Expansion, Slavery & Reform — Problem set, Grade 7
Five focused units, a three-session source workshop, chapter review, and chapter quiz.
Review the key ideas
Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny & Contested Land
Gold was found at Sutter’s Mill nine days before Mexico signed away California. The United States gained about 525,000 square miles in 1848 — roughly a third of Mexico — and every acre of it immediately raised the question the country could not answer: slave or free.
Indian Removal: Sovereignty, Resistance & Enforcement
The Cherokee did everything the United States said it wanted: a written constitution, an alphabet, a newspaper, farms. They sued in the Supreme Court and won in 1832. Six years later the army marched sixteen thousand of them a thousand miles west, and about four thousand died.
Reform Movements: Religion, Education & Public Action
A change in theology produced a wave of reform. When preachers began saying that salvation was a choice rather than a fate decided in advance, the conclusion followed quickly: if a person can be reformed, so can a prison, a school, a drinking habit, a country.
Abolition & Women’s Rights: Arguments, Networks & Disagreements
Abolition and women's rights came out of the same halls, the same pledges and the same mailing lists, and they split over the same question: when the vote is finally on offer, who gets it first. Both movements were argued hardest by people the law counted as property or as dependants.
Cotton, Domestic Slave Trade & Enslaved People’s Agency
A machine that cleaned cotton faster made slavery larger, younger and further south. Between the ban on importing people in 1808 and the Civil War, about a million people were sold from the Upper South into the cotton states, and resistance to it looked far more often like a slowed pace of work than like a rising.
Problem 1
Answer and explanation
The act and removal were related but distinct events separated by years and a presidential transition. Jackson supported the 1830 act; Van Buren was president during the principal forced Cherokee removal. A causal account must include intervening treaties, resistance, state pressure, and federal action. Correct chronology does not reduce the consequences or erase institutional responsibility.
Separate legislation from implementation.
Place events under different administrations.
Identify the continuing policy and the particular actors who implemented it.
Response criteria
- Describe the historical context and institutions accurately.
- Connect relevant evidence with an explained claim or calculation.
- Represent particular perspectives without stereotypes or invented testimony.
- Identify an assumption, evidentiary limit, or distinction that qualifies the conclusion.
Problem 2
Answer and explanation
Purchase, annexation, and war involved different actors, agreements, and conditions. The Louisiana Purchase, Texas annexation, and territorial transfer after the Mexican-American War were not one mechanism. Distinguishing them also helps explain contested boundaries and the consequences for communities already living in the territories.
Problem 3
Answer and explanation
The ruling documents a legal conclusion, not guaranteed implementation. The disputed signatures cannot stand for every Cherokee person or authorized leadership. Later removal shows why political and military action mattered. A complete explanation compares treaty procedures, objections, enforcement, and community accounts rather than infer fairness from formal paperwork.
Separate legal judgment from later enforcement.
Identify the dispute over signing authority.
Connect decisions and unequal power with the outcome.
Response criteria
- Describe the historical context and institutions accurately.
- Connect relevant evidence with an explained claim or calculation.
- Represent particular perspectives without stereotypes or invented testimony.
- Identify an assumption, evidentiary limit, or distinction that qualifies the conclusion.
Problem 4
Answer and explanation
It concerned nationhood, land, jurisdiction, treaty commitments, state and federal action, and power over people’s ability to remain.
Problem 5
Answer and explanation
Enrollment rises by 10, or 50% of the starting count, under the supplied model. Exclusion continues for the specified category, so the increase is not universal access. Attendance, resources, instruction, and learner records would test educational effects. These are invented figures, not measured historical outcomes.
Identify the enrollment increase.
Identify the continuing eligibility limit.
Separate enrollment from attendance and learning.
Response criteria
- Describe the historical context and institutions accurately.
- Connect relevant evidence with an explained claim or calculation.
- Represent particular perspectives without stereotypes or invented testimony.
- Identify an assumption, evidentiary limit, or distinction that qualifies the conclusion.
Problem 6
Answer and explanation
Implementation, resources, access, enforcement, and unintended effects determine outcomes. Compare the aim with evidence about the actual change.
Problem 7
Answer and explanation
The later declaration used equality reasoning to challenge exclusion, connecting revolutionary language with reform. The purposes differed: independence justification versus rights demands at a convention. Neither summary establishes equal access for everyone or immediate fulfillment of every demand; legislation, rules, organizing, and enforcement need separate study.
Identify equality language as a shared resource.
Identify each document’s purpose and historical setting.
Distinguish a demand from legal implementation.
Response criteria
- Describe the historical context and institutions accurately.
- Connect relevant evidence with an explained claim or calculation.
- Represent particular perspectives without stereotypes or invented testimony.
- Identify an assumption, evidentiary limit, or distinction that qualifies the conclusion.
Problem 8
Answer and explanation
It documents one intervention, while networks, resources, audiences, institutional responses, and varied participants help explain sustained change.
Problem 9
Answer and explanation
The ban did not abolish slavery or domestic sale, so a later domestic record is compatible with it. The transaction can document an ownership claim and movement while omitting the person’s full experience and resistance. Additional testimony and community records would deepen the account.
Identify importation as one channel.
Distinguish domestic sale and enslaved status.
Recognize the limited viewpoint of the transaction record.
Response criteria
- Describe the historical context and institutions accurately.
- Connect relevant evidence with an explained claim or calculation.
- Represent particular perspectives without stereotypes or invented testimony.
- Identify an assumption, evidentiary limit, or distinction that qualifies the conclusion.
Problem 10
Answer and explanation
Its raw material and commercial relationships can depend on coerced production. Geographic distance does not erase a supply-chain connection.