CLEP History of the United States I flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Three-Fifths Compromise

Constitutional provision counting three of every five enslaved persons for House apportionment and direct taxes, increasing southern representation in Congress without granting enslaved people any rights.

Marbury v. Madison

1803 Supreme Court ruling that struck down part of the Judiciary Act, establishing judicial review: courts may invalidate acts of Congress that conflict with the Constitution.

Missouri Compromise of 1820

Admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, and barred slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes in the Louisiana Purchase, preserving sectional balance in the Senate.

Dred Scott v. Sandford

1857 decision holding that Black Americans were not citizens, that enslaved people remained property even in free territory, and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

1854 law organizing those territories under popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise line and provoking violent conflict known as Bleeding Kansas.

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

1798-1799 statements written secretly by Madison and Jefferson arguing that states could judge the constitutionality of federal laws, later used to support nullification.

Reconstruction amendments

Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship and equal protection; Fifteenth (1870) barred denying suffrage on account of race.

Bacon's Rebellion

1676 Virginia uprising of frontier settlers and servants against Governor Berkeley; planters responded by replacing indentured servants with enslaved African laborers.

Salem witch trials

1692 Massachusetts episodes in which accusations and spectral evidence led to about twenty executions; later discredited, they reflected social, gender, and property tensions.

Seneca Falls Convention

1848 gathering in New York that issued the Declaration of Sentiments, drafted mainly by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, demanding women's suffrage and legal equality.

Nat Turner's Rebellion

1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, that killed roughly sixty white people; southern legislatures responded with harsher slave codes and limits on Black literacy.

Second Great Awakening

Early nineteenth-century revival movement stressing individual conversion; camp meetings such as Cane Ridge energized temperance, abolitionist, and women's rights reform.

American Colonization Society

Founded in 1817 to resettle free Black Americans in Africa, helping establish Liberia; immediatist abolitionists rejected it as a scheme to preserve slavery and white supremacy.

Navigation Acts

Seventeenth-century English statutes requiring colonial trade to use English ships and pass through English ports, enforcing mercantilism and prompting colonial smuggling and resentment.

Cotton gin

Eli Whitney's 1793 device that separated seed from short-staple cotton, making upland cotton highly profitable and accelerating slavery's expansion across the Deep South.

Hamilton's financial program

1790-1791 plan for funding the debt, federal assumption of state debts, a national bank, and an excise tax, which sparked the first party system.

Erie Canal

Completed in 1825, it linked the Hudson River to Lake Erie, slashed freight costs, made New York City the leading port, and triggered a nationwide canal boom.

Embargo Act of 1807

Jefferson's ban on American exports intended to force Britain and France to respect neutral shipping; it devastated New England commerce without changing European policy.

Panic of 1837

Financial collapse following Jackson's bank policies, the Specie Circular, and falling cotton prices; banks failed and unemployment rose during a prolonged depression.

First Great Awakening

1730s-1740s religious revivals led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield that split churches into New Lights and Old Lights and fostered intercolonial communication.

Transcendentalism

New England movement associated with Emerson and Thoreau asserting that intuition surpasses sense experience; it produced Self-Reliance, Walden, and Civil Disobedience.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel depicting slavery's cruelties; it sold in enormous numbers, strengthened northern antislavery sentiment, and drew angry southern rebuttals.

Hudson River School

Group of mid-nineteenth-century American painters, including Thomas Cole, whose large landscapes of wilderness and scenery expressed romantic nationalism and awe at nature.

McGuffey Readers

Widely used nineteenth-century schoolbooks that taught reading through moral, religious, and patriotic lessons, helping spread a common Protestant American culture.

Mormon migration to Utah

After founder Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, Brigham Young led Latter-day Saints westward, settling near the Great Salt Lake in 1847 to escape persecution.

Treaty of Paris, 1783

Agreement ending the Revolutionary War: Britain recognized independence, granted territory west to the Mississippi River and Newfoundland fishing rights, and kept Canada.

Jay Treaty

1794 agreement with Britain in which British troops evacuated western forts and limited trade opened; it avoided war but was denounced as pro-British for ignoring impressment.

Pinckney's Treaty

1795 agreement with Spain granting Americans free navigation of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans, and setting the Florida boundary at 31 degrees north.

Louisiana Purchase

1803 acquisition of French territory for about $15 million, doubling the size of the United States and raising debate over implied presidential power.

Treaty of Ghent

December 1814 agreement ending the War of 1812 with no territorial changes and no mention of impressment or neutral rights; fighting continued until news arrived.

Monroe Doctrine

1823 declaration that the Western Hemisphere was closed to further European colonization or intervention, while the United States would avoid involvement in European affairs.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

1848 treaty ending the Mexican War; Mexico recognized the Rio Grande boundary and ceded California and the Southwest for $15 million and assumption of claims.