U.S. History Chapter 12

What helped fuel economic growth in the United Sates during the mid-1800s?

The movement of Americans from farms to cities

What allowed factories to become more productive during the 1840’s and 1850s?

Steam began to be used as an energy source

Why did so many migrants move to the Midwest between 1830 and 1860?

The rich soil made conditions favorable to farming

Agricultural productivity in the Midwest increased in the late 1830s partly because of

John Deere’s steel plow

To help facilitate the increase in U.S. agricultural productivity in the 1840s and 1850s, the federal government

sold the land for as little as $1.25 an acre

Why did American manufacturers, unlike their European counterparts, invent labor-saving methods and devices during the first
half of the nineteenth century?

Workers were in limited supply and thus more expensive

Which region led the nation in manufacturing?

New England

The "American system" of standardized parts allowed manufacturers to

hire less expensive, unskilled workers

What was the effect of the growth of railroads in the 1850s?

New industries, like telegraph communications, flourished

Who tended to benefit from America’s impressive economic growth in
the early nineteenth century?

Native-born white men

Supporters of the free-labor ideal claimed that the system

allowed hired laborers to become self-employed

What did free-labor proponents believe about education?

It offered another opportunity for Americans to achieve their potential

Which statement describes the economic status of Americans by
1860?

Most Americans owned no land

Three-fourths of the almost 4.5 million immigrants who arrived
between 1840 and 1860 came from either Ireland or

Germany

Most German immigrants were the families of

skilled tradesmen

What happened to most Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s?

Most immigrants entered at the bottom rung of the free-labor ladder

What did New York journalist and armchair expansionist John L. O’Sullivan mean when he coined the term manifest destiny in 1845?

Americans had the God-given right to expand their civilization across the continent

How did the United States and Great Britain resolve competing claims on the Oregon territory in 1818?

The two nations decided on joint occupation

How did white settlers who traveled west in wagon trains during the
mid-1800s bring devastation to the Plains Indians?

Whites brought with them alcohol and deadly diseases

What was the experience of most women settlers in Oregon?

They worked tirelessly

Who led the Mormon exodus to the Great Salt Lake?

Brigham Young

Within ten years of arriving at the territory around the Great Salt
Lake, the Mormon community

developed an efficient irrigation system

Why were Mexico’s northern borderlands vulnerable to American
expansionists?

The borderlands were sparsely populated

Who were the migrants who settled on the Texas land granted to
Stephen F. Austin by Mexico in the 1820s?

Southerners who brought cotton and slaves with them

Texans gained their independence from Mexico in 1836 after

Sam Houston’s army defeated Santa Anna’s troops in a surprise attack

Who triumphed at the Alamo in March 1836?

the Texians

In the 1820s, Americans were beginning to trickle into thinly populated California; in an effort to increase Mexican migration to that area, the Mexican government

granted huge estates to new Mexican settlers

Why did Congress refuse to annex Texas into the Union?

Texas would come into the Union as a slave state

What was the dominant issue in the 1844 presidential election campaign?

Territorial expansion

President Tyler obtained approval for the annexation of Texas

through a joint resolution of Congress

How was President Polk able to add Oregon to U.S. holdings?

He renewed an old offer to divide Oregon along the forty-ninth parallel

When Mexico refused the Polk administration’s offer to buy Mexico’s northern territories, the United States realized manifest destiny would require

military force

Which group was most outspoken in its opposition to war with
Mexico?

Whigs

What was President Polk’s strategy to win the Mexican-American War?

to occupy Mexico’s northern provinces and win a couple of major battles, after which Mexico would sue for peace

Of the 13,000 American soldiers who died during the Mexican-American War, most

died from diseases

Which general made a successful amphibious landing at Veracruz on March 9, 1847?

General Winfield Scott

What did Mexico agree to do under the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?

Mexico gave up all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and ceded California and the Utah and New Mexico territories to the United States

Why did massive numbers of immigrants pour into California in the late 1840s and early 1850s?

They sought gold

The Gold Rush created a social environment that was

competitive, violent and unhealthy, but growing rapidly

Which group attracted scrutiny owing to its members’ dress, eating habits, and recreational use of opium during the California gold rush?

The Chinese

How did the gold rush affect California Indians?

They were attacked and pushed off their land

What do the transcendentalists believe?

That society and its institutions- particularly organized religion and political parties- ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual

The Oneida community was known for its

practice of complete sexual freedom

The convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 advocated

women’s rights and suffrage

Abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s made their issue more attractive to white Northerners

by promoting limitations on the geographic expansion of slavery

What was the goal of the American Colonization Society?

To gradually free slaves, through purchasing them, and send them to Africa

In 1855, African American leaders saw their most notable success to date when, in Massachusetts,

public schools were integrated

Who founded the "underground railroad" to help fugitive slaves escape from the South?

Harriet Tubman