The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five bills, passed in September 1850, which defused a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North regarding the status of territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The compromise avoided secession or civil war and reduced sectional conflict for four years.
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| 399524952 | 1 | The first sectional battle of the new decade involved CA. More than 80,000 Americans flooded into CA during the gold rush of 1849. With Congress unable to agree on a formula to govern the territories, President Taylor urged these setters to apply irectly for admission to the Union. They promptly did so, proposing a state constituion that banned slavery... | |
| 399524953 | 2 | Southern politicians objected because CA's admission as a free state would upset the equal balance of 15 free and 15 slave states in the Senate. At a minimum, southerners wanted the Missouri' Compromise line extended to the Pacific. | |
| 399524954 | 3 | Henry Clay (respected Whig leader) sensed that the Union was in peril. Thus, in the winter of 1850 he presented a series of compromise measures in one last attempt to preserve the nation... | |
| 399524955 | 4 | The Compromise addressed these difficult problems: - Would CA become a free state? - How should the territory acquired from Mexico be organized? Texas, a slave state, claimed large portions of it as far west as Santa Fe. | |
| 399524956 | 5 | The Compromise had 5 essential measures: 1. CA became a free state 2. The Texas boundary was set at its present limits and the U.S. paid Texas $10 billion for the loss of New Mexico territory 3. New Mexico and Utah territories were organized on a basis of popular sovereignty 4. The Fugitive Slave Law was strengthened 5. The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia | |
| 399524957 | 6 | While many celebrated at the time, historians argue that the Compromise of 1850 was more an "armistice," delaying greater conflict, than a compromise. It had 2 basic flaws. The first concerned the ambiguity of territorial legislation: how exactly was popular sovereignty to be enforced? Southerners insisted there would be no prohibition of slavery during the territorial stage, and northerners declared that settlers could bar slavery whenever they wished... | |
| 399524958 | 7 | The second flaw lay in the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave new (and controversial) protection to slavery. | |
| 399528195 | 9 | The Compromise was another effort to deal with the wound of slavery that the U.S. was born with. |
