Test: #5 Antebellum Reform and Expansion (1836 to 1848)
Format: 80 AP Style Multiple Choice

Chapters Covered: #14, #15, #16, and #17

Chapter 14: Forging the National Economy  The new nation went bounding into the nineteenth century in a burst of movement. New

England Yankees, Pennsylvania farmers, and southern yeomen all pushed west in search of cheap land and prodigious opportunity, soon to be joined by vast numbers of immigrants from Europe, who also made their way to the country’s fast-growing cities. But not only people were in motion. Newly invented machinery quickened the cultivation of crops and the manufacturing of goods, while workers found themselves laboring under new, more demanding expectations for their pace of work. Better roads, faster steamboats, farther-reaching canals, and tentacle- stretching railroads all helped move people, raw materials, and manufactured goods from coast to coast and Gulf to Great Lakes by the mid nineteenth century. The momentum gave rise to a more dynamic, market-oriented, national economy.

Chapter 15: The Ferment of Reform and Culture A third revolution accompanied the reformation of American politics and the transformation of the American economy in the mid-nineteenth century. This was a diffuse yet deeply felt commitment to improve the character of ordinary Americans, to make them more upstanding, God-fearing, and literate. Some high-minded souls were disillusioned by the rough-and-tumble realities of democratic politics. Others, notably women, were excluded from the political game altogether. As the young Republic grew, increasing numbers of Americans poured their considerable energies into religious revivals and reform movements. Reform campaigns of all types flourished in sometimes bewildering abundance. There was not “a reading man” who was without some scheme for a new utopia in his “waistcoat pocket,” claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reformers promoted better public schools and rights for women, as well as miracle medicines, polygamy, celibacy, rule by prophets, and guidance by spirits. Societies were formed against alcohol, tobacco, profanity, and the transit of mail on the Sabbath. Eventually overshadowing all other reforms was the great crusade against slavery ).

Many reformers drew their crusading zeal from religion. Beginning in the late 1790s and boiling over into the early nineteenth century, the Second Great Awakening swept through America’s Protestant churches, transforming the place of religion in American life and sending a generation of believers out on their missions to perfect the world

Chapter 16: The South and the Slavery Controversy  At the dawn of the Republic, slavery faced an uncertain future. Touched by Revolutionary idealism, some southern leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, were talking openly of freeing their slaves. Others predicted that the iron logic of economics would eventually expose slavery’s unprofitability, speeding its demise. But the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793 scrambled all those predictions. Whitney’s invention made possible the wide-scale cultivation of short-staple cotton. The white fiber rapidly became the dominant southern crop, eclipsing tobacco, rice, and sugar. The explosion of cotton cultivation created an insatiable demand for labor, chaining the slave to the gin, and the planter to the slave. As the nineteenth century opened, the reinvigoration of southern slavery carried fateful implications for blacks and whites alike—and threatened the survival of the nation itself.

Chapter 17: Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy  Territorial expansion dominated American diplomacy  and politics in the 1840s. Settlers swarming into the still-disputed Oregon Country aggravated relations with Britain, which had staked its own claims in the Pacific Northwest. The clamor to annex Texas to the Union provoked bitter tension with Mexico, which continued to regard Texas as a Mexican province in revolt. And when Americans began casting covetous eyes on Mexico’s northernmost province, the great prize of California, open warfare erupted between the United States and its southern neighbor. Victory over Mexico added vast new domains to the United States, but it also raised thorny questions about the status of slavery in the newly acquired territories—questions that would be answered in blood in the Civil War of the 1860s