Study Guide for Quiz #1

Here is the study guide for the first quiz, which will be based on lecture (from August 23 to September 6) and Chapter 1 of Gallagher and Waugh, The American War. The quiz was originally scheduled for September 8, but since I did not provide the study guide a full week in advance, I will push the quiz to September 13.

Part I: Map Identification
Study the location of the following Southern states: Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia (which at the war’s beginning included W. Virginia), North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.  You will not need to know state capitals, bodies of water, etc., only the location of the state.  Use this map (or one like it) to prepare.

Part II: Chronologies
Develop a list of key dates in the sectional crisis, using lecture notes and The American War.  Include such events as the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Wilmot Proviso, Mexican War, the raid on Harpers Ferry, Dred Scott decision, South Carolina’s secession, etc.).  This part of the quiz will not require you to memorize the actual dates, but instead it will ask you to put a series of events in chronological order–the idea behind this is to help you understand cause and effect, so even if you forget the year of the Harpers Ferry raid, you will at least remember that it came before South Carolina’s secession (as one example).

Part III: Short Answer
Be prepared to answer these questions in 3-4 complete sentences. The quiz will include two of these prompts.

1. How did Bacon’s Rebellion play a role in the establishment of chattel slavery in Virginia?2. Besides sectionalism, what do Gallagher and Waugh identify as some of the other themes of American life during the antebellum period?
3. What is the definition of “free soil?”
4. During the debates over secession, what were the three main schools of thought among white Southerners?

Part IV: Short Essay
There will be one question that requires a written answer of at least one long paragraph or two short paragraphs.  For this section, here are the two questions to study:
1. What were the economic incentives that encouraged the development of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil War South?
2. How would you describe the relationship between slavery and states’ rights in the early nineteenth century?