rap2016_ch14

Quiz for Document 14–2: Frederick Douglass, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Proslavery or Antislavery? 1860

Choose the best answer to each question.

1. What argument against the dissolution of the United States did Douglass make?

The northern textile industry needed southern cotton.

The principles of the union were more important than the issue of slavery.

The absence of the North would strengthen the power of southern slave owners over their victims.

Without a union, western expansion and access to land for freedom would be jeopardized.

2. Which of the following was a reason Douglass believed slavery to be unconstitutional?

It was not protected in the Bill of Rights.

The rights laid out in the Constitution applied to all people, not just a privileged few.

Most of the founding fathers had opposed slavery in theory and would have wanted it abolished.

The Constitution was outdated and required much rewriting.

3. How did Douglass describe the way Americans, up until that point, had treated African Americans and the Constitution?

They treated African Americans as exceptions to the rules and rights in the Constitution.

The North had always championed the rights of slaves while the South had not.

Americans thought the Bible’s teachings on slavery were more important than the Constitution.

They acknowledged that the Constitution granted rights to slaves but ignored it for years.