moyo akande's List: History Readings Unit2

• Today, the only restrictions on voting involve the insane,   convicted felons, and the young
• he United States was the first nation to expand   the vote to virtually all white men, but it has also undergone   periods in which voting rights were restricted, and it   was one of the last Western nations to guarantee the vote   to all citizens.
• The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America   was that voters should have a "stake in society."
• vote should be restricted to those   who owned property or paid taxes. Only these people, in   their view, were committed members of the community and   were sufficiently independent to vote.
• Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies and Jews in four.
• he American Revolution was fought in part over the issue   of votin
• This made many restrictions on voting seem to be a violation of fundamental rights
• During the period immediately following the Revolution, some states replaced property qualifications with taxpaying requirements
• the principle that there should be "no taxation without representation.
• By 1790, all states had eliminated religious requirements   for voting.
• six states (Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina,   Pennsylvania, and Vermont) permitted free African-Americans   to vote.

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• led seven states in the lower South to secede from the Union beginning in December 1860 and to establish the Confederate States of America the following February.
• After futile pleas to the border states to free slaves voluntarily, Lincoln in the summer of 1862 decided that emancipation was a military and political necessity.
• The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war from a conflict to save the Union to a war to abolish slavery. It authorized the enlistment of African Americans; 220,000 served during the war, helping to ensure the destruction of slavery.
• 3. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, ended slavery in the United States.
• modern history's first total war. It is truly the central event in American history.

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• The most radical proposal advanced during Reconstruction to confiscate plantations and redistribute portions of the land to the freedmen was defeated.
• carpetbaggers (Northerners who had migrated to the South after the Civil War)
• southern white Republicans known as scalawags, temporarily gained power in every former Confederate state except Virginia.
• internal divisions
• Northern apathy
• white terror
• white Southern Democrats known as Redeemers to return to power.
• High interests rates charged for goods bought on credit transformed sharecropping into a system of economic dependency and poverty.
• They helped set the pattern for future race relations and defined the federal government's role in promoting racial equality.

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• During the 1870s and 1880s, the Democratic and Republican parties were of almost exactly equal strength

  • note
• The Democrats were split on this program of economic modernization. Grover Cleveland supported big business and the gold standard but in 1887 came out strongly against the tariff, which he viewed as a tax on consumers for the benefit of rich industrialists.

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• By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain
• Long hours and hazardous working conditions led many workers to attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from industrialists and the courts.
• n era of intense political partisanship, the Gilded Age was also an era of reform.
• The Interstate Commerce Act sought to end discrimination by railroads against small shippers and the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed business monopolies.
• hese years also saw the rise of the Populist crusade. Bu
• n the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display.

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• As a result, it took more than a year for the delegates to agree on a draft and more than four years for the states actually to adopt the Articles of Confederation, which became official in 1781.
• The Articles of Confederation created only a loose alliance among the states and left the national government with so little authority that it was nearly powerless
• Meeting in Philadelphia in 1787, those leaders began to draft a new document—the U.S. Constitution.

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• Virginia Plan. This plan included a bicameral (two-house) legislature. The lower house (the House of Representatives) would be elected by the people. This house would then elect the representatives to the upper house (the Senate). States would have a number of seats in both houses proportional to their populations. This last feature became the sticking point as it favored large states by giving them more representatives.
• Great Compromise,

• 
• • these two compromises: Three-fifths and slave trade compromises

• . Federalists favoring a strong centralized government and Antifederalists favoring a government that protected individual states' rights had discussed, argued, or debated the document point by hard-won point.
• The Federalists argued in favor of the Constitution as it had been written
• The Antifederalists feared the Constitution would put too much power in the hands of the federal government
• Called the Bill of Rights, they are intended to clearly outline the inherent rights of all American citizens irrespective of race, color, creed or gender, and what state they may live in. The ratification process was the first time that a people had actively chosen how they would be governed. That choice had been fueled by the freedom to disagree.

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• Alexander Hamilton.
• he played a leading role in the Constitutional Convention and wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers, urging support for the new Constitution. As
• Hamilton's debt program was a remarkable success. By demonstrating Americans' willingness to repay their debts, he made the United States attractive to foreign investors. European investment capital poured into the new nation in large amounts.
• The most eloquent opposition to Hamilton's proposals came from Thomas Jefferson, who believed that manufacturing threatened the values of an agrarian way of life.
• Most strikingly, it was an economic vision that had no place for slavery.
• Jefferson's vision of an egalitarian republic of small producers--of farmers, craftsmen, and small manufacturers--had powerful appeal for subsistence farmers and urban artisans fearful of factories and foreign competition. In increasing numbers, these voters began to join a new political party led by Jefferson.

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• The Election of 1796  
  
   

    The election of 1796 was the first in which voters could choose between competing political parties. It was also the first test of whether the nation could transfer power through a contested election.
• he Federalists chose Vice President John Adams
• the Republicans selected Thomas Jefferson
• John Adams won the election,

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• Jay Treaty,
• permitting the British to seize French goods from American ships in exchange for financial compensation.
• Word of the "XYZ affair"
• uring the winter of 1798, an undeclared naval war took place between France and the United States.
• s Alien and Sedition Acts, which were designed to suppress public criticism of the government. These laws: 
• 14 years;
• • imprison or deport any foreigner believed to be dangerous to the United States; and
   
  • made it a crime to attack the government with "false, scandalous, or malicious" statements or writings. 
• Sedition Act to convict ten editors and printers
• Republicans accused the Federalists of violating fundamental liberties.

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• new revolution was necessary, "as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form." What was needed was a return to basic republican principles.
• • a frugal, limited government;
   
  • reduction of the public debt;
   
  • respect for states' rights;
   
  • encouragement of agriculture; and
   
  • a limited role for government in peoples' lives.
• he sought to return the country to the principles of republican simplicity.
• Convinced that presidents Washington and Adams had acted like British monarchs by personally appearing before Congress and requesting legislation, Jefferson simply sent Congress written messages. I

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• Marbury v. Madison was a landmark in American constitutional history. The decision established the power of the federal courts to review the constitutionality of federal laws and to invalidate acts of Congress when they are determined to conflict with the Constitution.

• The prospect of French control of the Mississippi River alarmed Jefferson. Jefferson feared the establishment of a French colonial empire in North America blocking American expansion. The president sent negotiators to France, with instructions to purchase New Orleans and as much of the Gulf Coast as they could for $2 million.
• Without Haiti, Napoleon had little interest in keeping Louisiana.
• . For 2 years Lewis and Clark led some 30 soldiers and 10 civilians up the Missouri River as far as present-day central North Dakota and then west to the Pacific.

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• he Democrats failed to gain control of the House of Representatives in the Fall 1862 election, in part because the preliminary emancipation proclamation gave a higher moral purpose to the northern cause.