Topic 11.4: The US Civil War (1840-1877) Questions

Approximately how many African Americans served as soldiers in the Union army following the Emancipation Proclamation?

To what extent do you agree with the claim that the cotton economy, rather than any political dispute, was the fundamental driver of the sectional divide between North and South by 1850?

Evaluate the claim that everyday, non-violent resistance by enslaved people (family networks, cultural adaptation, escape) was more significant in undermining slavery than the open rebellions of Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner.

Choose the invention that made short-staple cotton highly profitable and drove the expansion of the Cotton Belt.

What event in 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the effective end of Reconstruction?

Which piece of legislation repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise line and opened two new territories to slavery by popular sovereignty?

Which amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery in 1865?

Choose the federal law passed in 1833 authorising President Andrew Jackson to use the army to enforce tariff collection in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis.

Choose the enslaved-led uprising of 1831 in Virginia that killed around 55 white people and triggered brutal reprisals along with harsher slave codes across the South.

Choose the term historians use for the forced movement of roughly one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the new cotton states of the Deep South.

John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 was crushed by US Marines under the command of which officer?

Choose the newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 that demanded immediate, uncompensated emancipation.

Discuss the view that the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 was fundamentally a rehearsal for the sectional conflict over slavery, rather than simply a dispute about tariffs.

Which state seceded from the Union first, in December 1860, following Abraham Lincoln's election?

To what extent do you agree that Southern pro-slavery ideology, exemplified by John C. Calhoun's 1837 description of slavery as a "positive good", represented a fundamental shift rather than simple continuity in how the South defended slavery?

Who became the first Black US Senator in 1870, representing Mississippi?

In Dred Scott v Sandford (1857), what did the Supreme Court rule about the constitutional power of Congress?

In which year was the Ku Klux Klan founded as a white supremacist terror group opposing Black political participation?

Which president introduced a lenient path back into the Union for former Confederate states (1865-67), allowing them to pass Black Codes and elect ex-Confederates to office?

Evaluate the claim that enslaved people's resistance, rather than the actions of white abolitionists, did more to undermine slavery and heighten sectional tension before 1850.