Framing the Constitution
This 1786–1787 armed revolt of indebted Massachusetts farmers demonstrated the structural weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation to national elites.
What is Shays's Rebellion?
Alexander Hamilton proposed creating this financial institution to serve as the main depository for federal funds and manage national credit.
What is the Bank of the United States?
Anti-Federalists refused to ratify the proposed Constitution until Federalists guaranteed the addition of these ten amendments to protect personal liberties.
What is the Bill of Rights?
This controversial 1794 treaty with Great Britain canceled the formal military alliance with France and intensified political party divisions in the U.S.
What is Jay’s Treaty?
In Voices of Freedom, Judith Sargent Murray argued in "On the Equality of the Sexes" that women had equal intellectual capacity to men and needed access to this.
What is education?
This 1787 landmark ordinance banned slavery in the Old Northwest territory and established a mechanism for admitting new states as equal members of the Union.
What is the Northwest Ordinance of 1787?
President Washington mobilized 13,000 militiamen in 1794 to suppress this backcountry protest against an internal tax on distilled liquor.
What is the Whiskey Rebellion?
In Voices of Freedom, David Ramsay praised the power to do this as the Constitution’s greatest innovation for enabling peaceful political change without violence.
What is the power to amend the Constitution?
British warships routinely committed this act by seizing American merchant ships and forcing American sailors into service in the Royal Navy.
What is impressment?
Inspired by the French and American Revolutions, this 1791 slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture created the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere.
What is the Haitian Revolution?
This constitutional agreement determined that enslaved people would count as three-fifths of a person for both congressional representation and direct taxation.
What is the Three-Fifths Compromise?
Passed by Federalists in 1798 during the Quasi-War, these laws authorized the deportation of non-citizens and made public criticism of the government a crime.
What are the Alien and Sedition Acts?
In Voices of Freedom, Mercy Otis Warren criticized the Constitution because she believed it would concentrate power in a wealthy aristocracy, subverting this era’s principles.
What is the American Revolution?
In Who is an American?, this Shawnee leader rejected white land purchases and attempted to forge a pan-Indian military alliance across the Mississippi Valley.
Who is Tecumseh?
In 1800, an enslaved blacksmith organized this planned armed rebellion in Virginia to demand freedom, but it was betrayed and put down before it began.
What is Gabriel’s Rebellion?
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the vast geographic size and diverse interests of the United States would prevent any single political group from forming a dominant one of these.
What is a faction (or majority tyranny)?
Thomas Jefferson doubled the physical area of the nation in 1803 by authorizing this $15 million land transaction with France.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
This term describes the division of political authority between the national government and state governments established by the Constitution.
What is federalism (or the division of powers)?
Thomas Jefferson attempted to prevent war with Europe by passing this 1807 policy, which banned all foreign trade with American vessels, crippling the U.S. economy.
What is the Embargo Act?
The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions introduced this constitutional theory, asserting that individual states could declare unconstitutional federal laws null and void.
What is nullification?
This small-state proposal at the Constitutional Convention called for a unicameral legislature with equal representation for every state regardless of population.
What is the New Jersey Plan?
Thomas Jefferson termed his presidential election victory over John Adams this, viewing it as a restoration of revolutionary principles of limited government.
What is the "Revolution of 1800"?
This constitutional mechanism distributes legislative, executive, and judicial powers into distinct branches so that no single branch can dominate.
What is separation of powers (or checks and balances)?
Under the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, the U.S. government instituted this policy, giving annual institutional grants of money to Native tribes to tie them closer to federal authority.
What is the annuity system?
The New England Federalists who gathered at this 1814 secret convention ended up destroying their party's credibility after news of the victory at the Battle of New Orleans arrived.
What is the Hartford Convention?