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About This Drill
AP U.S. History — Period 5 (1844–1877) — Drill 22 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Period 5: 1844–1877. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
This AP U.S. History Period 5 drill uses a modern historian's analysis arguing that the Civil War's causes were structural, not accidental. Questions address the historian's argument, the economic necessity of slavery's expansion, and the relationship between the crises of the 1850s and the outbreak of war.
Passage
The following is adapted from a modern historian's essay arguing that the Civil War's causes were structural rather than accidental.
The Civil War was not an accident, a failure of statesmanship, or an avoidable tragedy produced by a generation of blundering politicians. It was the culmination of a deep, structural conflict rooted in the incompatibility of two distinct social systems — one organized around enslaved labor and the other around free labor — that could not indefinitely coexist within a single federal union as both sought to expand westward. The political crises of the 1850s — the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid — were not causes of the war so much as symptoms of an underlying disease. What made the conflict irrepressible was not the failure of any individual statesman but the impossibility of permanent compromise between a slave society that required expansion to survive and a free society that could not permit that expansion without surrendering its own future.
Questions in This Drill
- The historian's argument that the political crises of the 1850s were 'symptoms of an underlying disease' rather than causes of the Civil War primarily challenges which of the following historical interpretations?
- The historian's argument that the slave society 'required expansion to survive' most directly reflects which of the following economic realities of antebellum Southern agriculture?
- The historian's claim that a 'free society could not permit that expansion without surrendering its own future' most directly refers to which of the following concerns of antebellum Northerners?
- Which of the following developments of the 1850s most directly supports the historian's argument that the political crises of the decade were symptoms rather than causes of the underlying conflict?
- Which of the following most directly occurred in the decade following the Civil War that would complicate the historian's argument that the conflict was 'irrepressible' and structurally determined?