Practice questions: The Influence of Revolutionary Ideals

Answer: (B) Leaders applied natural-rights language to men's political standing and left wives' legal status inside the household.

1. The Declaration announced rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it did not enact English common law or rewrite the law of marriage.
2. After independence, coverture still gave a husband his wife's property and wages and barred her from suing or signing contracts in her own name.
3. Many women joined the Daughters of Liberty, boycotted British goods, spun homespun cloth, and kept farms and shops running during the war.
4. John Adams laughed at the proposal and refused to repeal what he called the masculine system, and Congress passed no such code.

Answer: (D) Laws binding wives who had no part in making them.

1. Women who made this argument had joined the resistance to British goods, so the complaint was aimed at their standing under American law.
2. During the war, women kept farms and shops going and supplied the army, and that labor was part of the Patriot effort.
3. British commanders offered freedom or protection to people who escaped Patriot owners, a policy separate from wives' place in the law.
4. Under coverture a wife's property and wages belonged to her husband, and she could not sue or contract in her own name.

Answer: (A) Enslaved people sued under it, and courts later refused to enforce slavery.

1. Massachusetts passed no abolition statute; enslaved people won freedom suits, and after 1783 the courts would not enforce slavery.
2. Article I said men are born free and equal, in words of its own, and coverture continued to place a wife's property and contracts under her husband.
3. The Stamp Act crisis was in 1765, and this article was a state bill of rights adopted in 1780, with no role left for Parliament.
4. Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual law, not the Massachusetts constitution, bound children born after the cutoff to service until age twenty-eight.

Answer: (C) Arguments colonists had made against the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties.

1. The Great Awakening was a revival movement of the 1730s and 1740s, and this complaint was about taxes and the vote.
2. The Northwest Ordinance was passed in 1787, seven years later, and it barred slavery in the Northwest Territory rather than in the existing states.
3. Since 1765, colonists had held that Parliament could not tax people who elected no members, and these free Black taxpayers turned that objection against their own state.
4. The three-fifths clause was written into the federal Constitution in 1787, and it did not give these petitioners a vote.

Answer: (A) Free Black taxpayers in Massachusetts who were denied the vote.

1. In 1780 Paul and John Cuffe of Dartmouth were taxed without a vote, refused to pay, and were jailed that December for pressing the same consent principle against Massachusetts.
2. Saint-Domingue was a French sugar colony, and recruiting labor there had no tie to the colonial claim that taxes required consent.
3. Parliament imposed the Townshend duties and rejected the claim that only the colonists' own representatives could tax them.
4. The three-fifths compromise of 1787 increased slave states' numbers in the House, and it did not extend the vote to free Black taxpayers.

Answer: (C) Relief from taxes imposed where they could not vote.

1. Western land bounties for veterans came under later national land policy, and this petition asked for relief from state taxes.
2. About five thousand Black men fought for the Patriots, and this petition did not ask for army commissions.
3. The Cuffe brothers paid taxes in Dartmouth but could not vote, and they cited Patriot service to support relief from that taxation.
4. Massachusetts already sent delegates to Congress, and the petitioners were asking their state legislature for a remedy at home.

Answer: (D) State-level moves in the North to end slavery through laws and court rulings.

1. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 barred slavery in the Northwest Territory, not in the existing states, and no federal statute abolished slavery in the North.
2. Congress never freed enslaved men for enlisting, though about five thousand Black men fought for the Patriots, most of them from the North, under varied state policies.
3. Massachusetts courts heard this freedom suit and the later Quock Walker cases, and they did not close the courts to English common law.
4. Revolutionary claims of equal rights fed freedom suits and gradual laws across the North, and this county verdict freed two plaintiffs as part of that state-by-state break with slavery.

Answer: (B) An end to court enforcement of slavery, without a statute abolishing it.

1. Massachusetts never passed an abolition law, and Pennsylvania's 1780 statute was another state's gradual scheme.
2. After Cushing's 1783 charge in the Quock Walker cases, Massachusetts courts would not enforce slavery, and the 1790 census counted no enslaved people there.
3. The 1780 declaration that men are born free and equal stayed in force, and Cushing treated slavery as inconsistent with it.
4. Coverture still placed a wife's property and contracts under her husband, and this charge addressed slavery rather than women's votes.

Answer: (A) Freedom suits and court rulings that stopped the state from enforcing slavery.

1. Massachusetts passed no abolition statute; enslaved people won suits, and after 1783 the courts would not enforce slavery, so the 1790 census recorded none.
2. The federal government issued no emancipation proclamation in 1790, and slavery remained legal in the South and in several Northern states.
3. Before the Revolution, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies, Massachusetts included.
4. Pennsylvania's 1780 law left people already enslaved in bondage and only set a term for children born afterward, so thousands remained enslaved there in 1790.

Answer: (C) Pennsylvania ended slavery's passage to the next generation, and Virginia left freedom to each owner.

1. Pennsylvania did not free adults already enslaved, and Virginia's 1782 law freed no class of people by itself.
2. Both were state laws, and the Continental Congress did not order Pennsylvania to pass the 1780 act.
3. Pennsylvania left those already enslaved in bondage but ended lifelong slavery for children born after the act, who owed service until age twenty-eight, while Virginia only let owners free people by will or deed.
4. Some states freed particular soldiers, but Pennsylvania's act was a general rule for children born after 1780, and Virginia's law did not reach people held in other states.

Answer: (A) The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed recapture across state lines.

1. The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act let an enslaver seize a person who had escaped into another state, and Washington tried twice to recover the woman who had fled his household for New Hampshire in 1796.
2. Pennsylvania's gradual law left adults already enslaved in bondage, which is why a return from Philadelphia to Virginia threatened her liberty.
3. Virginia's 1782 law let an owner free someone by will or deed, and leaving the state did not free Ona Judge, who belonged to the Custis estate.
4. Congress did not abolish slavery in the capital in 1796, and Philadelphia still held enslaved people under the gradual law and the fugitive-slave clause.

Answer: (D) It permitted private manumission, and the state's enslaved population still grew.

1. Ending hereditary slavery for children born after a cutoff was Pennsylvania's 1780 approach, and Virginia freed no such class by statute.
2. Washington's 1799 will promised freedom to people he owned, and he had no power to free people who belonged to the Custis estate.
3. The Treaty of Paris recognized American independence, and it did not require Virginia to authorize manumission.
4. The 1782 law let owners free people by will or deed, so thousands were freed, but each manumission depended on an owner and the number of enslaved Virginians kept growing.

Answer: (B) A Northern gradual law that left adults enslaved, alongside slavery's hold in Virginia.

1. Pennsylvania's 1780 law did not free adults already enslaved, so living in Philadelphia did not by itself end her bondage.
2. Under Pennsylvania's gradual law, adults already enslaved stayed enslaved, and Virginia still left freedom to each owner's choice, so a forced return there closed off liberty.
3. The 1794 French decree applied to French colonies, and it did not free people enslaved in the United States.
4. Haiti declared independence in 1804, eight years after this 1796 escape, and the United States offered no such asylum.

Answer: (B) Natural-rights ideas and self-rule spreading across the Atlantic after 1776.

1. This proclamation declared Haiti independent after a revolution that destroyed slavery there, and it was not a Spanish project to expand the slave system.
2. After 1776, claims of natural rights and self-government spread to France, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America, and Haiti's 1804 independence carried an enslaved people's revolt through to a new state.
3. The United States did not back Haitian independence, and slaveholding politicians blocked recognition until 1862 for fear the example would spark revolts at home.
4. The Second Great Awakening was a series of Protestant revivals, and this proclamation was a declaration of political independence.

Answer: (D) The continued enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people in Saint-Domingue.

1. Lafayette, who had fought beside Washington, wrote an early draft with Jefferson's advice.
2. Britain did not end slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1789, and this French declaration did not do so either.
3. A Paris crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, the month before the declaration was adopted.
4. The declaration did not free the nearly half a million enslaved people in Saint-Domingue, who rose in August 1791, with French colonial slavery abolished only in 1794 under pressure from that revolt.

Answer: (A) The sale of Louisiana after France failed to retake the colony.

1. In 1802 Napoleon sent an army to retake the colony, yellow fever and the rebels destroyed that army, and in 1803 he sold Louisiana to the United States.
2. France allied with the United States in 1778, and Britain recognized American independence in 1783, years before the revolt in Saint-Domingue.
3. Pennsylvania's gradual law was a state statute of 1780, and France did not direct it.
4. The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue and, in 1804, made Haiti an independent state.

Answer: (C) The cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable, and slavery spread south and west.

1. Congress banned the import of enslaved Africans in 1808, and the later growth came from births and from slavery's spread inside the country.
2. The Haitian Revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue, and the enslaved population of the United States kept rising past a million.
3. Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 made short-staple cotton profitable and slavery spread across the South and West, while by 1804 the Northern states had ended slavery or set it on a path to end and no Southern state had.
4. The census counted enslaved people as their own category in 1790, 1800, and 1810, and the rising total records a rising population.

Answer: (C) Girls' academies and a home-based civic role for women.

1. No amendment enfranchised women in this era, and the Nineteenth Amendment came in 1920.
2. Coverture outlived the Revolution, and a wife's property, wages, and power to sue or contract stayed with her husband.
3. The ideal of educated mothers raising civic-minded sons opened academies to girls and, in the 1800s, hardened into the belief that a woman's influence belonged in the home.
4. New Jersey let some property-owning unmarried women and widows vote, and it did not elect women to the legislature.

Answer: (A) Property tests eased, and men of modest means gained seats.

1. Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution let free men who paid taxes vote in place of the older property bar, and several states lowered property requirements so that farmers and artisans won seats once held by wealthy men.
2. The Articles of Confederation left voting qualifications to the states and set no national suffrage rule.
3. Most states did not enfranchise women, and New Jersey's exception for some property-owning women ended by statute in 1807.
4. For white men of modest means the trend ran the other way, and legislatures once dominated by wealthy gentlemen gained farmers and artisans.

Answer: (D) Claimed equal minds for women and the same education for them.

1. Murray argued for wider education, and her target was an upbringing that confined girls while boys were led into the sciences.
2. The essay, written in 1779 and published in 1790, concerned intellect and schooling, and it was not a proposal for a federal suffrage amendment.
3. Coverture kept a wife's property and legal voice under her husband, and Murray challenged the educational inequality that supported such limits.
4. Murray argued that women's minds equaled men's and that the apparent gap came from unequal education, a step past schooling girls mainly so they could teach their sons.

Answer: (B) Struck women and free Black men from the state's electorate.

1. The 1807 law did the opposite of a wider franchise: it confined the vote to free white male citizens and kept a property test.
2. Under the 1776 wording, some free Black men and some property-owning unmarried women and widows voted, and the 1807 law limited the electorate to free white male citizens.
3. This was a New Jersey statute, and Congress had not ordered the states to adopt a white-male electorate.
4. Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution let taxpaying free men vote and did not enfranchise women, and New Jersey's 1807 law was a restriction.