APUSH Periods 4–5 — 1800 to 1877

Two periods that the course treats as one long argument about slavery in the territories, with a war in the middle of it and an unfinished settlement at the end.

Five questions cover 1800 to 1848. The electorate that widened for white men while narrowing or standing still for everyone else. The market revolution, and what happened to work when it left the house. The Missouri Compromise, reached here through an invented 1820 speech that explains the arithmetic of the Senate in two sentences. The Declaration of Sentiments, quoted in its own words. And McCulloch v. Maryland, which settled what "necessary and proper" was going to mean.

Five cover 1844 to 1877. The Wilmot Proviso. Why a party that had won national elections could not survive the 1850s. What the seceding states said they were doing — asked with Mississippi's declaration of causes open in front of you, since those documents are the best evidence there is of their own stated reasons. What four years of war did to the size and reach of the federal government. And the Fifteenth Amendment.

That last one is the question worth the most. The amendment forbids denying the vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude", and by 1900 black turnout across most of the former Confederacy was close to nothing with the amendment untouched and in force. The answer is in the wording: a poll tax, a literacy test marked at a registrar's discretion and a grandfather clause mention race nowhere and exclude by race in practice. That gap between what a measure says and what it does is most of what the course means when it asks about Reconstruction.

Where historians disagree — why enforcement ended, how much weight the tariff dispute carries in 1861 — the question says they disagree and picks no side. Where a source is quoted it is public domain and the words are exact; where a source is invented the question says so in its own first line.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the AP examinations, and it is not an exam centre.

• Describe how the electorate changed in the Jacksonian era, and for whom it did not
• Explain what the market revolution did to where and how Americans worked
• Identify the Missouri Compromise from its terms, and place it against the Northwest Ordinance, 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska by decade
• State what the Declaration of Sentiments argued and which movement produced it, and what McCulloch v. Maryland established about implied powers
• Account for the collapse of the second party system in the 1850s
• State the reasons the seceding states themselves gave, using their own declarations as evidence
• Explain how a race-neutral rule can exclude by race, and why the Fifteenth Amendment did not prevent it

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, says the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged 'on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude'. By 1900 black turnout across most of the former Confederacy had fallen close to nothing, and the amendment was still in force and had never been altered. How was that done?