AP US History Practice Exam — Free

The question asks you to read the delegates' position in its 1765 context rather than through the lens of 1776.

The Stamp Act (1765) was the first direct, internal tax Parliament had levied on the colonies for the stated purpose of raising revenue; earlier measures such as the Navigation Acts, and even the Sugar Act of 1764, took the form of duties on trade. Colonial leaders responded by drawing a line: Parliament could legitimately regulate imperial commerce, but taxation was a gift of the people through their representatives, and the colonists elected no one to Parliament. The Stamp Act Congress's declaration made exactly this argument, which is why it could profess loyalty and “due subordination” while denying Parliament's right to tax. Option B captures this distinction, which John Dickinson later developed at length in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767–68).

Option C is the most tempting wrong answer because “virtual representation” is the correct name for Britain's counter-argument (that every member of Parliament represented the whole empire). But the colonists rejected that doctrine; they did not accept it and quibble over the rate. Option A is anachronistic: almost no colonial leader called for independence in 1765, and the declaration's language of loyalty rules it out. Option D overstates the claim; wholesale rejection of parliamentary authority came only in 1774–76.

Answer: B — the delegates accepted parliamentary regulation of trade but denied Parliament's right to tax unrepresented colonists.

Context. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816 for twenty years, held the federal government's deposits and, under its president Nicholas Biddle, disciplined state banks by presenting their notes for redemption. Henry Clay and Biddle pushed an early recharter through Congress in 1832, expecting that a veto would hurt Jackson in that year's election. Jackson vetoed the bill on July 10, 1832, and the veto message became a campaign document.

(a) Jackson's objections. First, he declared the Bank unconstitutional. The Supreme Court had upheld the Bank in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), but Jackson argued that each branch of government must judge constitutionality for itself and that the Court's opinion did not bind the president. Second, he attacked the Bank as a monopoly of special privilege: a private corporation with exclusive federal benefits, whose profits flowed to a small group of wealthy stockholders, many of them foreign, while ordinary farmers, mechanics and labourers received nothing. In his words, government was being used to make “the rich richer and the potent more powerful”. He also stressed the danger of so much financial power sitting outside democratic control.

(b) Removal of the deposits. Having won re-election, Jackson decided in 1833 to drain the Bank before its charter ran out. Treasury Secretary Louis McLane would not remove the deposits and was moved to the State Department; his successor, William Duane, also refused and was dismissed. Jackson then appointed Roger B. Taney, who stopped depositing federal revenue in the Bank and placed it instead in state-chartered banks chosen by the administration, which critics nicknamed “pet banks”. The Senate censured Jackson in 1834 for exceeding his authority (the censure was expunged in 1837), and the Bank's federal charter lapsed in 1836.

Answer: (a) unconstitutional, and a privileged monopoly that enriched wealthy and foreign stockholders at the public's expense; (b) in 1833 he had the federal deposits removed and placed in state “pet banks”, through Treasury Secretary Roger B. Taney.

(a) Historical situation. In 1865–66, Southern legislatures restored under President Johnson's lenient Reconstruction plan passed Black Codes restricting freedpeople's movement, labour contracts, property rights and access to the courts. Congressional Republicans answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, declaring the freedpeople citizens with equal rights under law; Johnson vetoed it and Congress overrode him. Because a future Congress could repeal a statute and courts might strike it down, Republicans wrote its core into the Constitution. The amendment's opening sentence (birthright citizenship) and its command that “no State shall” deny equal protection target exactly such state laws.

(b) Contrast with the Thirteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified December 1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. It ended the legal status of bondage but said nothing about what rights the formerly enslaved held. The Fourteenth Amendment answered that question: it defined national citizenship, overturning the Dred Scott ruling (1857) that African Americans could not be citizens, and it limited state power over citizens' rights.

(c) How the promise narrowed. The Supreme Court read the amendment narrowly. In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) it confined the privileges-or-immunities clause to a short list of national rights. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883) it struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, holding that the amendment restricts only state action, so Congress could not reach discrimination by private businesses. Then Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld a Louisiana law requiring segregated railway cars under the “separate but equal” doctrine. With federal enforcement gone after the Compromise of 1877, these rulings left the equal-protection clause largely unenforced for African Americans until the mid-twentieth century.

Answer: (a) the Black Codes of 1865–66 and the need to secure the Civil Rights Act of 1866; (b) the Thirteenth abolished slavery, the Fourteenth defined citizenship and restrained the states; (c) the Civil Rights Cases (1883) limited the amendment to state action and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) permitted “separate but equal”.