COVER PAGE BIOGRAPHIES

As we explore the nine Time Periods in the CHS American History you will be responsible for independently researching 12 biographies relevant to each time period. You should limit your sketch to under 100 words and include any relevant information that will help you connect the individual or group to the time period.

Biography Exemplars from Time Period #4 1800 to 1848

John Quincy Adams, (1767- 1848) sixth president of the United States (1825–29) and eldest son of President John Adams.  In his pre residential years he was one of America’s greatest diplomats, formulating, among other things, what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine, and in his post presidential years (as U.S. congressman, 1831–48) he conducted a consistent and often dramatic fight against the expansion of slavery.

Stephen Van Rensselaer, (1764 –1839), was a landowner, businessman, militia officer, and politician. A graduate of Harvard University, Van Rensselaer took control of his family's manor. He developed the land by encouraging tenants to settle it, and granting them perpetual leases at moderate rates, which enabled the tenants to use more of their capital to make their farms and businesses productive. Active in politics as a Federalist, Van Rensselaer served in the NY State Assembly, NY State senate, lieutenant governor, and US House of Representatives. 

Nicholas Biddle (1786 -1844 ), was an American financier who served as president of the Second Bank of the United States (1823–36). Biddle made it the first effective central bank in US history. He was President Andrew Jackson’s chief antagonist in a conflict (1832–36) that resulted in termination of the bank through Presidents Jackson’s veto.

John Calhoun (1782-1850), was a prominent US statesman and spokesman for the slave-plantation system of the antebellum South. As a young congressman from South Carolina, he helped steer the United States into war with Great Britain and established the Second Bank of the United States. Calhoun went on to serve as US secretary of war, vice president and briefly as secretary of state. As a longtime South Carolina senator, he opposed the Mexican-American War and the admission of California as a free state, and was renowned as a leading voice for those seeking to secure the institution of slavery.

Lowell Factory Girls - The Lowell Girls were young female workers who came to work in industrial corporations in Lowell, MA during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of propertied New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 30, but sometimes as young as 7 years old. By 1840, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the textile mills had recruited over 8,000 women, who came to make up nearly seventy-five percent of the mill workforce.

The American Party or Know-Nothing party, was a political party that flourished in the 1850s. The Know-Nothing party was an outgrowth of the strong anti-immigrant and especially anti-Roman Catholic sentiment that started to manifest itself during the 1840s. A rising tide of immigrants, primarily Germans in the Midwest and Irish in the East, seemed to pose a threat to the economic and political security of native-born Protestant Americans. In 1849 the secret Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in NYC, and soon after lodges formed in nearly every other major American city.