History Spotlight, 1/29

Senator Henry Clay

On January 29, 1850, Senator Henry Clay submitted the Compromise of 1850 to the US Congress hoping to quell the sectarian divisions that had divided the nation over slavery. The whole issue wasn't that the South had slaves, but whether or not the slavery would expand along with the rest of the nation.

Arg, this is one of those thorny historical issues on which I don't really have the firmest grasp.

OK, so, here we go: The South liked slavery and the North was, at best, ambivalent towards it. But, what about new states added to the Union, like all those southwest territories grabbed from Mexico during the Mexican-American War? And what of California? You'll remember that gold was discovered in California just two years before. The US very much wanted California to become a state, for obvious reasons.

It all comes down to control of the US Senate. Every state added to the Union added two more Senators. Every slave state meant to more pro-slavery Senators and every non-slave state meant two more "at best, ambivalent" Senators. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 set it up so that, each time a free state was added (Maine on March 25, 1820) a slave state was added too (Missouri on August 10, 1821). States added below 36 degrees 40 minutes would be slave and states added above would be free.

If you're thinking, "That sounds like an unworkable solution," you're right. The whole antebellum history of the US is one unworkable solution to slavery after another.
Things went on that way for a few years until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and added vast tracts of land to the Union, almost all of it below 36 40. This threatened to throw off the balance in the Senate, so a new unworkable compromise had to be hammered out.

Enter Henry Clay and the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise consisted of five main elements:
1) California was to be admitted as a free state.
2) The trade of slaves (but not slavery) was abolished in Washington, DC.
3) The territory of Mexico and Utah were organized under the principle of popular sovereignty. Slavery wasn't expressly allowed, but neither was it expressly prohibited.
4) Texas had to give up much of its land claims in the west (Texas was, if you can imagine, and even more vast tract of land than it is today) in exchange for the US paying off its debt from the war with Mexico to the tune of $10 million.
5) Last, and most certainly least, was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. In the pantheon of abhorrent laws passed in the US, the Fugitive Slave Act must stand triumphant. Briefly, it said that any US citizen had to assist in the arrest, capture and return of slaves to their Southern masters. This meant that, even if you were a Northerner, even if you were an abolitionist, it was your duty to capture slaves. Moreover, this also meant that, if you were an escaped slave, you weren't safe until you made it to Canada. This law had the unintended consequence of causing "on the fence" Northerners to see the brutality of the slave-hunters first hand and knocked many of them off the fence onto the abolitionist side.

In the end, it didn't work out. The Compromise was as unworkable as the rest and the Union slid even further towards civil war. But, as the historian Robert Caro points out in his excellent book Master of the Senate, the compromises may have only delayed the Civil War, but that delay bought the infant Union precious time. If the Civil War had begun in 1851 when public opinion in the North was still very much divided on the subject of slavery rather than 1861 when it had firmly coalesced against slavery (a large part of that due to the Fugitive Slave Act) the outcome might have been very different.