Local Presidents Questions

1. Local Presidents Questions Minor/Elementary Divisions #13-24

2. #1 (6 points) Before becoming president, I served as U.S. Minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson, and I was also Secretary of State under James Polk. In fact, I am the last Secretary of State to become president. (4 points) My first Secretary of State, Lewis Cass (pictured), resigned because of my inaction during an impending national crisis. His replacement, Jeremiah Black, warned me that, if I continued my inaction, I would be “the last President of the United States.” (2 points) I was born and died in the same state. During my one term in office, my vice president, 36-year-old John C. Breckenridge, was and still is the youngest vice president in American history.

3. #2 (6 points) Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the McKinley Tariff while I lived in the White House. More states entered the Union while I was president than during any other president’s term. The six were the two Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. (4 points) I was born and died in the North. I created a scandal in my family when I remarried following my wife’s death. She died early in my last year in the White House. Three and a half years later, I married my first wife’s niece (at the right) who was 25 years younger than me. This horrified my children, who shunned the wedding. (2 points) I am the only president whose predecessor and successor were the same man.

4. #3 (6 points) I was wounded in the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War. As president, I named Carl Schurz Secretary of the Interior. In this posi-tion, he was in charge of the Office of Indian Affairs, which was known as the most corrupt office in the department. He cleaned up the office. I appointed the black activist Frederick Douglass as marshal of the District of Columbia. The Democrats opposed this selection. (4 points) The biggest controversy of my life involved my election to the presidency. My Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, won the popular election by nearly 300,000 votes. He seemed certain to win the electoral vote as well. But the voting in four states, in-cluding Florida and Louisiana, was disputed, with each side claim-ing victory. So Congress set up an electoral commission to decide the issue. The committee awarded the electoral votes of all four states to me. (2 points) Because of the bad feelings from my election, I promised to serve only one term and to remove the Federal troops that had stayed in some Southern states since the Civil War. Another candidate from my party won the next presidential election, this time without any argument.

5. #4 (6 points) One of my best friends at Bowdoin College in Maine was the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” and the “Song of Hiawatha.” After college, I became a lawyer and entered politics. I volunteered for the Mexican War and rose to the rank of brigadier general under General Winfield Scott, who would be my Whig opponent for the presidency. (4 points) I don’t know if you can call it a scandal, but people gossiped about my wife Jane because she was rarely seen by anyone during our four years in the White House. She was depressed by the deaths of our three sons, especially our youngest, Bennie, who was killed in a train wreck as we traveled from Boston. She took his death as a sign that God did not want me to be president. She spent her days upstairs at the White House writing letters to Bennie. The staff called her “The Ghost of the White House.” (2 points) The nickname given to me for my run for president was “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills.” Just as James K. Polk had been called “Young Hickory,” I was too because I was the candidate of Andrew Jackson’s party. “The Granite Hills” was a reference to my home state in New England.

6. #5 (6 points) As the collector of duties for the port of New York, I regularly forced my employees to contribute money to Repub-lican campaigns. So I was removed from office. People didn’t believe I had much to offer as president, but I was selected as the vice presidential running mate for my predecessor to please party leader Roscoe Conkling. (4 points) I once said; “For the vice presidency, I am indebted to Mr. Conkling, but for the presidency my debt is to the Almighty.” As president, I changed my scandalous ways. For example, I vetoed the “pork barrel” legislation of the Rivers & Harbors Act which authorized $19 million in spending for unnecessary projects in districts of powerful congressmen. Congress over-rode my veto, but I won praise for my fight against wasteful spending. (2 points) One of the most important pieces of legislation during my presidency was the Pendleton Act that reformed the civil service. A German immigrant, Anton Feuchtwanger, sold the first hot dog in St. Louis, and Buffalo Bill organized his first successful Wild West Show during my term. I was born and died in different Northern states.

7. #6 (6 points) My family lived in a log cabin near Hodgeville, where I was born. We later moved across the Ohio River into another state. As a young man, I volunteered to fight in the Black Hawk War. I was elected captain of my local regiment, but we never saw any combat action. (4 points) I studied law books and passed the test to be-come a lawyer in my adopted state in the North. I won my first political race as a member of the Whig Party to earn a seat in the state legislature. I later served in the U.S. House of Representatives for one term and actively supported the campaign of General Zachary Taylor for president. By the time I became president, the Whig party no longer existed. (2 points) The nation learned the names of many towns in the South while I was president – names like Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Chickamauga, and Vicksburg. They also learned the names of generals like George McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, Ambrose Burnside, and James Longstreet.

8. #7 (6 points) One of my nicknames was “Canal Boy” because I worked on a canal boat. I fell overboard numerous times. After one fall, I caught a fever and was sent home. My mother convinced me to go back to school. I was also called the “Teach-er President” because I taught classical languages at Hiram College, becoming president of the college at age 26. But I left teaching to pursue a career in law. (4 points) When the Civil War broke out, I left my position in the state Senate and volunteered for service in the army. I began as a lieutenant colonel. Many of the men in my command were my former students. While still in the army, I won election to the U.S. House of Representatives and served there for 17 years until I was elected president. (2 points) A man named Charles Guiteau, who had escaped from a mental institution, shot me several times at the train station in Washington. He was angry because he had not been appointed to an ambassador po-sition. I clung to life for over two months before dying.

9. #8 (6 points) My father died when I was three years old. So I had to go to work as a young boy. My brother and I were apprenticed to a tailor named Selby. We became what were known as “bound boys.” We worked for our room and board while we learned the trade. (4 points) The “Radical Republicans” in Congress passed over my veto the Civil Rights Act and other laws reorganizing southern state governments and granting the new black freedmen the right to vote. Angered by the loss of the Civil War and the humiliation of reconstruction, southern men formed violent hate groups. The most famous was the Ku Klux Klan. (2 points) My Secretary of State, William Seward, arranged the pur-chase of Alaska. This came to be known as “Seward’s Folly.” Public opinion changed when gold was discovered in Alaska.

10. #9 (6 points) While I lived in the White House, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the Dred Scott case. The court ruled that slaves were not citizens. So Dred Scott could not be consider-ed a free man even though he left slavery and moved to a free state. As to my own views on slavery, I regretted that slavery existed but believed that individual states could allow it if they wished. (4 points) While I was president, Minnesota, Oregon, and Kansas joined the Union. But South Carolina seceded from the Union as did five other Southern states. (2 points) I am the only president who never married.

11. #10 (6 points) The great writer Mark Twain helped me publish my autobiography after I left the White House when I needed money. I finished writing my life’s story just a few days before my death from cancer. (4 points) I didn’t hold any political office before becoming president. Unfortu-nately, my eight years in the White House were marked by numerous scandals. Most of them were given names like Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, and the Gold Panic. I belonged to a different political party from my predecessor but the same party as my successor. (2 points)I graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I fought in the Mex-ican-American War before resigning from the military. But I rejoined the army seven years later when the Civil War began.

12. #11 (6 points) I was called the “Veto Governor” and later the “Veto President.” During just my first term in the White House, I vetoed more than four hundred bills to keep them from becoming law. I believed in limited government. Today I would be called a “conservative” and belong to the opposite party from the one I led as president. (4 points) I was born and died in the same state. But I lived most of my life in a nearby state where I entered politics. My opponents criticized me for hiring a substitute to take my place in the Civil War when I was in my 20s. But what I did was perfectly legal because I was the chief supporter of my mother and sisters. I am the only president who got married in the White House. My wife Frances and I had five children, one of whom was known as “Baby Ruth” in the newspapers. (2 points) You can circle either one of two numbers and be correct for this question.

13. #12 (6 points) I won election to the presidency as “The Railsplitter” candidate. I got this nickname when my home state party convention endorsed me for the White House. I had split rails for the railroad in my youth. The image of me as a hard worker appealed to voters. West Virginia and Nevada became the 35th and 36th states while I served as president. (4 points) I belonged to a different political party than the presidents before and after me. My First Lady Mary was a controversial figure who was treated more and more harshly by the public during our years in the White House. Her grief following the death of our son Willie caused her to turn to spiritualists in an attempt to communicate with Willie beyond the grave. (2 points) In 2013, Daniel Day Lewis won an Academy Award for playing me in a Steven Spielberg movie that bore my name.

14. #13 (6 points) Before becoming president, I served in the Assembly of my native state and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for four terms. My string of good luck ran out, however, as I failed to win the nomination of my party for vice-president, then lost an election for governor to the Democratic candidate. But I didn’t give up and was later nominated for vice president on the winning ticket. (4 points) I am often listed as an example of a president that most people know nothing about. That’s interesting because, four years after leaving the White House, I ran for president as a candidate of the Know-Nothing Party. I did win one state, Maryland, but finished a distant third behind the winner.I was born and died in the same state. (2 points) I became president when my predecessor died in office. I died nine years after the end of the Civil War.

15. #14 (6 points) The entry of Chinese immigrants into the United States in the years before I became president caused violent protests in California, so much so that Congress felt the need to act. While I vetoed a bill as president that would have suspended Chinese immigration for 20 years, I eventually signed the Chinese Exclusion Act that limited immigration for 10 years, the only law in American history to limit immigration based on race. (4 points) My wife’s southern sympathies became a problem for us in our marriage. Ellen was born in Virginia and quietly supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. This caused a strain on our marriage, one that would end suddenly when she died just months before I took office as vice president. (2 points) I’m probably best known for the reforms I made in civil service during my one term in office. I decided not to run for reelection due to my bad health. I suffered from a kidney ailment that, during the last half of my presidency, often left me too tired to work.

16. Answers • #15 James Buchanan • #23 Benjamin Harrison • #19 Rutherford Hayes • #14 Franklin Pierce • #21 Chester A. Arthur • #16 Abraham Lincoln • #20 James Garfield • #17 Andrew Johnson • #15 James Buchanan • #18 Ulysses S. Grant • #22/24 Grover Cleveland • #16 Abraham Lincoln • #13 Millard Fillmore • #21 Chester A. Arthur