Practice questions: Continuity and Change in Period 3

Answer: (B) Wartime American efforts to recruit Native nations as allies against Britain

1. Reversed: the Proclamation of 1763 barred colonial settlement west of the Appalachians, one reason many Native nations preferred Britain.
2. At Fort Pitt the United States wanted Delaware friendship and passage through the Ohio country, because most Native nations had sided with Britain.
3. Anachronism: the Northwest Ordinance was passed in 1787 and organized United States territories, not a Delaware-led state proposed in 1778.
4. Wrong cause: the French alliance of 1778 promised military help against Britain and set no terms about Native land titles.

Answer: (A) Married women's property and legal identity remained under their husbands' control

1. Under coverture a wife's property belonged to her husband, so confiscation of a Loyalist husband's estate took the house his wife had inherited from her father.
2. Contradicts the record: of the new state constitutions, New Jersey alone let some property-holding women vote, and that ended in 1807.
3. Wrong definition: republican motherhood called on educated mothers to raise citizens, and it did not give wives legal control of family property.
4. Contradicts the record: Patriot women organized boycotts, made homespun cloth, and raised money and shirts for the Continental Army.

Answer: (D) Schooling for girls aimed at raising citizens inside the household

1. Contradicts the law of the period: revolutionary states left coverture in place, and general married women's property acts came decades later.
2. Wrong topic: the three-fifths clause counted enslaved people toward representation and direct taxes, and it was not a plan for women's education.
3. Anachronism and wrong cause: the Sedition Act punished criticism of the federal government a decade later and said nothing about schooling.
4. Republican motherhood widened girls' schooling so mothers could raise citizens at home, and it left the vote closed outside New Jersey's brief exception.

Answer: (C) Unpunished settler attacks on Native communities under both British and American rule

1. Contradicts the record: Pontiac's coalition in 1763 and the Western Confederacy after 1783 were alliances among Native nations.
2. Wrong for the colonial half: the Proclamation of 1763 barred settlement west of the Appalachians, so official encouragement was not continuous across 1776.
3. Frontier settlers killed Native people at Conestoga in 1763 and at Gnadenhütten in 1782, and neither the colonial government nor the revolutionary government punished the attackers.
4. Contradicts the record: most Native nations sided with Britain in the Revolutionary War, hoping a British victory would hold settlers back.

Answer: (A) Northern gradual-abolition laws and court rulings that began ending slavery in the North

1. Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts courts by 1783, and the other Northern states by 1804 began ending slavery, while no Southern state did.
2. Reversed cause: the cotton gin of the 1790s made short-staple cotton and enslaved labor more profitable, and no Southern state passed a gradual-abolition law.
3. Contradicts the Articles: Congress had no power to end slavery in the states, and Pennsylvania acted through its own assembly.
4. Wrong topic: the act dealt with bondage, not the franchise, and wartime service did not produce a general Northern grant of the vote to Black men.

Answer: (B) Campaigns against the Western Confederacy and the 1795 cession of most of present-day Ohio

1. Wrong law: Pennsylvania's 1780 act applied inside that state, and Congress did not extend it to Native nations as a land policy.
2. By 1790 American armies were marching into the Ohio country, and after Fallen Timbers in 1794 the Treaty of Greenville ceded most of present-day Ohio.
3. Wrong cause: the Quasi-War of 1798–1800 was an undeclared naval war with France, not a contest for the Ohio country.
4. Wrong effect: the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 called the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional, and they did not repeal the ordinance.

Answer: (D) Democratic-Republican opposition to Federalist taxes and to the Sedition Act

1. Reversed alignment: Hamilton's Federalists favored a strong national government, commerce, and Britain, the elite program this argument attacks.
2. Reversed: Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 warned against permanent alliances and did not endorse them.
3. Wrong period: by the 1790s the treaty of 1783 had recognized independence, and restoring the crown was not the fight of that decade.
4. Manning's attack on the power of the few belongs with the Democratic-Republican case against elite Federalist rule, the opposition that resisted federal taxes and the Sedition Act.

Answer: (C) Constitutional protections for speech and the press ratified in 1791

1. Wrong topic: the Northwest Ordinance's slavery ban addressed labor in the territory, not punishment for political writing.
2. Wrong topic: Pennsylvania's gradual-abolition law left registered enslaved people in bondage and did not govern speech.
3. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, protected freedom of speech and of the press, and the Sedition Act then made specified criticism of the government a federal crime.
4. Wrong topic: the 1795 treaty ceded Native land after Fallen Timbers and had nothing to do with publishing political criticism.

Answer: (A) The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, against the federal excise on distilled spirits

1. Both risings challenged a tax passed by the elected federal government, the whiskey excise in 1794 and the Direct Tax in 1799, and both were met with federal force.
2. Wrong authority: the Stamp Act was a tax by Parliament, and the colonial objection was taxation without representation in that body.
3. Wrong government: Shays' Rebellion targeted Massachusetts taxes and debt collection under the Articles, not a tax of the federal government created in 1789.
4. Wrong cause: Pontiac's War was a Native uprising against British posts and settler pressure after 1763, not a protest against a federal tax.

Answer: (B) Northern gradual-abolition laws and the weight of slaveholding states in Congress

1. Contradicts the amendment: the First Amendment protects the right to petition and sets no ban on petitions about property.
2. Gradual abolition was the Northern model, and slaveholding states gained extra House seats under the three-fifths clause, in a Congress with no power to end slavery in the states.
3. Anachronism: the Constitution barred a federal ban on the international slave trade before 1808, and Congress passed that ban only in 1807.
4. The opposite of the petitioners' claim: they asked to share the Declaration's liberties and unalienable rights, not to confine those rights to Europeans.

Answer: (D) The Constitution's requirement that people who escaped slavery be returned

1. Contrary policy: the ordinance banned slavery north of the Ohio, while this act gave claimants a federal process for recovering people from other states.
2. Reversed: gradual-emancipation laws reduced slavery in the North, and this act helped enslavers reach into free states.
3. Misapplied: removal rested on a judge's or magistrate's certificate from testimony or an affidavit, and the person seized had no jury.
4. Article IV required that a person held to service who escaped into another state be delivered up, and the 1793 act set the seizure and certificate procedure.

Answer: (C) Free Black Christians organizing worship under their own leaders

1. Contradicts the First Amendment: it barred Congress from establishing a national church, and states such as Virginia had already ended tax support for an official church.
2. Anachronism: independence and disestablishment removed royal control of worship, and this congregation opened its own building in 1794.
3. In July 1794 free Black Philadelphians opened Saint Thomas and Bethel under their own leaders, after Black worshippers were pulled from their knees in a white-led church.
4. Wrong topic: Cushing's 1783 charge treated slavery as incompatible with the Massachusetts constitution, which is a different development from an independent Black congregation in Philadelphia.

Answer: (A) Congress held that ending slavery in the states lay beyond its constitutional powers

1. The 85–1 vote rebuked the petition's call for emancipation, on the ground that the Constitution gave the federal government no power to end slavery in the states.
2. Wrong scope: the House referred the slave-trade and fugitive-law portions to a committee, a separate step from the recorded rebuke.
3. Contradicts the vote: the resolution withheld encouragement from the emancipation request and repealed no statute.
4. Wrong clause: the 1808 date limited a federal ban on the international slave trade and did not order emancipation in the states.

Answer: (C) Protections for slaveholders were built into the new republican government

1. Contradicts the clause: three-fifths increased slaveholding states' House seats and direct-tax share, and it did not enfranchise enslaved people.
2. Wrong duty: the 1808 date blocked a federal ban on importation until then and did not require emancipation.
3. The representation ratio, the delay on banning the international trade, and the return of people who escaped wrote protections for slavery into the Constitution.
4. Contradicts Article IV: the return of people who escaped was a constitutional duty, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 supplied a federal procedure.

Answer: (B) Independence from Britain left Native land claims and the demand for a collective voice unresolved

1. The 1786 protest said the peace had been made without the Native nations, so 1783 cannot be treated as their consent to the cessions.
2. The Treaty of Paris recognized American independence and transferred the claim west to the Mississippi with no Native nation at the table, and the confederacy still demanded a public, collective cession.
3. The confederacy demanded public cessions by its united voice and rejected private bargains by individual sellers.
4. Wrong audience: the address was sent to the United States Congress about land and peace, not to seek seats at Westminster.

Answer: (D) Constitutional protections for slavery and coverture's hold on married women's property

1. This is evidence of change, not of the limit: Northern states began ending slavery, and free Black people built churches and societies the Revolution's leaders had not planned.
2. Wrong measure: the election of 1800 transferred office between parties, which was a political change rather than a boundary on the Declaration's rights language.
3. Wrong measure: the Northwest Ordinance's path to equal statehood reorganized the West and was not itself the survival of slavery or coverture.
4. The Constitution protected slavery through representation, the slave trade, and the return of people who escaped, and coverture still placed a married woman's property under her husband.

Answer: (A) A pardon for armed tax rebels and a House rebuke of an emancipation petition

1. Adams pardoned the men sentenced after the armed Direct Tax rising, and the House that January rebuked a peaceful petition's call for emancipation.
2. Contradicts the record: the petitioners were not convicted of treason, and the pardon did not cover them.
3. Wrong outcomes: the pardon did not repeal the Direct Tax, and the House refused to encourage the emancipation request.
4. Reversed: the tax-rising leaders received the pardon, and the petition's emancipation language received the rebuke, with other sections referred to committee.