risen to our present state of prosperity... or shall we abandon it, and return to a state of colonial dependency? [...] The tariff is not an intolerable burden; on the contrary, it is the very source of our national independence and internal wealth, binding the agricultural interest of the West with the manufacturing power of the North."
— Henry Clay, Speech in the U.S. Senate, February 1832

Based on the sentiments expressed in the excerpt, which of the following best describes the primary disagreement between the Whig Party and the Democratic Party over the policy advocated by Clay?

“I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and scourged into obedience! . . . I appeal to your civil polity and your social code; I claim for these sufferers a protection which they cannot demand for themselves, and which is due to them from a Christian community. I ask that you establish institutions dedicated to their care, where they may find comfort and healing rather than neglect.”

— Dorothea Dix, Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, 1843

Which of the following early-nineteenth-century developments was the most direct inspiration for the sentiments expressed in the excerpt?

President James Madison, annual message to Congress, December 1815:

"Among the means of advancing the public interest, the occasion is a proper one for recalling the attention of Congress to the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority... Under circumstances giving a powerful impulse to manufacturing industry, it is consistent with a wise policy to provide a protection for it. In selecting the branches more especially entitled to the public patronage, a preference is obviously claimed by such as will relieve the United States from a dependence on foreign supplies."

The political and economic shifts described in the excerpt most directly reflect which of the following historical developments?

"No one can observe the signs of the times with much care, without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is preparing. . . . The struggle now is not between monarch and subject, nor between noble and plebeian, but between the operative and the employer, between the man who does the work and the man for whom it is done. . . . The system of wages labor, which has succeeded to the system of slavery and serfdom, is not a system of freedom."

— Orestes Brownson, "The Laboring Classes," 1840

The conditions described in the excerpt were most directly a consequence of which of the following historical developments between 1800 and 1848?