Exam 11: Imperial Ambitions, 1820-1848

The presidential election of 1844 was one of the most important in U.S.history.What was the background to this election? Who were the candidates and what issues did they support? Finally,what effects did the election's outcome have before the end of the following administration?

How do you explain the persistence in America of certain African practices (the ring shout and incest taboos,for example)and the gradual disappearance of others (among them,ritual scarring)?

How did slaves resist their circumstances and attempt to negotiate a better situation for themselves in the nineteenth-century South?

What prevented planter elites from exercising complete political dominance over the Cotton South in the 1830s and 1840s?

Which of the following methods was a highly uncommon form of slave resistance in the slave South?

Answer the following questions : -Bear Flag Republic

Which of these groups accounted for the largest percentage of the white population in the mid-nineteenth-century Cotton South?

What prevented white southerners from working to diversify their economy in the nineteenth century?

How did the South's status as a "slave society" affect the lives of white southerners who did not own slaves?

Which of the following examples embodied the synthesis of African and American culture that existed in the South in the 1850s?

Which of the following attributes of American society did the planter aristocracy in the South value highly in the mid-nineteenth century?

Why did President Polk go to war with Mexico? Why did the war become so divisive in Congress?

Americans who migrated to the Oregon Territory in the 1840s settled in which of these regions?

Which of the following statements describes the class of propertyless whites living in the South in the mid-nineteenth century?

Answer the following questions : -"Fifty-four forty or fight!"

For this question,refer to the following two excerpts. Texas is now ours....The independence of Texas was complete and absolute.It was an independence,not only in fact,but of right....What then can be more preposterous than all this clamor by Mexico and the Mexican interest,against Annexation,as a violation of any rights of hers...? Nor is there any just foundation for the charge that Annexation is a great pro-slavery measure-calculated to increase and perpetuate that institution.Slavery had nothing to do with it....That it will tend to facilitate and hasten the disappearance of Slavery from all the northern tier of the present Slave States,cannot surely admit of serious question.The greater value in Texas of the slave labor now employed in those States,must soon produce the effect of draining off that labor southwardly.... California will,probably,next fall away....Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it,armed with the plough and the rifle,and marking its trail with schools and colleges,courts and representative halls,mills and meeting-houses.A population will soon be in actual occupation of California....And they will have a right to independence-to self-government ...a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico,a thousand miles distant,inheriting from Spain a title good only against those who have none better. John L.O'Sullivan,Editor,"Manifest Destiny," from United States Magazine and Democratic Review,July 1845 If we regard Texas as a province of Mexico,its boundaries must be sought in the geography of that republic.If we regard it as an independent State,they must be determined by the extent of jurisdiction which the State was able to maintain.Now it seems clear that the river Nueces was always recognized by Mexico as the western boundary;and it is undisputed that the State of Texas,since its Declaration of Independence,never exercised any jurisdiction beyond the Nueces.... In the month of January,1846,the President of the United States directed the troops under General Taylor,called the Army of Occupation,to take possession of this region [west of the Nueces River].Here was an act of aggression.As might have been expected,it produced collision.The Mexicans,aroused in self-defence,sought to repel the invaders.... Here the question occurs,What was the duty of Congress in this emergency? Clearly to withhold all sanction to unjust war,-to aggression upon a neighboring Republic....The American forces should have been directed to retreat,not from any human force,but from wrongdoing;and this would have been a true victory. Alas! This was not the mood of Congress.With wicked speed a bill was introduced,furnishing large and unusual supplies of men and money....This was adopted by a vote of 123 to 67;and the bill then leaped forth,fully armed,as a measure of open and active hostility against Mexico. Charles Sumner,Conscience Whig and future Republican Senator from Massachusetts,Letter to Robert Winthrop,a Whig Congressman from Massachusetts,October 25,1846 The two excerpts above are best understood in the context of the

What did nineteenth-century American expansionists mean by the term Manifest Destiny?

Which of the following made the Oregon Territory so appealing to Americans in the mid-1800s?