Part VI
In this part...
Kick back, but not too far. These Part of Tens chapters contain fun information, but they can actually help you on the Big Test. The AP U.S. History exam is going to have questions on political, economic, and social events, so remember your PES dispenser. The following chapters contain the back story on the big-time happenings and unstoppable trends that still shape U.S. history. Enjoy, and may they serve you well on your road to test success!
Chapter 26
In This Chapter
● Checking out the background of the big happenings
● Seeing the social and economic factors behind the key political events
● Taking in the big picture around landmark times
Obviously, the AP Test Inquisitors want you to know the grand picture of U.S. history, but every history picture consists of little pixels usually known as facts. Trends are important, but events are the proof that trends have arrived, the champagne-cork pop after years of social and economic ferment. Chapters 7 through 21 give you all the gory details that may crop up on the test, but here I give you a quick rundown and reminder of all the main events that contain those details.
Obviously you don’t want to go confusing Andrew Jackson with Michael Jackson. Beyond that, you’d be wise to have the big events in order, complete with a few fun facts to drop into essays and use as a shield to avoid picking a bonehead multiple choice. Refer to this chapter often if you need to brush-up on which event happened when.
Next Stop, America: Setting Up the Colonies
It wasn’t just “let’s get a bunch of immigrants together and play house.” Putting together the American colonies took time, effort, and some often-desperate action. The time from Columbus to the Revolution is almost 100 years longer than the time that has passed from the Revolution until now. Here’s the sequence of events you need to remember from this period:
The American Indians were doing just fine, thank you, without all that European culture for 10,000 years before Columbus. You get a pass on most of those 10,000 years because the New World Indians were too busy inventing the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires in Mesoamerica to write much down.
The Spanish jaunted around Mexico and south looking for treasure and setting up colonies in the 1500s.
By 1607, the British got around to founding Jamestown; the Pilgrims got blown off course and started New England a few years later. It was no party; half the colonists at both Jamestown and Plymouth died in the first six months.
● The colonists got early help from the American Indians:
• The Pilgrims were greeted by Tisquantum, an American Indian they called Squanto, who incredibly enough had already been to Europe twice with passing explorers and spoke fluent English. Tisquantum (1621) taught the Pilgrims how to catch fish and build warmer houses.
• In Jamestown, the settlers had the help of Pocahontas, who not only brought food but also actually married Englishman John Rolfe. The wives of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan were her descendents.
• The American Indians shared gold, silver, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, squash, and tobacco — products that helped Europe become rich and powerful after their discovery of the New World.
● When the American Indians realized that the Europeans were more like hungry wolves than friendly dogs, they fought back in the mid-1600s. Too late; the colonists managed to hang on through King Philip’s War (1675) in New England and similar battles in Virginia and New York.
Colonizing for Fun and Profit
Having an understandably short sense of humor about having their land taken away, the American Indians kept fighting when they could against increasingly overwhelming odds for another 200 years. With native attacks on the back burner during the late 1600s, colonies started popping up all along the Atlantic coast. You need to know details about the earliest (not all 13) colonies:
● Massachusetts was home to the Pilgrims and Puritans who came for religious freedom for themselves, but kicked out spirit-filled freethinkers like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.
● Roger Williams then went on to found the tolerant, freethinking colony of Rhode Island.
● Maryland was a haven for Catholics, but Protestants were welcome too. Maybe too welcome, because Protestants in some Maryland towns burned Catholic churches. It took years, but toleration made a comeback.
● William Penn founded Pennsylvania on freedom for everybody and fair treatment of the American Indians. Modest William was a little embarrassed that the king named the whole woodland or silvania for Penn, but that didn’t stop him from founding the city of Philadelphia (brotherly love) or proposing a uniting of the colonial states and even a European union. Outside of New England, most colonists came from places other than England like Scotland, Germany, and Wales.
● Meanwhile, Virginia prospered with slaves and tobacco. Pocahontas’ husband John Rolfe got the business rolling by growing good leaf at Jamestown, and despite a warning from King James himself that smoking was “dangerous to the Lungs,” tobacco proved to be an addictive money-maker. Big tobacco bucks got the Southern colonies addicted to slavery.
By 1700, the American colonies held about 300,000 people; 25,000 of them were slaves. The first Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s lead to more religious devotion and communication between settlements. Talk turned toward freedom, covered in the next section.
Getting Ready for a Revolution
By the 1760s, the 13 colonies were almost 2 million people strong and feeling like big dudes. They’d helped the regular army from back home in Britain kick some French and American Indian butt in the war by that same name that ended in 1763. Now it seemed time for some nice new land over the mountains.
Oh, wait a minute; the British Parliament had just declared that land closed to settlement in the Proclamation of 1763. Well, at least they could play cards. Oops, no again: Parliament had put the Stamp Act of 1765 on cards, documents, and even newspapers. How about some tea? Nope, Parliament was messing with the tea prices to favor their own investors. America may have put up with King George’s bad wigs and wacky behavior, but in this dark time before coffee shops on every corner, they weren’t going to put up with no tea. Who did these Parliament guys think they were?
The Boston Tea Party was a fun answer to British lawmaking without Colonial representation. Colonists thinly disguised as American Indians boarded three British ships and efficiently dumped 45 tons of tea overboard, turning Boston harbor into the world’s biggest teapot. They didn’t damage the ships, but tea washed up on shore for weeks. That gave Parliament something to think about. Even better, another tea ship ran aground at Provincetown. The tea was quickly liberated and reached Boston tea cups within days. What could be better than boycotting tea and getting to drink it anyway?
Parliament then passed the Intolerable Acts in 1774 to punish the citizens of Boston by closing down their vital harbor. The British surged in a lot more troops and push came to shove at Lexington and Concord. Colonial minutemen responded to what the British called an antiterrorist sweep by shooting up British regulars. Because everybody was fighting anyway, the young and determined Congress had 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence in 1776. After the battle of Saratoga proved that the backwoods Americans could beat the British army, the French happily piled on to fight their traditional British foes.
George Washington never won a major battle, but he stayed in the field for six long years, usually without proper supplies or political support and with a desertion rate of 20 percent per year.
Finally the British decided to take a break from the conflict near the lovely seashore in Yorktown under the protective guns of their mighty navy. Surprise, the British navy wasn’t there, and the French and Americans got the British cornered. Washington finally got the big win he deserved, and it was time for peace and independence.
U.S. Lite: The Confederation Leads to a Keeper Constitution
The United States complained and revolted against British rule, but what to do about their own government? The first try was the Articles of Confederation in 1777 (not to be confused with the Robert E. Lee-type Confederacy — that came along 84 years later with the Civil War). The Articles called for more voluntary cooperation than most people can muster. The federal government had to politely ask the states for money because it had no power to tax on its own. Each state got one vote in Congress, and it took 9 of the 13 votes to pass any laws. With this weak government, the organization of the territory from Ohio north and west under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 is amazing.
In the same year, with much wrangling and a few drinks, Congress produced the U.S. Constitution, under which the nation is still governed. Drinking didn’t get in the way of political progress. At that time, the average U.S. male had about 600 drinks a year — the first thing most of the Congressmen did after they passed the Constitution was to adjourn to the nearest tavern. A few years later, President Washington and Alexander Hamilton personally led a large army into Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion — not to get rid of whiskey, but to try to enforce a tax on this popular form of booze. Somehow, the nation sobered up enough to get organized.
The addition of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) in 1791 strengthened the Constitution even further. Since then, the U.S. has made only 17 additional Amendment changes in more than 200 years. It took years of tough debate and friendly drinking to finish the original Constitution, but the results have lasted longer than any barroom promise in history.
Andy Jackson, Democracy, and Manifest Destiny
Although plenty of drinking and tobacco-chewing went on in the early 1800s, politics was more of a gentlemen’s game. The nation had been through an early attack on civil liberties in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and was settling down to enjoy its freedom.
European powers provided pesky challenges that resulted in the War of 1812, but for the most part the new United States was an increasingly prosperous one-party country. The time from 1815 to 1824 was even called the Era of Good Feelings.
Early 1800s U.S. democracy had one little catch: Only white males who owned a house or a farm could vote. Even people who could vote didn’t always bother; many figured the system would take care of itself.
All that changed with the contested election of John Quincy Adams in 1824. This was the first election in which all white males in most states got to vote whether they owned property or not. In a four-way race, war hero Andrew Jackson got the most votes, but John Quincy Adams got to be President because he made a deal with the other losers. That ticked off Jackson and his many followers, and they came back in force for the next election.
Jackson was president for eight years, and the several of the subsequent presidents —
Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, and James Polk — were all Jackson followers.
Jacksonian democracy meant the end of rich guys controlling a central Bank of the United States. It also meant moving the American Indians out to make way for Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. Jackson invited ordinary people to be part of government, rewarding his friends with government jobs (through the spoils system) and pushing for full democracy for everyone (as long as they were white males). Jackson kept the government out of business because he thought that most of the time the government just ended up helping rich people.
My Rules or I’m Leaving: The Long Prequel to the Civil War
The amazing thing wasn’t that the United States eventually became temporarily disunited by the Civil War; it was that the slavery time bomb took so long to blow up. The U.S. abolished the importation of slaves in 1808, only a few months after Britain’s moral conversion, which was portrayed in the film Amazing Grace. All northern U.S. states and a surprising number of southern plantation owners freed their slaves after the Revolution.
However, the invention of the cotton gin made slavery so profitable that it spread throughout the South in the first half of the 1800s, despite the intention of many of the Revolutionary Founding Fathers to bring it to an early end. North and South then started a long stretch of legal wrangling over slavery:
● The first major bills passed under the early Confederation outlawed slavery in the new Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
● The Missouri Compromise, also known as the Compromise of 1820, drew the Mason-Dixon line between slave and free states; the Compromise of 1850 later extended the Mason-Dixon line out west.
● The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 weakened the earlier compromises, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the Southern-controlled Supreme Court blew all the compromises away.
While the South got rich from slavery, the years of compromise had given the North time to get industrialized and relatively united in opposition to slavery. With the election of Abe Lincoln in 1860, it was showdown time.
If you’d been dropped into a random house in the United States in 1860, you’d have had about a 1 in 12 chance of being in a slave owning family. Of course, all the slave holding families were down South; if you had dropped into a random life in the South, you’d have had a one in three chance of being a slave. Slaves never got paid, worked from dawn to dusk, and could be whipped, sexually exploited, or even killed at the whim of their owners.
Eventually, people who weren’t making money off the work of slaves (and even a few people who were) couldn’t stand to see the evil system continue. The United States fought through the most horrible war in its history to get honest with the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
America Fighting Itself: Civil War Basics
When the compromises fell apart in the late 1850s, the South struck with the Dred Scott decision, essentially allowing slavery anywhere in the United States. The North had been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and for the first time had a pretty good picture of just how medieval Southern slavery could be.
Plus, the North was all uptight that the South may just march north with a factory’s worth of slaves and take the North’s paid jobs away. The South was worried that John Brown’s botched raid on Harpers Ferry was the beginning of a North-sponsored slave rebellion.
Neither of these situations would have happened, but a little paranoia about the other side is a traditional prelude to wars.
When Lincoln was elected, he had to sneak into Washington to become president. The train bringing him from his home in Illinois went through Maryland, a hotbed of Southern sympathy. The fear that someone would assassinate him before he ever took the oath of office was real.
The Southern states said “we’re leaving” and took over most of the federal forts in the South, but Lincoln wouldn’t give up Fort Sumter, so the South started shooting. Lincoln was in a tight spot — Southern troops were nearing Washington, and all he had to defend him were a few ceremonial units including the Army band. Lincoln paced the top of Washington’s hastily erected fortifications hoping to see reinforcements coming from the north. He even went to the Library of Congress and took out books on how to fight a war.
When the North got an army together, it didn’t do them much good at first. The South won most of the battles, fighting on their own territory with good generals. The North barely managed to turn back two Southern invasions, first at the Battle of Antietam and then at the Battle of Gettysburg. That was enough.
Even though the North was fighting for principle (one of the only times in history when an army has fought to free somebody else) while the South was fighting for its own land and slave property (usually worth three to one in fighting morale), the North’s determination through four long years of war won the day.
The United States Becomes a Big Dog
With the close of the Civil War in 1865, the U.S. was minus the free help of 4 million slaves but plus a determination to expand all across the continent and beyond. For the rest of the 1800s, mostly Republican presidents rode out economic downturns and political scandals while the U.S. economy steadily caught up with the world’s only international superpower: Great Britain.
The U.S. got some technological breaks by inventing most of the useful gadgets in the late 1800s: the electric light, telephone, and mechanical harvester, to name a few. Not held back by the need to support a large military or defend an empire, the U.S. poured all its capital into growth.
Because slavery was no longer an issue, new states got created as soon as they had the population to support a government. San Francisco was well established as the Queen of the Pacific, supported by both California gold and Nevada silver. Railroads spanned the continent, the longest creation of mankind since the Great Wall of China. Ironically, much of the western railroad was built by imported Chinese labor.
By the time the 1900s neared, the U.S. was starting to cast a hungry eye overseas for more territory. The country had bought Alaska from the Russians, stolen the Southwest from Mexico, and settled out the Northwest with the British. The Hawaiian Islands fell like an unguarded flower into Yankee hands. In 1898, the U.S. fought the weak colonial power of Spain to take away Cuba and the far-off Philippines. President Teddy Roosevelt sent the fleet parading around the world. The United States had the glory; coming up next would be the burden of being a world power.
The Reluctant Dragon: U.S. as World Power
The U.S. entered the 1900s with an empire, sort of, and enough military power to scare away other nations from attacking the New World. Most of the United States wanted to mind its own business, but other nations were building up fleets and armies and trolling for empire.
When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States stayed neutral. That was hard to do, because the British had been mother country to the U.S., and the French had helped the U.S. free itself. They were fighting together against Germany and clearly needed help. Even worse, ships carrying Americans kept getting sunk by German submarines, and the Germans even hatched a crazy plot to take over Mexico. After three years of neutrality, the U.S. finally pitched in the war on the side of the Allies.
It didn’t really take much fighting, but the U.S. tipped the balance, and the Allies defeated Germany in what turned out to be Round One of a two-round world war; Round Two (World War II) came later.
U.S. President Wilson had great plans for making a fair peace guaranteed by an international League of Nations that could keep future wars from developing. Oops, Congressional Republicans wouldn’t go along with letting the United States help guard the peace. So, after what amounted to a 21-year truce to make more weapons, the major nations (including the United States) plunged into an even more destructive World War II.
This time the reluctant dragon U.S. sat behind its oceans for two years before being awakened by a punch in the nose from Japan. Although the U.S. lost only 2 percent of the people that Russia did fighting World War II, it was enough to convince the country to stay active in world affairs and try to preserve the peace in the future.
U.S. Government as Guardian of the People
Although the U.S. got into the social welfare game after many European countries, the nation has been steadily developing services for its people for over 100 years. Public education grew rapidly after the Civil War. At the end of that conflict, the U.S. had fewer than 100 high schools in the whole country.
By the end of World War I, most towns in the U.S. had schools, and almost all children had at least some high-school education. College was for only a small minority of the elite before World War II. After that time, the GI Bill and the growth of state colleges and universities meant that by the 2000s, most U.S. citizens had the opportunity to get at least some college education.
The watershed for social programs was the Great Depression of the 1930s. As the Depression got worse and people stood in line for bread to feed their children, Republican President Hoover actually said that although the people helped the government, the government shouldn’t help the people. The people soon voted him out of office, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) took over for the longest presidency in U.S. history.
FDR started a lot of social programs that are still active today, including Social Security, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Housing Authority.
President Johnson added Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and President Nixon supported disability insurance in the 1970s. President Clinton expanded aid to education in the 1990s and President George W. Bush added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare in the 2000s.
With its history of rugged individualism and free enterprise, the U.S. was slower to adopt social programs than many other countries, but eventually the nation began to recognize that services like police, education, and fire protection were more efficient if they were bought “in bulk” by the whole community.