AP U. S. History Period 5 Multiple Choice Questions

Questions 8.1-8.6 refer to the excerpt below.

"Two factors—the expansionist pursuit of Jefferson’s empire of liberty, and the extraordinary continued growth of plantation slavery thanks to the cotton revolution—upset the Democratic and Whig Parties that had formed by 1840, and hastened the growth of the antagonistic northern and southern democracies. Americans experienced the crack-up primarily as a political crisis, about whether slavery would be allowed to interfere with democratic rights—or, alternatively, whether northern tyranny would be allowed to interfere with southern democracy. Over those questions, which encompassed clashes over northern free labor and southern slavery, the political system began falling apart in the mid-1840s."

--Sean Wilentz, historian, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, published in 2005

8.1

Which event most immediately accelerated the demise of the political system Wilentz is referring to?

(A) The spread of American republicanism

(B) Compromise of 1850

(C) Inherited ideals of the Federalists

(D) Kansas-Nebraska Act

8.2

Wilentz would most agree that the more powerful issue accounting for the differences in the views of the North and South over slavery was

(A) a question of equal rights for the African American

(B) a struggle over the "pursuit of happiness" for the white American

(C) a moral question of the inhumanity of slavery

(D) a question of redress for the wrongs of slavery

8.3

Wilentz’s interpretation most supports which statement regarding the political stance of the South in the increasingly bitter conflict over slavery?

(A) For southerners, slavery was a necessary evil.

(B) Southerners argued that the heart of the matter was one of states’ rights.

(C) The southerners’ viewpoint was that territorial expansion was the root of the controversy.

(D) Southerners saw slavery as mostly an issue of social welfare.

8.4

1.4 Which of the following best describes the free-labor stance of the North?

(A) Slavery threatened America’s democratic principle of social mobility.

(B) Slavery contradicted the American ideal of the equality of all races.

(C) Slavery was immoral by robbing the African American of the right to self-determination.

(D) Slavery was antithetical to the ideal that all laborers should be paid a standard wage.

8.5

How does the idea of "free labor," as referenced in the above excerpt, connect to the pro-union stance of the northern states?

(A) Break-up of the union threatened the balance of the manufacturing and agricultural regions which had naturally developed.

(B) Break-up of the union disrupted the continual blending of immigrant cultures into a single, unique American culture.

(C) Break-up of the union threatened the central vision of American economic progress and national power.

(D) Break-up of the union disrupted the progress of national labor rights.

8.6

Which was the heart of the ideology of the Republican Party that immediately arose from the demise of the party system referenced in the above excerpt?

(A) Free-labor

(B) Slow population growth

(C) Racist stereotyping

(D) Property rights