Free CLEP U.S. History I Exam Flashcards

Its signers agreed to form a civil body politic and obey laws made for the colony's general good. It illustrates government by consent and local self-rule, although participation was limited.

Loose enforcement of imperial rules let colonial assemblies and local institutions gain practical authority. Britain's later attempt to tighten control after 1763 therefore felt like a loss of established autonomy.

Colonists argued that Parliament could not tax them legitimately when they elected no representatives to it; they believed taxation required consent through their own assemblies.

Congress lacked reliable power to tax and regulate interstate or foreign commerce. The Constitution replaced the loose confederation with a federal government possessing enumerated powers, separate branches, and checks and balances.

Old World diseases caused catastrophic population loss, while introduced animals, crops, trade goods, and imperial competition changed economies, warfare, land use, and social relations across the Americas.

As tobacco expanded and the supply and conditions of European indentured labor changed, planters increasingly built a permanent, hereditary labor system around enslaved Africans, reinforced by colonial slave codes.

Enslaved people resisted through preserving community and culture, slowing work, breaking tools, escaping, and organized revolt. Resistance was continuous, not limited to large uprisings such as Stono.

Native peoples formed many distinct political, economic, and cultural systems adapted to different environments. They farmed, hunted, fished, managed land, built towns, and maintained extensive trade networks; no single model describes them.

Colonies were expected to supply raw materials and serve as markets within a regulated imperial economy. Navigation laws limited colonial trade largely to English or colonial shipping and channeled key exports through England.

Tobacco became a profitable export that encouraged dispersed plantations, land expansion, and intensive demand for labor—first heavily indentured and increasingly enslaved.

Puritans sought a disciplined covenant community that would reform English Protestant practice by example. Congregations, family life, education, and civil authority were closely linked, while dissent faced limits.

Revival preaching emphasized personal conversion and challenged established clergy. It divided churches while creating shared religious experiences across colonies and expanding lay participation.

The Declaration used natural rights, equality, consent of the governed, and a right to alter or abolish destructive government to justify independence rather than merely listing imperial grievances.

Britain won major territory but accumulated debt and then imposed new taxes and western limits. Those measures ended the earlier pattern of loose supervision and intensified colonial resistance.

The American victory at Saratoga helped secure a formal French alliance in 1778. French money, arms, troops, and naval power made the conflict international and were crucial to the victory at Yorktown.

Federal assumption of state debts, funding the national debt, tariffs, excise taxes, and a national bank tied creditors to the new government, established public credit, and expanded implied federal power.

Judicial review: the Supreme Court's authority to declare a federal law unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Marshall used it to strengthen the judiciary as a coordinate branch.

Most states removed property requirements for white male voters, parties organized mass campaigns, and turnout expanded. Political participation broadened for white men while women and most nonwhite Americans remained excluded.

It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving Senate balance, while barring slavery north of latitude 36°30′ in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory, except Missouri.

South Carolina claimed a state could nullify a federal tariff it judged unconstitutional; President Jackson rejected that claim and defended federal supremacy while a compromise tariff eased the confrontation.

It used popular sovereignty for Kansas and Nebraska and effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise restriction. Violence in Kansas and anger over slavery's possible expansion accelerated party realignment.

Lincoln won without carrying the Deep South on a Republican platform opposing slavery's expansion. Slaveholding leaders saw the result as a threat to their political power and slavery's future.

The 13th abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, the 14th established national citizenship and equal protection, and the 15th prohibited denying the vote because of race, color, or previous servitude.

The disputed 1876 election was resolved with Rutherford B. Hayes taking office, and remaining federal troops were withdrawn from Southern statehouses. “Redeemer” governments then consolidated control and weakened federal protection of Black rights.

Its emphasis on moral choice and human capacity for improvement inspired voluntary associations pursuing temperance, abolition, education, missions, and other efforts to perfect individuals and society.

Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it asserted women's equality and listed legal and social grievances, including the denial of voting rights. It made suffrage a public demand of the organized women's-rights movement.

Large immigrant communities supplied labor, expanded cities and Catholic institutions, and influenced politics. Their growth also provoked nativist and anti-Catholic movements such as the Know-Nothings.

It authorized treaties exchanging Indigenous homelands east of the Mississippi for western territory. Coercion and forced removals—including the Cherokee Trail of Tears—opened southeastern land to white settlement and slavery.

After the international trade closed, traders forcibly moved enslaved people from older tobacco regions to expanding cotton and sugar areas, separating families and making enslaved people a major form of movable wealth.

Northern advocates portrayed wage work as a temporary path to independence and property, contrasting it with slavery. In practice, industrial workers often faced low pay, long hours, and limited mobility.

Escaping enslaved people weakened Confederate labor systems, while nearly 180,000 Black men served in the U.S. Army and roughly 20,000 in the Navy, making military service central to freedom and citizenship claims.

It supported the transition from slavery by providing relief, education, labor-contract assistance, legal help, and other services to freedpeople and refugees, while facing limited resources and white resistance.

Improved transportation, commercial farming, factories, and wider credit linked regional producers to distant markets. More households bought and sold through markets, while wage labor and regional specialization expanded.

It sharply reduced the cost and time of moving goods between the Great Lakes and the Hudson River, strengthened New York City as a commercial center, and encouraged western settlement and market farming.

Faster removal of seeds made short-staple cotton highly profitable across the Deep South. Planters expanded land and enslaved labor even though the machine reduced labor in one processing step.

A protective tariff, a national bank, and federal support for internal improvements. The program aimed to integrate regional economies but provoked constitutional and sectional disputes over who paid and benefited.

Jackson vetoed the Second Bank's recharter and moved federal deposits to selected state banks. State-bank lending expanded; speculation, the Specie Circular, and an international credit contraction then helped precipitate the Panic of 1837.

Production shifted from household and artisan settings toward mechanized mills and factories. Wage labor expanded, including the employment of young women in textile towns, and workers organized over hours, pay, and control.

The ideal assigned women responsibility for raising virtuous republican citizens. It did not grant equal political rights, but it supported greater female literacy and schooling as necessary to the republic.

Thinkers such as Emerson and Thoreau emphasized intuition, individual conscience, nature, and self-reliance over inherited authority. Their ideas encouraged experiments in personal and social reform.

Their dramatic American scenery associated nature and westward space with national identity, spiritual meaning, and progress, even as expansion displaced Native peoples and transformed environments.

Tax-supported public schools should educate children of different backgrounds, prepare citizens, and promote social order. Reform increased access but often imposed Protestant cultural norms and remained unequal by race and region.

First-person accounts exposed slavery's violence, demonstrated Black authorship and intellect, and turned individual experience into an argument against the institution. Frederick Douglass's narrative became a leading example.

Cheap, mass-circulation newspapers broadened readership and emphasized crime, human-interest stories, advertising, and timely urban news, creating a more commercial public culture.

Photographers documented camps, leaders, landscapes, and the dead with unprecedented visual immediacy. Reproduced images shaped memory of the conflict even though technical limits prevented most combat action shots.

Jefferson favored strict construction, yet the Constitution did not expressly grant a power to acquire territory. He accepted the treaty to secure the Mississippi watershed and expand the agrarian republic.

British interference with American shipping, impressment of sailors, and support for Native resistance fueled war, alongside U.S. nationalist and expansionist pressure.

The United States would oppose new European colonization or intervention in the Americas while generally avoiding European political conflicts. U.S. enforcement power was initially limited and British naval strength helped deter intervention.

The U.S. victory brought vast western territory under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Debate over whether slavery could expand there reopened the issue Congress had repeatedly tried to balance.

Confederate leaders expected Europe's textile dependence to force recognition, but Britain and France found other cotton sources, faced antislavery public pressure, and would not risk war without stronger Confederate prospects.