AP® United States History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/us-history/units/4/4-14)
Unit 4 · Topic 4.14
4.14 Causation in Period 4
This skill topic asks you to explain causes and effects across Period 4. For example, how did the market revolution and the Second Great Awakening spark reform, and how did the spread of cotton and the westward movement of settlers deepen sectional conflict and lead to Native removal?
Key terms
- causation
- short-term and long-term causes
- market revolution
- Second Great Awakening
- sectionalism
Thinking in causes and effects
Causation asks you to explain why something happened and what it led to. In Period 4, many developments are linked: economic change caused social change, which caused political change. Your job is to trace those links with specific evidence.
Strong causation answers distinguish between kinds of causes (economic, religious, political, social), between short-term and long-term causes, and between primary and secondary causes. They also explain the mechanism: how exactly did A lead to B?
Key causal chains in Period 4
| Cause | Effect | Further effect |
|---|---|---|
| Market revolution (canals, factories, wage work) | Growth of a Northern middle class; cities and social problems | Middle-class reformers lead temperance, education and asylum reform |
| Second Great Awakening (free will, perfectionism) | Belief that people should fight sin in society | Abolition and other reform movements |
| Cotton gin and textile demand | Expansion of cotton and slavery into the Deep South | Domestic slave trade; sectional conflict over slavery's expansion |
| Westward settlement and planter demand for land | Pressure on Southeastern Native nations | Indian Removal Act (1830) and the Trail of Tears |
| End of property requirements for white male voters | Mass parties and higher turnout | Jackson's rise and the Second Party System |
| Missouri's application as a slave state (1819) | Missouri Compromise (1820) | A temporary truce that set the 36°30′ line later fought over in the 1850s |
Multiple causes of one development
Take reform movements. Several causes worked together: the Second Great Awakening gave reformers a moral and religious motive; the market revolution created social problems and a middle class with time, money and education; Enlightenment and Romantic ideas taught that people could be improved; and women, shut out of politics, used reform as a way to act in public.
A sophisticated essay does not just list these causes. It argues which mattered most, explains how they interacted, or shows how a cause affected different groups differently. For example, the market revolution gave middle-class women time for reform, while working-class women had little.
From Period 4 to Period 5
Many Period 4 effects become Period 5 causes. The growth of cotton slavery and the rise of abolitionism made compromise harder. The market revolution tied the Northwest to the Northeast by rail and canal, so when war came the North and West stood together. Westward expansion kept raising the question of slavery in new territories.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Causation thesis with ranking
Write a thesis for this prompt: Evaluate the relative importance of the causes of reform movements in the United States in the period 1820 to 1848.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Name at least two causes.
- Step 2: Rank them clearly.
- Step 3: Give a reason for your ranking that you can defend with evidence.
Answer: Model thesis: Although the market revolution created both new social problems and a Northern middle class with the time and resources to address them, the Second Great Awakening was the most important cause of reform movements from 1820 to 1848, because its message that individuals could choose salvation and perfect society turned converts into reformers who saw drinking, slavery and the neglect of the mentally ill as sins to be fought.
- Example 2
A causation chain paragraph
Explain how the invention of the cotton gin contributed to sectional tension in the United States by 1848.
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- Step 1: Start with the invention and its immediate economic effect.
- Step 2: Trace the effect on slavery and the South.
- Step 3: Connect to political conflict between the sections.
Answer: Model answer: Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) made it fast and cheap to clean short-staple cotton, which made cotton growing hugely profitable across the inland South. Planters moved into the Deep South and forced about a million enslaved people from the Upper South to work new cotton lands, tying the Southern economy ever more tightly to slavery. As Southerners came to defend slavery as a 'positive good' while Northern states had abolished it and abolitionists grew louder, the sections clashed over whether slavery could spread west, as in the Missouri crisis of 1819–1820.
Common mistakes
- Listing causes without explaining how each produced the result.
- Picking a cause too far removed from the effect without showing the middle links.
- Ignoring the prompt's time frame, for example using the 1850s Kansas–Nebraska Act as a cause of 1830s developments.
On the exam
- Long essay prompts on Period 4 often ask about causes of reform, the market revolution's effects or the growth of sectionalism. Prepare a chain for each.
- Words like 'because', 'led to' and 'as a result' make your reasoning visible to the reader.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 4.14 Causation in Period 4. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Which of the following best explains why tensions between the North and the South increased between 1800 and 1848?
Historians often argue that the market revolution helped cause the reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s. Which of the following best supports that argument?
| Census year | Enslaved population of the United States |
|---|---|
| 1790 | 698,000 |
| 1800 | 894,000 |
| 1810 | 1,191,000 |
| 1820 | 1,538,000 |
| 1830 | 2,009,000 |
| 1840 | 2,487,000 |
| 1850 | 3,204,000 |
| 1860 | 3,954,000 |
Source: United States Census, 1790–1860. Figures rounded to the nearest thousand.
The trend shown in the table most directly contributed to which long-term development?
| Decade | Total immigrants | From Ireland | From the German states | Share from Ireland and Germany |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1831–1840 | 599,125 | 207,381 | 152,454 | 60% |
| 1841–1850 | 1,713,251 | 780,719 | 434,626 | 71% |
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (1975), series C 89–119, immigrants by country. Shares are rounded.
Most of the immigrants shown in the table settled in the North and the Midwest rather than the South. This most likely had which long-term effect?
0 of 4 answered