PSAT Writing and Language Practice Test 41: Writing Concisely Questions

Questions 1-10 refer to the following information.

A Name That Says It All

As a high school student, I always appreciated the frankness of the War of 1812—it declared 1 its milieu in its very name, making it the subject of the most painless question on the semester exam. You guessed it: the war took place in 1812. This two-and a-half-year-conflict, however, was far more complex 2 than this. At best, it can be said to have been a war of mixed results.

James Madison 3 , known as the "Father of the Constitution," put the fledgling founding document to its earliest test as the first president to ask Congress to declare war. At the top of the commander in chief's list of reasons for going to war were Great Britain's restrictions on U.S. trade, disregard and violation of maritime rights, and encouragement of Native-American attacks on U.S. colonies. 4 Ultimately, he was afraid of what might happen if there were a reconquest of the colonies by Great Britain's powerful naval forces.

According to the Federalists, particularly those of New England who depended on trade with Great Britain, the rationale for going to war wasn't as sincere as Madison would have liked everyone to believe. 5 They argued, instead, that the justifications for war were barely camouflaged excuses to expand the colonies without further 6 meddling and intrusion by Great Britain. At the time, British support of Tecumseh and the Shawnee Indians impeded westward expansion. Regardless of its ambiguous roots, in June of 1812, a divided Congress voted in favor of war.

By the time the Treaty of Ghent was signed in February 1815, Americans felt victory 7 but had achieved very little. Despite the War of 1812 being celebrated as a second war of independence, the original motivations for war were all but forgotten by its close. The U.S. had surrendered Detroit but found success in the Battle of Lake Erie, defended Baltimore and New Orleans just to have Washington, D.C. captured and burned. When Britain moved for an armistice, American patriotism soared, casually ignoring the 8 severely serious losses on its own end.

The war proved particularly useful for the military and political careers of famous American men like Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and William Henry Harrison, who in most cases entered the war as relatively anonymous but came out as eminent patriots. 9 Most of these men were recognized by few people before the war but afterward were widely known and respected by their countrymen. The real loss, on the other hand, befell the Native Americans. An armistice between the colonies and Great Britain not only marked a major failure in the Native-American end goal of self-government but also catalyzed a century of imperial expansion into Native-American territories 10 , which were areas of land.