Practice questions: Shaping a New Republic

Answer: (B) Meeting the department heads as a cabinet the Constitution does not name

1. The Constitution was already in effect when Washington took the oath on April 30, 1789, and Congress did not keep the Articles alive until 1791.
2. The Constitution lets the president ask department heads for written opinions, but it creates no cabinet; Washington's meetings with them made the cabinet a precedent.
3. The House chose the president in February 1801, after Jefferson and Burr tied, which fell outside Washington's first term.
4. Washington took the oath on April 30, 1789, more than two years before the Bill of Rights was ratified in December 1791.

Answer: (C) The first Congress building offices the Constitution had only sketched

1. Anti-Federalists had warned against a powerful central government and pressed for a bill of rights, not for additional departments and courts.
2. The Constitution replaced the Articles on March 4, 1789, and the Articles did not require these departments as the price of ending.
3. The Constitution outlines Congress, the presidency, and a Supreme Court, and the First Congress supplied the departments, the attorney general, and the lower federal courts.
4. Britain and the United States were at peace in 1789; their next war began in 1812.

Answer: (A) Georgia and settlers pressing onto Creek land the treaty reserved

1. Georgia's leaders attacked the Treaty of New York, and settlers kept crossing the boundary the United States had guaranteed to the Creek.
2. The United States went on negotiating with Native nations after 1790, including the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.
3. Pinckney's Treaty in 1795 set Florida's northern border at the 31st parallel; Spain kept Florida until the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819.
4. The Constitution did not make members of Native nations citizens, and it left “Indians not taxed” outside the apportionment count.

Answer: (D) It would reward speculators over the original holders.

1. Hamilton's funding plan was meant to restore the credit that let the United States borrow; Madison was not claiming it would cut off European loans.
2. Madison's quarrel was over which Americans should be paid, not over handing the Treasury to France.
3. Tariff revenue was how Congress expected to pay the debt, and the plan left that power in place.
4. Madison asked Congress to reserve part of the payment for soldiers and suppliers who had sold their certificates, because paying face value to the current holder rewarded speculators, and the House rejected him.

Answer: (B) Southern votes for assumption, in exchange for a Potomac capital.

1. Washington signed the bank bill in February 1791, and the neutrality proclamation came in 1793; Federalists did not trade the bank for support of neutrality.
2. In the summer of 1790 enough southern congressmen accepted federal assumption of state debts in exchange for a permanent capital on the Potomac, with Philadelphia as the capital until 1800.
3. The limit on ending the slave trade was written into the Constitution in 1787, and it was not swapped for a tariff at this 1790 meeting.
4. Virginia ratified the Constitution in June 1788, during the fight over amendments, two years before this bargain.

Answer: (C) build public credit and attach wealthy creditors to the government's success.

1. Assumption did the reverse: the federal government took responsibility for war debts the states still owed.
2. Paying certificates at face value to whoever held them rewarded speculators; Madison, not Hamilton, tried to limit what purchasers received.
3. Hamilton argued that honoring the debt in full would restore public credit and give wealthy creditors a reason to want the new government to last.
4. France and Britain went to war in 1793, and Washington then refused to join; the 1790 report was not a plan to pay for that war.

Answer: (A) Chartering a bank to carry out federal taxing and borrowing

1. Hamilton read “necessary” broadly so Congress could charter a bank, which the Constitution does not list, as a useful means of taxing, borrowing, and handling federal money.
2. Hamilton was urging Washington to sign the bank bill under the Constitution as it stood, without waiting for an amendment.
3. Congress already holds the tariff power in Article I, and the Report on Manufactures came in December 1791; this February opinion was the argument for a bank.
4. Hamilton's test still required that the Constitution not forbid the measure, so it did not let the president cancel a prohibition.

Answer: (D) How broadly Congress could read the means for listed powers

1. The Constitution already assigns import duties to Congress, and that division was not the quarrel in this opinion.
2. Assumption of state debts had been enacted in the summer of 1790, before Jefferson wrote against the bank.
3. The House rejected Madison's plan to divide payment in February 1790, a year before this opinion.
4. Jefferson argued that treating a convenient bank as “necessary” would erase the limit on Congress, the strict-construction case against implied powers.

Answer: (B) Northeastern merchants and creditors who backed Hamilton's program

1. The whiskey excise fell hardest on western farmers, who became opponents of Hamilton's program rather than its backers.
2. The bank was chartered by Congress and owned mostly by private investors, and the core of support for Hamilton's program was northeastern merchants and creditors.
3. Jefferson and Madison, speaking for many southern planters, led the opposition to the bank, and Washington signed it over that opposition.
4. Britain and France were not yet at war when the bank was chartered in February 1791, and the bank was not a French instrument for dragging the United States into that war.

Answer: (C) The ratification contest and the later parties turned on different disputes.

1. Madison stayed inside the constitutional government; the Republican opposition fought over the bank, federal power, and foreign policy, not for a return to the Articles.
2. Madison remained a congressman from Virginia, so the party change was not the result of a move north.
3. In 1788 “Federalist” meant support for ratifying the Constitution, while the parties of the 1790s divided over Hamilton's finance, the reach of federal power, and Britain and France.
4. Madison took his seat in the First Congress as a supporter of the Constitution and helped organize the opposition while serving under it.

Answer: (A) The French minister fitting out privateers in U.S. ports against Britain

1. Edmond Genêt commissioned privateers in American ports to seize British ships, which put the United States on one side of a war Washington had refused to enter.
2. A government that meant to stay out of the war kept up diplomacy with both belligerents, and Washington's cabinet did so.
3. Asking whether the 1778 French alliance required the United States to join the war was how the cabinet reached the proclamation, not a breach of it.
4. Printed argument about staying out of the war was partisan debate, not the arming of ships against Britain.

Answer: (B) The 1793 split over aiding France against Britain

1. Spain had kept the Mississippi closed since the 1780s, a western grievance settled by Pinckney's Treaty in 1795, and that closure was not the crisis Genêt provoked.
2. Genêt's privateers and his campaign against Washington's policy exposed the divide between Americans who wanted to aid revolutionary France and those who wanted to stay out of its war with Britain.
3. The bank fight ended in February 1791, when Washington signed the charter over Jefferson's objection.
4. Britain still held forts on American soil in 1793, but that dispute was what Jay was sent to settle, not the cause of the Genêt affair.

Answer: (D) Democratic-Republican societies that criticized the administration and cheered France

1. Merchants who backed Jay's mission sat with the Federalists; Washington's November 1794 message blamed the political societies, and Madison answered that message.
2. Demands for a second convention to revise the Constitution belonged to the ratification debates of 1787 and 1788.
3. Loyalists who had left for Canada were not the clubs Washington accused of stirring resistance to the whiskey tax.
4. Washington had blamed the Democratic-Republican societies, which cheered revolutionary France and attacked his government, and Madison answered that criticism belongs to the people.

Answer: (A) Western hostility to a distant government that taxed their whiskey

1. The 1791 excise fell hardest on western farmers who distilled their grain, and the 1794 rising was aimed at a federal collector and a summons to a distant court in Philadelphia.
2. The men who met the marshal were American farmers angry about a federal tax, not Loyalists working to restore British government.
3. The whiskey tax was a piece of Hamilton's program, and western Pennsylvania rose against that program rather than in support of it.
4. Westerners wanted the Mississippi opened, but this rising targeted the excise and the collector Neville, and Spain opened the river by treaty in 1795.

Answer: (C) The federal government could call state militia to enforce a federal law.

1. Under the Articles, Congress could not raise the men or the money to stop Shays's Rebellion, and Massachusetts was left to its own militia.
2. Knox's figures are militia from four states, called out to enforce a federal statute, not a standing army put in the militia's place.
3. The Constitution allowed the federal government to summon militia across state lines, and Washington used that power against a tax the Articles government could not have enforced.
4. The gatherings outside Pittsburgh broke up before the column arrived, so the show of authority did not rest on a battle.

Answer: (B) British and Spanish control that still limited American trade and settlement

1. Republicans attacked Jay's Treaty as a concession to Britain, and neither that treaty nor Pinckney's Treaty created an alliance with France.
2. Britain still garrisoned forts on land the 1783 treaty had assigned to the United States, and Spain still controlled the mouth of the Mississippi; Jay's Treaty and Pinckney's Treaty bargained over those limits.
3. The Constitution does not forbid trade with European empires, and both treaties were themselves commercial settlements.
4. The United States bought Louisiana from France in 1803; neither the 1794 treaty with Britain nor the 1795 treaty with Spain transferred that territory.

Answer: (C) The opening of most of present-day Ohio to American settlement

1. Spain opened the Mississippi to Americans in Pinckney's Treaty in October 1795, soon after these events, rather than closing it.
2. Jay's Treaty, signed in November 1794, contained no article ending impressment, and the fight at Fallen Timbers did not produce such a promise.
3. At Greenville in 1795 the defeated nations ceded most of what is now Ohio, and that cession opened the region to American settlement.
4. Wayne had just defeated the confederacy, and the British fort had refused its fighters entry, which is the opposite of a joint alliance against Britain.

Answer: (A) The missions coerced baptized Native people to stay and work.

1. At missions such as San Carlos, missionaries forced baptized Native people to remain and work, and punished those who left.
2. The work of these missions was done by coerced Native labor, not by a shipment of enslaved Africans to the Pacific coast.
3. Some soldiers of mixed ancestry rose in rank and gained land; baptized Native people held at the missions were not given citizens' titles to the land.
4. The missions were Franciscan stations under Spanish soldiers, not posts run by British fur companies.

Answer: (D) The 1778 treaty of alliance with France, which was still in force

1. Jay's Treaty required Britain to evacuate the Northwest forts by 1796 and said nothing that ended impressment.
2. Pinckney's Treaty opened the Mississippi and the deposit at New Orleans and accepted the 31st parallel; it did not place American ships under Spanish protection.
3. The Treaty of New York guaranteed remaining Creek land, and it was not a military alliance Washington still had to honor.
4. The 1778 alliance with France was still binding in 1796, so the warning against new permanent alliances stopped short of breaking that engagement, which the Convention of 1800 later ended.

Answer: (B) Joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949

1. The American proclamation of neutrality in 1914 followed the advice to stay clear of a European war.
2. Membership in NATO, begun in 1949, tied the United States to a permanent peacetime alliance, the commitment Washington told the country to avoid.
3. By rejecting the League of Nations in 1919 and 1920, the Senate refused a standing commitment of the kind the address warned against.
4. The Louisiana Purchase transferred territory from France; it did not bind the United States to a permanent French alliance.

Answer: (A) The Twelfth Amendment (1804), with separate votes for president and vice president

1. Ratified in 1804, the Twelfth Amendment gives electors one vote for president and another for vice president, so the second-place candidate no longer becomes vice president.
2. The Seventeenth Amendment changed the election of senators and left the presidential ballot untouched.
3. The Twentieth Amendment moved Inauguration Day from March to January and did not separate the two electoral votes.
4. The Twenty-second Amendment wrote Washington's two-term custom into the Constitution and did not change how electors vote for the two offices.

Answer: (C) Federalists designed it to shield their officeholders from Republican criticism.

1. Delaying citizenship, and with it voting, was the point of the Naturalization Act's fourteen-year rule, not of a statute aimed at political writing.
2. The prosecutions fell on Republican printers and officeholders who favored France; sympathy for Britain in 1798 ran with the Federalists.
3. Federalists held the presidency and the Congress the act protects, and the omitted office belonged to Jefferson, the leader of the Republican opposition.
4. Genêt's challenge to neutrality came in 1793 and ended in his recall; this statute was enacted in July 1798, during the Quasi-War.

Answer: (D) Irish and French immigrants were lining up with the Democratic-Republicans.

1. The Constitution sets no ten-year schedule for naturalization; Congress changed the residence term in 1790, 1795, 1798, and again in 1802.
2. Subscriptions to the bank opened in 1791, among merchants and speculators at home, not among the immigrant voters this 1798 rule was written to delay.
3. The French demand in the XYZ Affair was a bribe and a loan, not the handover of people born in France.
4. The Federalists stretched the wait for citizenship from five years to fourteen because recent immigrants, Irish and French among them, were supporting Jefferson's party.

Answer: (B) Passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts after anti-French anger

1. The anger that followed the published dispatches was aimed at France, and Congress declared no war on Britain.
2. Adams released the dispatches in 1798, the resulting anti-French anger strengthened the Federalists, and that summer Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
3. Jefferson resigned as secretary of state on December 31, 1793, years before these dispatches were printed.
4. Spain opened the Mississippi in Pinckney's Treaty in October 1795, before the XYZ dispatches were published.

Answer: (A) The Supreme Court had not yet voided a federal statute.

1. In 1798 no Supreme Court decision had yet set aside an act of Congress; Marbury v. Madison came in 1803, and Jefferson and Madison took the argument to the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures.
2. The Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, had been ratified in December 1791, years before the Sedition Act.
3. The federal courts stayed open and heard the cases; Lyon was convicted in the circuit court at Rutland in October 1798.
4. Adams signed the Sedition Act on July 14, 1798.

Answer: (C) Whether states or federal courts judge whether a federal law is constitutional

1. The bank charter was fought over in February 1791, and this 1798 resolution is about treating a federal statute as void.
2. Washington issued the Proclamation of Neutrality on executive authority in 1793, a separate dispute from the one this sentence poses.
3. The resolution treats the Union as a compact and claims that a state may hold a federal act void when Congress uses a power the states did not grant, against the view that federal courts have the last word.
4. Assumption of state debts was settled in 1790, and this sentence is about who may void a federal law, not about which treasury should carry the old debt.

Answer: (D) A Federalist split after Adams made peace with France

1. Adams signed the Sedition Act and federal courts enforced it against Republican editors and politicians; Hamilton was a Federalist, not a Republican complaining of weak enforcement.
2. Hamilton opposed the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which Jefferson and Madison wrote against the Federalist statutes.
3. The move to a Potomac capital had been law since the bargain of 1790, and this pamphlet attacked Adams's fitness for office rather than that move.
4. Adams sent a peace envoy to France in 1799 without consulting his cabinet, the Convention of 1800 ended the Quasi-War and the 1778 alliance, and Hamilton's pamphlet, published weeks before the election, showed the Federalist split that choice produced.