Colonial Regional Dynamics (1600s-1776)
Due to a cold climate and rocky soil, this colonial region developed a mixed economy based on shipbuilding, fishing, commerce, and small family farms.
What are the New England Colonies?
Known as America's first constitution, it created a very weak national government with no president, no federal court system, and no power to collect taxes or enforce laws.
What are the Articles of Confederation?
The 2,000-mile overland route used by hundreds of thousands of 19th-century pioneers traveling west in search of fertile farmland and economic opportunities.
What is the Oregon Trail?
The immediate political event in 1860 that triggered the secession of Southern slaveholding states from the Union.
What was the election of Abraham Lincoln?
These plans preferred lenient, rapid readmission for Southern states with few conditions.
What are Lincoln and Johnson's plans?
These middle colonies were known as the "breadcrumb" region because of their flourishing export economy based on cereal crops like wheat, attracting diverse European migrants
What are the Middle Colonies?
This compromise reached during the 1787 Philadelphia Convention created a bicameral legislature, balancing state population representation in the House with equal state representation in the Senate.
What is the Connecticut Compromise (or Great Compromise)?
The 19th-century belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its borders across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
What is Manifest Destiny?
The North developed an _________ economy reliant on free labor; while the South relied on an _________ economy dependent on slave labor.
What is industrial and agricultural?
This plan wanted to punish former Confederates, restrict white Southern elites, and use federal military authority to enforce full civil equality for Black Americans.
What is Radical Reconstruction?
The Southern colonies and British West Indies relied on long growing seasons to export staple cash crops like tobacco and sugar, creating a heavy economic reliance on this forced labor system.
What is African chattel slavery?
To satisfy Anti-Federalist fears of a strong central government and ensure ratification, Federalists promised to add these first ten amendments to protect individual liberties.
What is the Bill of Rights?
This 1803 territorial purchase from France doubled the physical size of the U.S. and granted control over the Mississippi River.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
A secret, decentralized network of safe houses and brave conductors like Harriet Tubman who assisted enslaved people fleeing to free Northern states and Canada.
What is the Underground Railroad?
For each of the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—identify their core functions.
What is to abolish slavery (13th), to guarantee citizen and equal protection (14th), and to protect voting (15th)?
Leading up to the American Revolution, this phrase rallied colonists against the Crown and its overbearing tax policies.
During the 1787 convention, delegates agreed to this compromise, which counted 60% of an enslaved population for state representation in Congress and federal taxation.
What is the Three-Fifths Compromise?
The political concept—introduced in new western territories—that allowed local voters to vote directly on whether to permit or ban slavery within their borders.
What is Popular Sovereignty?
Issued by Lincoln following the Battle of Antietam, this executive order declared enslaved people in rebelling Confederate states to be legally free and reframed the war's purpose around abolition.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
An agricultural system where tenant farmers worked land in exchange for a portion of the harvest, which frequently trapped freedpeople in a cycle of debt and poverty.
What is Sharecropping?
This founding document declared that "all men are created equal" with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to justify breaking away from King George III.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
The Founders met here to write a new Constitution creating three branches of government (Executive, Legislative, Judicial) with a system of checks and balances.
Where is Philadelphia?
Violent clashes broke out in 1854 between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers following the passage of this law introduced by Stephen Douglas.
What is the Kansas-Nebraska Act (or "Bleeding Kansas")?
Considered a turning point, this Union victory that the North control of the strategic Mississippi River.
What is the Battle of Vicksburg?
This political agreement formally ended the Reconstruction Era in exchange for certifying Rutherford B. Hayes's contested presidential victory, resulting in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
What is the Compromise of 1877?