CLEP History of the United States I cheat sheet

Articles of Confederation (1781-1789): unicameral Congress with no power to tax or regulate interstate commerce; amendments needed unanimous state consent; major legislation needed 9 of 13 states.

Connecticut (Great) Compromise: House seats apportioned by population, Senate equal by state; the Three-Fifths Clause counted three of every five enslaved persons for representation and direct taxes.

Constitution ratification required 9 states; the Federalist Papers (85 essays by Hamilton, Madison, Jay) defended ratification, and the Bill of Rights (1791) answered Anti-Federalist objections.

Marbury v. Madison (1803) established judicial review; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld implied powers and federal supremacy over state taxation of a federal bank.

Missouri Compromise (1820): Missouri entered as a slave state, Maine as free, and slavery was barred north of 36 degrees 30 minutes in the Louisiana Purchase territory.

Compromise of 1850: California free, popular sovereignty in New Mexico and Utah, a stricter Fugitive Slave Act; the settlement collapsed with the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which repealed the 36-30 line.

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): Black Americans were not citizens, enslaved people remained property in free territories, and Congress could not bar slavery in the territories.

Veto override requires two-thirds of both houses; treaty ratification requires two-thirds of the Senate; impeachment conviction requires two-thirds of the Senate.

Civil War amendments: Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery; Fourteenth (1868) guaranteed citizenship, due process, and equal protection; Fifteenth (1870) barred denial of suffrage based on race.

Chesapeake society depended on young male indentured servants under the headright system; the New England Great Migration of the 1630s brought families and produced higher life expectancy.

Bacon's Rebellion (1676, Virginia) pushed planters toward racial chattel slavery; Virginia law made enslaved status hereditary through the mother by 1662.

Slave codes tightened after the Stono Rebellion (1739, South Carolina) and Nat Turner's revolt (1831, Virginia), restricting assembly, literacy, and movement.

The Second Great Awakening (c. 1790-1840) generated reform societies: American Temperance Society (1826), American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), and woman suffrage agitation.

Seneca Falls Convention (1848): the Declaration of Sentiments, drafted mainly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton with Lucretia Mott, demanded women's suffrage and legal equality.

Abolition press: Garrison's Liberator (1831) and Douglass's North Star (1847) demanded immediate emancipation; the American Colonization Society (1817) instead promoted resettlement in Africa.

Antebellum immigration: Irish and German arrivals peaked in the 1840s-1850s, fueling nativism and the Know-Nothing (American) Party.

Institutional reform: Horace Mann promoted public schooling, Dorothea Dix publicized abuses in mental asylums, and temperance crusaders targeted alcohol consumption.

Mercantilism in practice: the Navigation Acts (1651-1673) confined colonial trade to English ships and ports and listed enumerated goods that had to pass through England.

Colonial staples: tobacco in the Chesapeake, rice and indigo in South Carolina and Georgia, wheat in the middle colonies, and fur in New France.

Hamilton's program (1790-1791): fund the federal debt at par, assume state debts, charter a national bank, and levy an excise tax, including the whiskey tax that sparked the 1794 rebellion.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made short-staple cotton profitable, spreading slavery westward; cotton supplied roughly two-thirds of US export value by 1860.

Transportation Revolution: National Road begun 1811, Erie Canal completed 1825, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 1830; freight costs fell sharply and market exchange widened.

The Embargo Act (1807) and Non-Intercourse Act (1809) damaged New England shipping but encouraged domestic manufacturing.

Bank War: the Second Bank was chartered in 1816; Jackson vetoed recharter in 1832, removed deposits to pet banks, and issued the Specie Circular in 1836.

Financial panics: 1819 (cotton price collapse and bank tightening), 1837 (Specie Circular, bank failures, depression), and 1857 (railroad and banking collapse).

Puritan New England: John Winthrop's 1630 'city upon a hill' ideal; literacy encouraged for Bible reading; town schools and Harvard College (1636).

First Great Awakening (1730s-1740s): Jonathan Edwards's 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' and George Whitefield's tours split congregations into New Lights and Old Lights.

Enlightenment currents: Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, deism among several founders, and Locke's natural rights language in the Declaration of Independence.

Transcendentalism: Emerson's 'Nature' (1836) and 'Self-Reliance'; Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' (1849) and Walden (1854).

Antebellum literature: Irving and Cooper in the early republic; Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), and Emily Dickinson's privately circulated verse.

Utopian experiments: New Harmony (1825), Brook Farm (1841), Oneida (1848), and celibate Shaker communities.

Protest literature: Douglass's Narrative (1845) and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which sold roughly 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year.

Religious innovation: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith; Brigham Young led the migration to Utah in 1846-1847.

Treaty of Paris (1783): British recognition of independence, territory west to the Mississippi River, and fishing rights off Newfoundland; Britain retained Canada.

Jay Treaty (1794) averted war with Britain but won no concession on impressment; Pinckney's Treaty (1795) secured Mississippi navigation and the New Orleans right of deposit from Spain.

XYZ Affair (1797-1798) produced the Quasi-War with France, ended by the Convention of 1800, which terminated the 1778 alliance.

Louisiana Purchase (1803) cost about $15 million and doubled US territory; the Lewis and Clark expedition explored the purchase in 1804-1806.

War of 1812 causes: impressment, British Orders in Council, and War Hawk pressure; the Treaty of Ghent (1814) restored the status quo, and the Hartford Convention discredited the Federalists.

Adams-Onis Treaty (1819) acquired Florida and drew a boundary to the Pacific; the Monroe Doctrine (1823) warned Europe against new colonization or intervention in the Americas.

Texas was annexed in 1845; the Oregon Treaty (1846) set the 49th parallel; the Mexican War (1846-1848) ended with Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Mexican Cession.

Civil War diplomacy: the Trent Affair (1861) risked war with Britain, and the Emancipation Proclamation tied Union aims to abolition, discouraging British and French recognition of the Confederacy.

Later expansion: the Gadsden Purchase (1853) added southern Arizona borderland; the Alaska purchase (1867), arranged by Seward, cost $7.2 million.