User:Klshaw1/Compromise of 1850

From the arctilce '' A debate over slavery in the territories had erupted during the Mexican–American War, as many Southerners sought to expand slavery to the newly-acquired lands and many Northerners opposed any such expansion. The debate was further complicated by Texas's claim to all former Mexican territory north and east of the Rio Grande, ''

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=== To make it easy to understand, the Compromise of 1850 was 5 different bills all together passed by Congress that keeps salves and free states from going to war. It also helped set the borders in Texas and helped to decide what would happen in the slave trade. Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas made this happen with the help of President Filmore. === The Compromise of 1850 was Congress's response to the political crisis that commenced in 1846 with the U.S.-Mexican War and intensified as gold lured thousands of migrants to freshly conquered California after 1848. Discord over slavery expansion destabilized partisan politics: thousands of northerners rallied to the Free Soil Party, while John C. Calhoun attempted to forge a solid southern proslavery phalanx and Whig and Democratic regulars in both sections struggled to defuse the conflict. The issue exploded in the 1849-50 session of Congress, as politicians' threats of disunion and bloodshed were echoed by a militant clamor in Texas and New Mexico and by defiant declarations from southern secessionists and northern abolitionists. Henry Clay proposed a far-reaching settlement, only to watch his omnibus bill collapse in mid-summer. Soon after, Stephen Douglas of Illinois steered much of Clay's proposal through Congress by dividing it into separate bills and building unique coalitions to pass each one; by late September 1850, President Millard Fillmore had signed them into law. The compromise admitted the free state of California; organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah under the slippery principle of popular sovereignty; reduced Texas's size but promised to pay its massive debt; restricted the sale, though not the ownership, of enslaved people in Washington, D.C.; and established a draconian Fugitive Slave Act, which made recovery of alleged runaways a federal priority.

Stephen E. Maizlish's A Strife of Tongues is an exhaustively researched account of the Compromise of 1850. Unlike Childers, who attempts to place his congressional debate in a much larger context, Maizlish focuses exclusively on the nine months of debate during the 1st session of the 31st Congress, and he deals with a much larger cast of characters, drawing on the words of nearly 60 percent of the 290 senators and representatives in 1850. While the Webster-Hayne debate is well-known if under-studied, the Compromise of 1850 is arguably the most studied legislative event in American political history.

References

Woods, Michael E. “The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past.” The Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 9, no. 3, University of North Carolina Press, 2019, pp. 438–56, https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2019.0052.

Alexander, Erik B. "The Webster–Hayne Debate: Defining Nationhood in the Early American Republic." Journal of the Early Republic 40.3 (2020): 605-10. ProQuest. Web. 1 Mar. 2022.