Alex Kornienko 2006
The Episcopal Academy
Advanced Placement Examination
AMERICAN HISTORY
Section II
Part A
(Suggested Writing Time— 45 minutes)
Percent of Section II score— 45
Directions: The following question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrates your interpretation of Documents A-H and your knowledge of the period referred to in the question. High scores will be earned only by essays that cite key pieces of evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the period.
1. [Question]: How and why did the politics of slavery affect or reflect the South’s “world view” and therefore its relations with the North in the decades leading up to the Civil War?
Use the documents and your knowledge of the period 1831-1861 to construct your essay.
Document A
Document B
Document C
Document D
Document E
Document F
Document G
Document H
Source: Confessions of Nat Turner, 1831 (ABC Clio)
[A]ll my time, not devoted to my master's service, was spent either in prayer, or in making experiments in casting different things in moulds made of earth, in attempting to make paper, gun-powder, and many other experiments, that although I could not perfect, yet convinced me of its practicability if I had the means … Knowing the influence I had obtained over the minds of my fellow servants (not by the means of conjuring and such like tricks—for to them I always spoke of such things with contempt) but by the communion of the Spirit whose revelations I often communicated to them, and they believed and said my wisdom came from God. I now began to prepare them for my purpose, by telling them something was about to happen that would terminate in fulfilling the great promise that had been made to me.
Source: Theodore Weld: American Slavery As It Is, 1839 (ABC Clio)
They tell us, also, that the slaveholders of the South are proverbially hospitable, kind, and generous, and it is incredible that they can perpetrate such enormities upon human beings; further, that it is absurd to suppose that they would thus injure their own property, that self-interest would prompt them to treat their slaves with kindness, as none but fools and madmen wantonly destroy their own property; further, that Northern visitors at the South come back testifying to the kind treatment of the slaves, and that the slaves themselves corroborate such representations. . . . We are not to be turned from our purpose by such vapid babblings.
Source: John C. Calhoun: “Disquisition on Government”, 1840 (ABC Clio)
Liberty, indeed, though among the greatest of blessings, is not so great as that of protection; inasmuch, as the end of the former is the progress and improvement of the race,—while that of the latter is preservation and perpetuation. And hence, when the two come into conflict, liberty must, and ever ought,...
