Compromise of 1850

Compromise of 1850, a series of laws passed by Congress to settle issues arising from the deepening sectional conflict over slavery.Although enacted separately, the laws followed a tradition of complex federal compromises over slavery's expansion designed to obtain concessions from all parties. A tough new Fugitive Slave Act, designed to stop interference by northerners with the capture and return of fugitive slaves, empowered federal marshals to deputize bystanders to assist in seizing runaways and permitted the settlement of cases without jury trials. Legislation to organize the new territories of New Mexico and Utah permitted the settlers to introduce or ban slavery when they sought statehood. (This legislation also permitted suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of slaves in the territories, thereby laying the groundwork for the 1857 Scott v. Sandford case. California was admitted as a free state over the protests of southerners fearful of a free‐state majority in the Senate. Congress also banned public slave‐trading in Washington, D.C., a compromise between antislavery forces demanding total abolition in the district and southerners who viewed any restriction as unconstitutional. Finally, the slave state Texas relinquished its claims on much of neighboring New Mexico territory in exchange for the federal government's assumption of Texas's preannexation debts.

The final shape of the legislation was hammered out during months of rancorous congressional debate. Although each element of the compromise garnered a majority vote, the entire package never attracted a solid majority in either house. Arguing for a comprehensive compromise were leaders of the aging Jacksonian generation, including Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, joined by a group of younger politicians like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who drew upon party loyalty to forge agreements on individual bills. Opposing compromise were powerful militants from both sections, including the northerners William Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and the southerners John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.

The Compromise of 1850 briefly muted sectional antipathies and delayed civil war for a decade. But the controversial enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act proved deeply divisive, and the settlement finally unraveled in 1854, when an overconfident Douglas, in the Kansas‐Nebraska Act, engineered the reversal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise and opened Kansas to slavery on the basis of the local‐option principle. Northerners, furious at this use of one compromise to overturn another, abandoned the Democratic party in droves and flocked to the new Republican party.
See also Antebellum Era; Civil War: Causes; Mexican War.

Bibliography

Holman Hamilton , Prologue to War: The Compromise of 1850, 1964.
David M. Potter , The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, comp. and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher, 1976.
William W. Freehling , The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854, 1990.
Mark J. Stegmaier , Texas, New Mexico and The Compromise of 1850: Boundary Dispute & Sectional Crisis, 1996.

Peter B. Knupfer