Final American history

1. Define the term “Trail of Tears” (in about one sentence), and in at least 5-6 substantive sentences explain its significance in the 1820s-30s and beyond (in the course of your explanation, you should bring in specific examples from lecture and OB, as well as DBM #4).

The Trail of Tears was a terrible, devastating blow to the Native population (nearly ¼ of the Cherokee population perished), to Native morale (Cherokee were forced to live amongst sworn native enemies; their homes/livelihoods and communities had been destroyed; family members perished; pleas and treaties were ignored). Americans believed Whites and Natives Americans could not live in peace. Removal was seen as the solution.  The lands west of the Mississippi River were thought of as the Great American dessert and of no use in 1830. Once removed Whites could seize Indian lands for agriculture and mineral resource.

2. Define the term manifest destiny: Though settlers had begun migrating to newer portions of the west in the 1820s, the 1840s and 1850s truly saw the most dramatic increase in western settlement, in westward expansion. One of the major factors in why more people were migrating westward was the spread of an idea called “Manifest Destiny,” an idea that would come to define the American spirit for decades to follow. Manifest Destiny explained to Americans that the United States was destined, by God, “to expand its boundaries over a vast area, an area that included, but was not necessarily restricted to, the continent of North America.”5 This idea embraced a spirit of nationalism which insisted that it was Americans’ duty to bring that wonderful institution—democracy—to the farthest reaches possible. And by the 1840s, the idea of Manifest Destiny had spread like wildfire through the nation. Newspapers sang

3.Define the term Abolitionist Movement: So first let us take a look at abolitionism. Abolitionism was the term given to the anti-slavery movement in America. The national crusade against slavery basically began in the 1830s, largely because of the efforts of a man named William Lloyd Garrison and his Boston newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison believed that opponents of slavery should focus not on the evil influence of slavery on white society (this had largely been the way anti-slavery activists argued against slavery—they claimed that it made whites more debased, it brought Africans to America, and so on—all things that don’t take into account the awful effects of slavery on the slaves themselves!), but instead on how evil slavery was to blacks. The movement split into various cohorts. Some abolitionists tried to plead with Southern slave owners to get rid of the horrible institution of slavery. When that did not work, many tried 6 using politics to enact change. For example, some of these political abolitionists helped slaves to escape to the north or to Canada and, more importantly, won a Supreme Court victory in 1842 (although the victory was short-lived, being overturned in 1850) that said that states did not need to aid in enforcing a law that had been passed in the 1790s that required the return of runaway or fugitive slaves to their owners. In other words, northerners no longer had to return runaway slaves to owners in the south. Likewise, political abolitionists also encouraged the federal government to outlaw slavery in the new territories that were being added to the US. Other abolitionists, frustrated with how long it was taking to get slavery abolished, took matters into their own hands, using violence as a means to their end (that’s a little foreshadowing of what’s to come in future lectures—mayhem, madness, violence!!). But women really took the reins of the abolitionist movement from the 1830s on, helping to make the antislavery movement a vocal and powerful one. As I said a few minutes ago, people thought William Lloyd Garrison’s idea that women be granted full equality within the American Antislavery Society was seen as extremely radical. In response to this, female anti-slavery societies formed alongside (and as technical subordinates to) male-dominated societies as a way to maintain the unwritten gender laws of the time. Women widely participated in the movement, citing a hatred for human suffering, which meshed well with the roles as mother, wife, moral guardian, and nurturer that women were expected to follow. The best known of these corollary female groups was the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, created as an adjunct to the Garrison-led Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, which became an arena for women to perform their moral duties, and, for some, a way to voice political opinion. These women made their first foray into public life with the abolitionist Petition Campaign of 1835, which was largely run by women. These women collected signatures to show support for a growing call to outlaw slavery in Washington, DC—in the nation’s capital. But their petition campaign was something much bigger, too—women were now going beyond the private, domestic sphere. In their quest for signatures, these women found themselves enormously successful. The vast number of signatures obtained by female abolitionists suggested that rather than simply gaining support from obvious sympathizers, these women were actually educating new people—new petition signers, who were male—on the ills of slavery by sharing their own political opinions.

4. Identify the term ‘’ King cotton’’: By the 1850s, King Cotton, as it had come to be known, dominated the Southern economy, fueled the Southern economy, exploded the Southern economy. King Cotton was being exported for nearly $200 million a year in profit—and this meant it was here to stay.

What it also meant was that people were migrating by the thousands to the regions of the Southwest where cotton production was developing. These migrants were wealthy plantation owners, in some cases, but many more were small slaveholders or farmers who could not afford any slaves, but who hoped to become wealthy, slave-owning plantation owners. The migrants were also slaves—between 1840 and 1860, about 410,000 slaves came with masters to this region or were sold to masters living in this region.