Practice questions: Comparison in Period 2

Answer: (D) The growth of a slavery that passed from enslaved mothers to children

1. Planters kept buying English servants into the 1700s; the law defined who was enslaved but did not end servitude.
2. Bacon's Rebellion grew out of frontier war with Native peoples and anger at Governor Berkeley, not out of the 1662 law on slave status.
3. Tobacco stayed the Chesapeake's main export through the colonial era; some planters turned to wheat only in the later 1700s.
4. By tying a child's status to the mother, Virginia made slavery hereditary, so the children of enslaved women were born enslaved for life.

Answer: (B) An elected assembly led by Quakers who would not fund a militia

1. The assembly, not the governor, controlled taxes and spending, which is why Governor Thomas could urge men to arm but could not pay for it.
2. Pennsylvania's Quaker-led assembly passed no militia law until 1755, so poor men had no public weapons when the war with France began.
3. Parliament set no such ban; Massachusetts, for one, kept a militia by law and raised troops against the French in this war.
4. The Six Nations stayed neutral in King George's War and did not take on Pennsylvania's defense.

Answer: (A) William Penn's promise of religious toleration to settlers from Europe

1. Penn, a Quaker, offered freedom of worship and cheap land, which drew English, Welsh, German, Scots-Irish and other settlers to Pennsylvania.
2. Pennsylvania's economy rested on family grain farms; Black people were about 7 percent of the Middle colonies' population in 1750.
3. Pennsylvania had no tax-supported church; Virginia and South Carolina were the colonies that funded the Anglican church.
4. Dutch rule shaped New York's mixed population; Pennsylvania was an English proprietary colony founded in 1681.

Answer: (C) Shipping flour to feed the plantation colonies of the Caribbean

1. Tobacco was the Chesapeake's staple; Pennsylvania's leading exports were wheat and flour.
2. Rice and indigo came from South Carolina's coastal plantations, not from Pennsylvania's grain farms.
3. Pennsylvania farmers grew wheat, and Philadelphia merchants shipped it as flour to the sugar islands, whose plantations grew little of their own food.
4. The Albany fur trade belonged to New York; Philadelphia's merchants dealt chiefly in grain and flour.

Answer: (B) colonial farms and settlements spreading onto Native hunting lands

1. Spanish missions stood in Florida and New Mexico, far from the Six Nations' lands in New York and Pennsylvania.
2. English colonists came to farm, and as their fields, fences and cattle spread west, the Six Nations and their neighbors lost hunting land and deer.
3. New France sent few settlers, and the Hudson valley was an English colony with Dutch settlers, not a French one.
4. Those epidemics struck the Iroquois a century earlier; Canassatego blamed hardships that came after the English arrived.

Answer: (D) written deeds and treaties colonists used to claim Native land

1. Virginia offered to school Six Nations boys only later in the council, and Canassatego turned the offer down.
2. The secretary at the table was writing the council minutes, and the dispute with Maryland was about land, not war news.
3. Trade licenses regulated traders' conduct; the quarrel at Lancaster was over land titles, which colonists recorded in deeds.
4. Colonists recorded land sales in written deeds and treaty minutes, and in the Walking Purchase of 1737 Pennsylvania had used a disputed deed to take Lenape land.

Answer: (C) Its reliance on Native trade partners and allies to hold its claims

1. Large-scale displacement for farming marked the more populous English colonies; New France's small population farmed mainly along the St. Lawrence.
2. Slavery existed in New France on a small scale, but Canada's short seasons supported no plantation economy; France's plantations were mainly in the Caribbean.
3. With few settlers spread across a huge territory, New France depended on Native trading partners and military allies to gather furs and defend its claims.
4. France barred Protestant Huguenots from New France; many settled instead in British colonies such as South Carolina and New York.

Answer: (A) Earlier wars in which the Six Nations conquered other Native peoples

1. In the 1600s the Iroquois fought rival Native nations, partly over the fur trade, and claimed the lands of peoples they defeated, including the Virginia backcountry.
2. The Crown claimed Virginia under its own charters; the Six Nations' claim rested on their own history, not on a royal grant.
3. That clash left dead on both sides but won no land, and both sides came to Lancaster partly to settle it.
4. Spanish accommodation after 1680 applied to the Pueblos of New Mexico and had no bearing on Six Nations claims in Virginia.

Answer: (C) Its merchants and sailors profited from the Atlantic slave trade

1. New England's small family farms used relatively few enslaved workers; large gangs worked on southern and Caribbean plantations.
2. New England could not grow sugarcane; its distillers imported molasses from the Caribbean, much of it from French islands.
3. Rhode Island ships carried rum to West Africa to buy captives, so New England drew profit from slavery even though few enslaved people lived there.
4. The Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1698, and after that colonial ships traded legally for captives on the African coast.

Answer: (A) Lax enforcement that let colonial merchants smuggle French molasses

1. Under salutary neglect, British officials seldom enforced laws such as the Molasses Act of 1733, so merchants traded with the French islands at little risk.
2. The Navigation Acts stayed in force until independence; colonial protests against British trade laws grew only after 1763.
3. No colony adopted the Albany Plan of 1754, so it limited nothing; it dealt mainly with defense and Native affairs.
4. Britain and France fought each other from 1744 to 1748, and no treaty opened the French islands; merchants who traded there broke the law.

Answer: (D) Enslaved New Englanders often lived and worked within farm households

1. Slavery in New England was lifelong and hereditary, as in the South; fixed terms belonged to indentured servants.
2. Tobacco was the Chesapeake's crop; New England's short seasons and small farms produced food, timber and fish instead.
3. A few New Englanders, such as Samuel Sewall in 1700, attacked slavery, but churches did not bar it, and ministers such as Cotton Mather held enslaved people.
4. New England farms held few enslaved people each, often one or two who worked and ate beside the family, while Chesapeake planters used larger field gangs.

Answer: (B) Spain's offer of freedom in Florida to runaways from South Carolina

1. Georgia banned slavery from 1735 to 1751 for its own settlers' sake, but it did not free or shelter runaways from Carolina.
2. Spain promised freedom to British runaways who became Catholic, and the Stono rebels marched south toward St. Augustine.
3. Whitefield first preached in Charleston in 1740, after the uprising, and he criticized cruel masters without opposing slavery itself.
4. Britain made such offers only during the American Revolution, as in Lord Dunmore's proclamation of 1775.

Answer: (C) Slave codes that tightened control as the enslaved population grew

1. Assemblies did contest governors' power, but this law regulated enslaved people and their owners, not the governor.
2. The Navigation Acts came from Parliament and governed shipping; this act came from South Carolina's own assembly.
3. From Barbados in 1661 to South Carolina in 1740, colonies wrote harsher slave codes as enslaved populations grew and planters feared revolt.
4. Toleration laws protected Protestant worship; this law restricted enslaved people's gatherings and the sounds they could use to signal one another.

Answer: (A) The heavy labor demands of export crops grown on large plantations

1. Tobacco, rice and indigo plantations bought enslaved Africans in large numbers, while northern farms relied mostly on family members, servants and hired hands.
2. Slavery was legal in the northern colonies in 1750; the first gradual abolition law came in Pennsylvania in 1780.
3. Revivals spread through north and south alike in the 1740s and did not set any colony's labor system.
4. Parliament set no such limits; merchants in New York and Rhode Island openly bought and sold enslaved people.

Answer: (D) Spain's use of freed British runaways to guard its Florida border

1. Spain kept slavery in Florida and across its empire; it freed only runaways from rival British colonies.
2. The Pueblo Revolt broke out in New Mexico in 1680, sixty years earlier and far from Florida.
3. Menéndez served the Spanish crown against Britain; British offers of freedom for military service came only in the American Revolution.
4. Spain freed runaways from British colonies who became Catholic and armed them at Fort Mose, where Menéndez's militia fought a British invasion in 1740.

Answer: (C) Assemblies guarded local power while London feared colonial self-rule

1. In 1754 colonists still saw themselves as loyal British subjects; calls for independence came two decades later.
2. The Albany Plan dealt with defense, taxes and Native affairs; it said nothing about churches.
3. Each assembly defended its own power to tax, and British officials thought a council chosen by the assemblies gave colonists too much power.
4. The plan's council would have raised and paid troops through its own taxes, and it was the assemblies that rejected that power.

Answer: (B) Native nations could shift alliances when an empire neglected them

1. The Six Nations acted as an independent confederacy, bargaining and complaining rather than taking orders from colonial governors.
2. The Six Nations bargained between Britain and France, and Hendrick warned that neglect would push his people toward the French, who were courting them.
3. Hendrick described the French as working hard to win Native allies, and France relied on such alliances in the war that began in 1754.
4. Native nations traded with both empires and used that competition to press for better terms and gifts.

Answer: (D) Labor systems ranged from family farms to large slave plantations

1. Shared British books and goods support Hamilton's view that colonists in different regions were alike.
2. Revivals that crossed colonial borders show a shared religious culture, which supports Hamilton's claim.
3. Elected assemblies built on English models were common to the colonies, which supports Hamilton's view of similarity.
4. New England relied on family labor while South Carolina had a Black majority, a regional difference in work and society that a focus on manners leaves out.

Answer: (A) splits between supporters and critics of revival in many churches

1. New Light supporters and Old Light critics divided congregations in the 1740s, and many New Lights left to form churches of their own.
2. Deism came from Enlightenment reason; revivalists such as Davenport stressed emotional conversion instead.
3. Connecticut ended tax support for its churches in 1818 and Massachusetts in 1833, long after the revivals.
4. Revivals drew crowds and new members; the problem they raised was division, not empty churches.

Answer: (B) sought land for farms and kept settlers apart from Native peoples

1. Spanish colonizers used missions and labor grants such as the encomienda to put Native people to work; English settlers wanted land more than Native labor.
2. English colonists came in families to farm, took Native land and mostly lived apart from Native people, unlike the Spanish and French.
3. Mixed ancestry became common in Spanish America and among French traders; English settlers married Native people far less often.
4. French traders often married into Native families to secure the fur trade; English colonists seldom did.

Answer: (C) New England lacked an export crop that needed many field workers

1. Slavery stayed legal in Connecticut; its gradual abolition law came in 1784.
2. Connecticut's churches did not bar slaveholding, and some ministers held enslaved people.
3. Rocky soil and short seasons kept New England's farms small and mixed, while Maryland's tobacco needed large numbers of workers year after year.
4. Maryland's planters moved toward more enslaved African labor in the 1700s, not toward Native servants.

Answer: (A) a contest with France for the Ohio River valley in the 1750s

1. Virginia read "hereafter" as a claim west to the Ohio, Virginia investors sought land there, and French troops seized the Forks of the Ohio in 1754.
2. The Walking Purchase took place in 1737, seven years before this deed, and involved Pennsylvania, not Virginia.
3. Britain was already at war with Spain from 1739 and with France from March 1744, before the deed was signed.
4. Bacon's Rebellion took place in 1676, nearly seventy years before this deed.

Answer: (D) Town meetings in which men with property decided local affairs

1. The House of Burgesses was Virginia's assembly, a southern institution rather than a northern one.
2. Connecticut's voters elected their own governor under the colony's charter; the king did not appoint him.
3. Colonial voters were men who met property requirements; women were shut out of elections.
4. New England towns governed themselves in meetings, and Connecticut's voters even elected their own governor.

Answer: (B) Colonists' growing taste for books and fashions from Britain

1. Colonial boycotts of British goods began in the 1760s, after Parliament passed new taxes such as the Stamp Act.
2. Historians call this Anglicization: colonists from Boston to Charleston bought the same British novels, clothes and teacups, which tied them to Britain.
3. Colonial readers in 1744 mostly bought British books; a distinct American literature grew mainly after independence.
4. The list includes a Puritan theology book, and religious reading stayed popular, especially during the revivals of the 1740s.

Answer: (C) a second export crop grown by enslaved workers beside rice

1. The lowcountry ran on rice and indigo plantations; family grain farms were more typical of the backcountry and the Middle colonies.
2. Charleston's slave imports rose again in the late 1740s and 1750s as rice and indigo planters bought more workers.
3. Indigo became South Carolina's second staple in the 1740s, grown and processed by enslaved workers, often on plantations that also grew rice.
4. The letter itself shows ties to the West Indies, and South Carolina kept trading rice, food and lumber with the islands.