American History

Part 1
Cotton gin
Mexico
Confederate States of America
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
Border ruffians and Free-Soilers
Antebellum  years
Abraham Lincoln
Jefferson Davis
Dred Scott
Compromise

Part II
1. General Ulysses Grant led the North in vanquishing the Confederate States as the Union Armys general-in-chief during the American Civil War. He later became the eighteenth United States President.

2. General Robert E. Lee commanded the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and is considered one of the greatest soldiers in US history.

3. The Black Codes were legislation passed by the Southern states that restricted the movement and civil rights of newly-freed African Americans.

4. The Fourteenth Amendment is one of three Reconstruction Amendments that provided for, among others, the citizenship and constitutional rights of slaves.

5. Manifest Destiny was a prevailing belief in the 19th century that suggested of the United States destiny to expand territorially into the North American continent, through the Atlantic seaboard, and toward the Pacific Ocean.

6. King Cotton was a phrase coined in the Southern US emphasizing the importance of cotton to the economy of Confederate states during the Civil War.

Part III.
1. Abraham Lincoln is best known as the American leader who led the United States through its greatest crisis and worked for the abolition of slavery. He became the sixteenth President of the United States (March 1861 to April 1865).  Lincoln won the nomination for president under the Republican Party in 1860 and won the election in 1861. His election was mired with tension between the North and South, eventually, leading up to the War of the Union. After the defeat of the secessionist South, Lincolns tenure as president became permanent. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, putting constitutional force on the abolition of slavery.

2. Reconstruction endeavored to rebuild the states destroyed by war to their full status. There were many accomplishments during the Reconstruction period. The newly-freed slaves or Freedmen were given employment contracts. Schools and courts were built. Most of all, the greatest accomplishments were founded in the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth granted the Freedmen citizenship and the Fifteenth the right to vote. The Radical Reconstruction resulted to violent resistance from groups like the Ku Klux Klan which wad me by force by the federal government. Soon, the North lost commitment to Reconstruction and determined that the South should solve its own problems. Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1867, leading to the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South.

Part IV. Essay Question
The North and South differed bitterly on several issues, including the question on tariffs, Westward expansion, states rights theory of government, and position on the Dred Scott decision. The North favored high tariffs to protect factories and workers from the influx of cheaper European goods while the mainly agricultural South was less concerned with tariffs but had to shoulder the high cost of goods to subsidize profits of Northern industries. Expansionism was disputed as the North and the South wanted to extend territory that would reflect their respective economic and political interests. The North feared the South used territorial annexation to expand slavery. The states  rights theory was a protecting principle invoked by the slave-owning states of the South, and was bitterly opposed by the abolitionist states of the North.  The Dred Scott decision favored the South because it upheld the states rights theory and provided that slave property should be protected, fueling opposition of the North who felt that their rights were violated both by that decision.