CHAPTER 13

The settlement of the western territories

divided the North and the South over the issue of slavery in the territories.

By the end of the 1840s, the territory of the United States included

nearly the entire territory of the current continental United States.

The idea that God and history had selected America to expand its boundaries over the continent of North America was known as

Manifest Destiny.

When the new republic of Texas requested annexation by the United States,

Americans in the North opposed acquiring a large new slave territory.

American immigrants into Oregon

outnumbered the British by 1850.

Immigrants going west on the great overland trails faced the least danger from

hostile Indians.

Which of the following was NOT part of President Polk's policy regarding New Mexico and California?

ceasing all diplomatic contact with Mexico

By combining the Oregon and the Texas issue in 1844, Democrats hoped to

appeal to both Northern and Southern expansionists.

Travelers on the Overland Trail

often migrated as families that practiced traditional gender divisions of labor.

The war with Mexico was criticized

by Northerners who believed it was part of a slaveholders' plot to bring in more slave states.

The Wilmot Proviso

passed the House by not the Senate.

The "overlord" of the Sacramento River Valley and the man on whose land gold was discovered was

John A. Sutter.

The Compromise of 1850 included all of the following EXCEPT

the national government would not pay the Texas debt.

Who of the following did NOT support the Compromise of 1850?

Zachary Taylor

The new leaders emerging in Congress after the Compromise of 1850 were

more concerned with narrow interest of self-promotion.

The "Young America" movement

was intended to divert young Americans' interests toward nationalism and expansion and away from the "transitory" issue of slavery.

The question of statehood for Kansas and Nebraska became a critical issue because

of the question of whether they would be slave or free states.

Northerners who accepted the concepts of "free soil" and "free labor" believed

slavery was dangerous not because of what it did to blacks but because of what it did to whites.

Through personal liberty laws, Northern states attempted to

use state authority to interfere with the deportation of fugitive slaves.

Southerners who believed in the "positive-good" theory argued

slavery was good for blacks.

American efforts to buy or seize Cuba failed because

antislavery forces in the North opposed it.

The Dred Scott decision

affirmed the South's argument that the Constitution guaranteed the existence of slavery.

Abraham Lincoln

believed slavery was morally wrong but was not an abolitionist, and had been a Democrat before he became a Republican.

The single event that did the most to convince white Southerners they could not live safely in the Union was

John Brown's raid.