The Wilmot Proviso, one of the major events leading to the American Civil War, would have banned slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico in the Mexican War or in the future.
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| 399507979 | 1 | In August 1846, David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, proposed an amendment (a proviso) to a military appropriations bill: that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist" in any territory gained from Mexico. | |
| 399507980 | 2 | Although the proviso never passed both houses of Congress, it transformed the debate. Southerners suddenly circled their wagons to protect the future of a slave society. | |
| 399507981 | 3 | John C. Calhoun asserted a radical new southern position: the territories, Calhoun insisted, belonged to all the states, and the deral government could do nothing to limit the spread of slavery there. | |
| 399507982 | 4 | Southern slaveholders had a constitutional right footed in the Fifth Amendment (no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property"), Calhoun claimed, to take their slaves (as property) anywhere in the territories... | |
| 399507983 | 5 | This position, called state sovereignty, was a radical reversal of history; in 1787 the Confederation Congress had excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory, and the Missouri Compromise had barred slavery from most of the Louisiana Purchase. Now, however, southern leaders demanded protection and future guarantees for slavery. | |
| 399507984 | 6 | In the North, the Wilmot Proviso became a rallying cry for abolitionists. David Wilmot, ironically, was neither an abolitionist nor an antislavery Whig. His goal was to defend "the rights of white freemen" and to obtain California "for free white labor." | |
| 399507985 | 7 | The Wilmot Proviso passed the House but failed in the Senate, where the South had greater representation. Thus, sectional conflict over slavery in the Southwest continued up to the Compromise of 1850. |
