Henry Clay is most famously remembered as the “Great Compromiser”. In his time as a United States Congressman he helped broker both the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850—which helped, temporarily, prevent the Union from fracturing. The Compromise of 1850 settled a number of territorial disputes and for half a decade diminished the importance of the slavery issue in the national political arena. Clay’s work on the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state so that answer is incorrect. Clay also argued in favor of war and was considered a “war-hawk”. 

The Compromise of 1850 was actually a collection of several bills that managed to pass Congress, narrowly, by co-opting the votes of those in favor and those moderates in the middle who desired preservation of the Union over all else. As part of the Compromise; California was admitted as a free state; The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia; a new Fugitive Slave Act was passed; Texas lost control over the territory of New Mexico; Utah and New Mexico were admitted into the Union and popular sovereignty was to be used in both territories to settle the issue of slavery. The incorrect answer is therefore that New Mexico was admitted to the Union as a slave state. Neither the North nor the South was entirely satisfied with the Compromise. In particular, the North found the new Fugitive Slave Acts abhorrent and the passage of that bill made compromise much harder to reach in the years that followed. The Compromise of 1850 is important for temporarily staving off Civil War, but as war broke out a decade later it must ultimately be viewed as only a fleeting success.

The Bill of Rights is the name given to the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. The Bill of Rights had been a necessary addition to the Constitution in order to ensure the unanimous support of all the States. They came into effect in 1791. The Freedom of speech, religion, and press are all established in the First Amendment. The right to a civil trial by a jury of one’s peers was established in the Seventh Amendment. The right to equal protection under the law, regardless of race, was not, however, established until after the Civil War—in the Fourteenth Amendment. 

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were all passed during the Reconstruction period, immediately following the Civil War, and were concerned with the inclusion and protection of freed slaves in the Union. The Nineteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to women. The Seventeenth Amendment is correct—it mandated that state senators were to be elected by a popular vote. Previously state senators had been elected by the State Legislature, but fear of corruption and political unaccountability lead to a campaign for reform in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. 

The Mexican War, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, ceded the territory of California to the United States. Due to the California Gold Rush and rapid settlement it was admitted to the Union very shortly after. The Spanish-American War was a half century after the acquisition of California. Likewise, the War of 1812, the Louisiana Purchase and the French-Indian Wars were much too early. 

Ratified on December 15th, 1791, the Bill of Rights is the name given to the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States that guarantee the rights of property and liberty, secure several personal freedoms, constrain the power of the government in certain matters, and reserve certain powers to the states.

John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer and a member of the famous Booth acting family, assassinated President Lincoln.  He was later shot by a Union soldier in rural northern Virginia.

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted land in the West to people who would cultivate it.  It was the first of the Homestead Acts.

During the Presidency of John Adams two major strains of American political ideology were separating and solidifying. Adams belonged to the Federalist Party and was generally opposed, on most issues, by the Republican Party. The growing enmity between the two parties lead to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts by the Federalist controlled Congress. The Alien Act stated that the United States government had the authority to expel any foreign-born individual believed to be dangerous to the preservation of the Union or to the American war effort. The Sedition Act stated that any individual found making slanderous or libelous comments regarding the government was subject to prosecution. Both laws were seemingly implicitly aimed at negating government criticism and expelling foreign nationals born in France. The Alien and Sedition Acts were heavily protested against, most notably by Thomas Jefferson who argued that States had the right to nullify Federal laws that were unconstitutional. 

The first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by George Washington, was John Jay. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were both lawyers, but neither ever served on the Supreme Court. John Marshall served as the fourth Chief Justice, but many consider him to be the most important of the early judges for establishing the powers of the Judiciary Branch. Edmund Randolph was the first Attorney General of the United States.