The Great American Story Course Notes Part 4

The Mexican War reopened national questions the Missouri Compromise had attempted to settle.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California into the Union as a free state in exchange for a tougher Fugitive Slave law.

In the Civil War, the South had the advantages of fighting a defensive war on their home territory and very talented and accomplished generals.

Winston Churchill praised Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as the ultimate expression of Shakespearean language.

In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln argued that slavery should be understood as national sin.

Roughly one of every four soldiers who fought in the Civil War were killed.

Abraham Lincoln argued that because secession was illegal, the Confederate states had never left the Union.

Reconstruction was driven primarily by Congress and not the President.

In the Compromise of 1877, Republicans agreed to withdraw the Reconstruction regime that governed the South in order to settle the dispute over the election of Rutherford Hayes.

The railroad industry was the first big business in the United States, and it helped spur the development of a national marketplace.

The rapid increase in immigration and the population of big cities during the late nineteenth century contributed to a change in the character of city government and the rise of the urban boss system.

In 1890, four out of five New York city residents were foreign-born.

According to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the disappearance of the western frontier would prove to be a major challenge to American democracy.

Source: “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope”