Chapter 14: Troubled Times: the Tumultuous 1850s
Review Questions
1. What was President Zachary Taylor’s top priority as president?
- preserving the Union
- ensuring the recapture of escaped enslaved people
- expanding slavery
- enlarging the state of Texas
2. Which of the following was not a component of the Compromise of 1850?
- the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act
- the admission of Kansas as a free state
- the admission of California as a free state
- a ban on the slave trade in Washington, DC
3. Why did many in the North resist the Fugitive Slave Act?
4. Which of the following was a focus of the new Republican Party?
- supporting Irish Catholic immigration
- encouraging the use of popular sovereignty to determine where slavery could exist
- promoting states’ rights
- halting the spread of slavery
5. Border ruffians helped to ________.
- chase abolitionists out of Missouri
- elect a proslavery legislature in Kansas
- capture escaped enslaved people
- disseminate abolitionist literature in Kansas
6. How did the “Bleeding Kansas” incident change the face of antislavery advocacy?
7. On what grounds did Dred Scott sue for freedom?
- the inherent inhumanity of slavery
- the cruelty of his enslaver
- the fact that he had lived in free states
- the fact that his family would be torn apart
8. Which of the following was not a result of the Lincoln-Douglas debates?
- Douglas was elected senator of Illinois.
- Lincoln’s national profile was raised.
- Citizens in both the North and South followed the debates closely.
- Lincoln successfully defended the principle of popular sovereignty.
9. What are the main points of the Dred Scott decision?
10. Why did John Brown attack the armory at Harpers Ferry?
- to seize weapons to distribute to enslaved people for a massive uprising
- to hold as a military base against proslavery forces
- in revenge after the sacking of Lawrence
- to prevent southern states from seceding
11. Which of the following did not contribute to Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1860?
- the split between northern and southern democrats
- the defeat of the Whig party
- Lincoln’s improved national standing after his senatorial debates with Stephen Douglas
- the Constitutional Union party’s further splintering the vote
12. What were southerners’ and northerners’ views of John Brown?