AP US History Unit 5 Content Outline

•  Economic Changes in America

•  Embargo & War of 1812 lead to more US manufacturing 

•  Eli Whitney’s invention of the Cotton Gin revolutionizes Southern agriculture

• Demand for cotton spread, increase in slavery

•  Whitney’s invention of interchangeable parts leads to assembly line production

•  Factories develop across New England

•  Samuel Slater sneaks plans for power loom from England

•  Textile mills built along New England rivers by entrepreneurs

•   Women from nearby farms employed

•   Lowell System: employees housed in company boardinghouse,

      provided supervision and a social life

• Inventions like the mechanical plow, sower, reaper, thresher all help farming

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•  Transportation Changes in America (roads then canals then railroads)

•  East-West travel very difficult

•  National Road built from Maryland to Ohio (Route 70/68)

•  Erie Canal completed in 1825 in NY

• Leads to hundreds of canals

•  Railroad construction begins in the 1830’s

•  Samuel Morse’s telegraph allows long-distance communication

• Robert Fulton perfects the Steamboat

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• Immigration in the 1830’s and 1840’s

•  Irish fleeing economic hardship and the Potato Famine

• Arrive in eastern port cities = Cities very crowded, dirty, unhealthy

•  Face anti-Catholic discrimination (NINA)

•  Germans arrive and move west to farmlands

•  “Know Nothings” organized to fight politically against immigrants

•  Made up of Nativists  (xenophobia = fear of foreigners)

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• Election of 1824

• Reveals sectionalism:  4 Democratic-Republican candidates, each from a section

• Andrew Jackson, war hero, representing “common man”

• John Quincy Adams from New England

• William Crawford from the south

• Henry Clay from the west 

• Jackson received the most votes but no one won a majority

• House of Representatives decided

• Henry Clay (#3) gave his votes to John Quincy Adams (#2) 

• Adams President, names Clay Secretary of State

• Called the “Corrupt Bargain”

• Jackson leaves party, organizes the Democrats to challenge Adams • beginning of the **second party system in US**

• First “modern” political party system

• coalition of organizations, newspapers, leaders, etc.

• Spends 4 years making Adams’ life miserable

• Adams calls Jackson a “stupid and violent drunkard”

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• Jackson elected in 1828 – “Jacksonian Democracy”

• Dismissed govt. officials and replaced with supporters = “spoils system”

• Based democracy on universal white manhood suffrage (even w/o property!)

• Establishes a very strong Presidency, advised by his “kitchen cabinet” of friends

• Indian Removal Act to get lands for westerners

• Challenges: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia

• Ignores Supreme Court = Trail of Tears

• Downsize Federal Government to leave people alone

• Pulled funds out of 2nd Bank of US so it failed

• Leads to shortage of money, Panic of 1837

• Cancels or Vetoes Henry Clay’s American System bills

• Tariff of 1828 raises Nullification issue again

•  South Carolina calls it the “Tariff of Abominations”

• Hurts cotton trade with Europe

• When renewed in 1832, South Carolina nullifies it 

• Jackson threatened to send in the troops 

• Settled by Henry Clay in the Compromise Tariff of 1833

• Issues the Specie Circular

• Ends the policy of selling govt land on credit (pay “hard cash”)

• Causes a shortage of money, Panic of 1837

• “King Andrew” picks fellow Democrat Martin Van Buren to run in 1836

• Opponents join to organize Whig Party and nominate Henry Clay

•  Van Buren wins but country crashes into economic crisis (Panic of 1837)

• Leads to first Whig President, William Henry Harrison, in 1841

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• Religious and Social Reform Movements  

• Second Great Awakening tries to “save humanity from itself”

•  Began in north in 1790’s, spread south 

•  Revivals and then new churches

•  Societies for change develop

• Many women involved

• Temperance = end use of alcohol

• Prison Reform

• Public Education

• Horace Mann

• Women’s Rights• Seneca Falls Convention = Declaration of Sentiments

• Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Amelia Bloomer

• Abolition

• William Lloyd Garrison

• Grimke Sisters

• Mental Hospitals

• Dorothea Dix

• Religious Utopias

• Mormons – Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Utah

• Oneida

• Shakers

• American Literature & Art Develops

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper

• Transcendentalism

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman

• Romanticism

• Hudson River School (painting)