AP United States History

CSS 11.1, 11.3

Unit 5 – Expansion and the Coming Crisis (1830s – 1850s)

Chapters 14 – 15 (p. 454 – 527)

Instructions: Please write out your answers for the short answer questions on one paper. Define the vocabulary terms Cornell style 2 – 3 sentences per term.

Chapter 14 – The Territorial Expansion of the US (1830s – 1850s) p. 454 – 489

1.  the Alamo (456)
2.  Stephen Austin (468)
3.  Battle of San Jacinto (470)
4.  Bear Flag Revolt (473)
5.  Comstock Lode (479)
6.  “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” (466)
7.  Free Soil Party (482)
8.  Gadsden Purchase (476)
9.  Gold Rush (477-478)
10.  Great American Desert (459-460)
11.  Sam Houston (470)
12.  Hudson Bay Company (458)
13.  Manifest Destiny (462) / 14.  Mexican-American War (472-476)
15.  Oregon Trail (466)
16.  James K. Polk (472)
17.  popular sovereignty (483, 499)
18.  rendezvous system (458)
19.  Santa Fe Trail (461)
20.  Gen. Winfield Scott (475)
21.  John Slidell (473)
22.  Zachary Taylor (473, 483)
23.  Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (475-476)
24.  Frederick Jackson Turner (462)
25.  Wilmot Proviso (480-481)

1. Define the concept of manifest destiny. What means did the United States use to achieve its destiny?

2. Trace the different ways in which the frontiers in Oregon, Texas, and California moved from frontiers of inclusion to frontiers of exclusion.

3. Explain the Whig and Democrat sides of the issues raised by the Mexican-American War. (Extension of slavery, justification for the war, conclusion of the war)

4. Referring back to Chapter 13, compare the positions of the Liberty Party and the Free-Soil Party. Examine the factors that made the free-soil doctrine politically acceptable to a greater number of people while abolitionism seemed so controversial.


Chapter 15 – The Coming Crisis (the 1850s) p. 490 – 527

26.  border ruffians (506)
27.  John Brown (507, 514)
28.  James Buchanan (509)
29.  Compromise of 1850 (497)
30.  Confederate States of America (520)
31.  Constitutional Union Party (515)
32.  Stephen Douglas (503, 515)
33.  Dred Scott v. Sandford (511-512)
34.  Election of 1860 (515-516)
35.  Emigrant Aid Society (507)
36.  fire eaters (520)
37.  Fugitive Slave Act (501)
38.  Harper’s Ferry (514)
39.  Kansas-Nebraska Act (505) / 40.  Know-Nothing Party (508-509)
41.  Lecompton Constitution (512)
42.  Lincoln-Douglas Debates (493-494)
43.  Ostend Manifesto (504)
44.  Panic of 1857 (513)
45.  Com. Matthew Perry (504)
46.  personal liberty laws (501)
47.  Franklin Pierce (503)
48.  Republican Party (509)
49.  Sumner-Brooks Affair (511)
50.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin (495-496)
51.  William Walker (503)
52.  Young America movement (503)

1. What aspects of the American economy in the first half of the nineteenth century contributed to the sectional crisis of the 1850s?

2. How might the violent efforts by abolitionists to free escaped slaves who had been recaptured, and the federal armed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act have been viewed differently by Northern merchants (the so-called Cotton Whigs), Irish immigrants, and abolitionists?

3. Trace the course of events in “Bloody Kansas” from Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act to the congressional rejection of the Lecompton constitution. Were these events the inevitable result of the political impasse in Washington, or could other decisions have been made that would have changed the outcome?

4. The nativism of the 1850s that surfaced so strongly in the Know-Nothing Party was eclipsed by the crisis over slavery. But nativist sentiment has been a recurring theme in American politics. Discuss why it was strong in the 1850s.

5. Evaluate the character and actions of John Brown. Was he the hero proclaimed by northern supporters or the terrorist condemned by the South?

APUSH 2010

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