Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin in 1793, a machine that quickly separated seeds from cotton fiber.
Missing Word
Whitney
Eli Whitney's gin let one worker clean far more cotton in a day than by hand, making cotton profitable across the interior South.
Category: Cotton Economy
Question 2
Much of the South's cotton crossed the Atlantic to the English port of Liverpool, gateway to the textile mills of Manchester.
Missing Word
Liverpool
Liverpool was the main British port receiving American cotton, linking southern plantations to Britain's industrial mills.
Category: Cotton Economy
Question 3
Cotton grown in the interior was shipped down the Mississippi River to New Orleans for export.
Missing Word
Mississippi
The Mississippi River and its tributaries formed the highway of the cotton trade, carrying bales to New Orleans for shipment abroad.
Category: Cotton Economy
Question 4
Falling prices for tobacco, the Chesapeake's long-standing cash crop, led many Upper South planters to switch to wheat and sell enslaved workers south.
Missing Word
tobacco
Tobacco had been the chief cash crop of Virginia and Maryland since colonial times. As it declined, planters needed fewer workers and sold many enslaved people into the cotton South.
Category: Domestic Slave Trade
Question 5
Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York, was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, an ordeal he described in Twelve Years a Slave.
Missing Word
Northup
Solomon Northup's narrative exposed the kidnapping of free Black people and the brutality of cotton and sugar plantations before he regained his freedom.
Category: Domestic Slave Trade
Question 6
Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland and became a leading abolitionist, described how sale and abuse tore enslaved families apart.
Missing Word
Douglass
Frederick Douglass became one of the best-known formerly enslaved writers and speakers of his time, using his own life to expose slavery.
Category: Resistance and Community
Question 7
Many enslaved Christians were drawn to the emotional worship of Baptist and Methodist churches.
Missing Word
Methodist
Methodist and Baptist preaching stressed personal conversion and spiritual equality, which appealed to many enslaved people.
Category: Resistance and Community
Question 8
Spirituals often drew on the biblical book of Exodus, which tells of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt.
Missing Word
Exodus
Exodus tells of a people freed from slavery, so enslaved Christians saw in it a promise of their own deliverance.
Category: Resistance and Community
Question 9
Elite southern men sometimes answered insults to their honor by fighting formal duels with pistols, a practice that had largely died out in the North.
Missing Word
duels
Duels were prearranged combats used to defend a gentleman's reputation under the southern code of honor, and they persisted in the South through the Civil War.
Category: Southern Society
Question 10
John C. Calhoun's theory of nullification held that a state could declare a federal law void within its borders.
Missing Word
nullification
Nullification was Calhoun's argument that states could refuse to enforce federal laws they judged unconstitutional, a tool meant to protect southern interests.
Category: Defending Slavery
Question 11
George Fitzhugh, author of Sociology for the South (1854), argued that slavery was a positive good and kinder than northern capitalism.
Missing Word
Fitzhugh
George Fitzhugh was a leading proslavery writer who claimed slaveholders cared for enslaved people for life while free-market capitalism abandoned workers.
Category: Defending Slavery
Question 12
South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond boasted in 1858 that no power on earth would dare make war on southern cotton.
Missing Word
Hammond
James Henry Hammond's speech, which declared that cotton is king, expressed planters' confidence that the world's dependence on their crop protected the South.
Category: Defending Slavery
Question 13
Some Americans feared that enslaved people in Cuba might overthrow slavery and create an independent Black republic like Haiti.
Missing Word
Haiti
Haiti became independent in 1804 after a revolution of enslaved people, and the example haunted slaveholders throughout the Americas.
Category: Filibusters and Expansion
Question 14
American diplomats meeting in Belgium in 1854 drafted the Ostend Manifesto, which argued that the United States would be justified in seizing Cuba from Spain.
Missing Word
Ostend
The Ostend Manifesto was a confidential memo whose leak caused outrage in the North, where critics saw it as a scheme of the Slave Power.
Category: Filibusters and Expansion
Question 15
President Franklin Pierce, inaugurated in 1853, pledged an expansionist foreign policy but backed away when a secret plan to take Cuba became public.
Missing Word
Pierce
Franklin Pierce, a northern Democrat sympathetic to southern goals, favored acquiring Cuba but retreated after the plan provoked anger at home and in Europe.
Category: Filibusters and Expansion