Home > Major Acts of Congress > Compromise of 1850

James Huston

Slavery presented innumerable problems to the United States prior to 1850, but none proved more unsolvable than those connected with westward expansion. Heated arguments arose over the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the admission of Missouri into the Union (1820–1821), and the annexation of Texas (1845). Each time politicians responded with some type of compromise that allowed the Union to continue with a slaveholding section and a free labor section. The Compromise of 1850 was the last important compromise between North and South over slavery and it did not last. By the end of 1863, in the midst of Civil War, almost all the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 had been repudiated.

The Mexican War of 1846–1848 generated the conflict that produced the Compromise of 1850. Northern Democrats, upset at Southern domination of the party, rallied behind a slogan of slavery prohibition from any territory acquired from Mexico—the Wilmot Proviso. But President James K. Polk desired to fill out the continental boundaries of the United States, and in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) he obtained the area now consisting of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. Southern politicians immediately denounced the Wilmot Proviso and insisted slavery could expand into any territory acquired by the United States. Between 1847 and the beginning of 1850, Congress was consumed by the slavery expansion issue and it burned away all other issues. The problem simply would not go away.

At the same time California was annexed to the United States as a territory, settlers found gold and within one year California had enough population to become a state. But if California became a free state, it would tip the balance of free to slave states in the nation in favor of the free states. The politics of the situation became desperate. In the 1848 election, the citizenry voted Zachary Taylor into the White House. Taylor, who was a Louisiana slaveholder, nonetheless believed the western territories would be free and so he favored the admission of both California and New Mexico as free states. This outraged Southern politicians and by December 1849 they were speaking of secession.

Henry Clay, called the "Great Compromiser" because of his previous roles in resolving sectional conflicts, was sent back to the U.S. Senate by Kentucky to forge a compromise. He fashioned legislation that he believed resolved all standing issues between the free and slave states. These issues were the admission of California as a free state; the implementation of a settler decision on slavery in the territories of Utah and New Mexico; the abolition of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.; a new fugitive slave law; a new boundary between Texas and New Mexico; and the federal government's agreement to pay the state debts of Texas. Clay placed all these matters in one bill called the "Omnibus." The Omnibus, however, failed to obtain the necessary majority to pass and failed on July 31, 1850. Clay soon left the Senate in disgust.

What changed the situation, however, was the death of Zachary Taylor and the installation of Millard Fillmore as president. Fillmore gave signals that he would sign a compromise act if one were passed by Congress. Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas and Georgia representative Howell Cobb leapt at the opportunity. They divided the Omnibus into separate bills, calculating they could win a majority for each bill even though the composition of the majority would change with every vote. And so in August and September 1850, separate bills passed the Senate and the House representing the elements of Clay's original Omnibus bill; those separate pieces of legislation were referred to as "The Compromise of 1850."

But the Compromise of 1850 was weak and destined to a short life. The Fugitive Slave Law created a furor in the North;

Southerners in the Gulf states debated leaving the Union in 1850 and 1851, but retreated in the face of overwhelming support for the Union. More importantly, Stephen A. Douglas's ill-conceived legislation to start territorial government in the Kansas and Nebraska territories (the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854), reignited the slavery extension issue and so undid much of the good achieved by the Compromise of 1850. The unsolvable nature of the slavery issue then produced Southern secession in 1860 and 1861, which in turn led to the War for the Union from 1861–1865.

During the Civil War, the Union Congress ended the Fugitive Slave Law, emancipated slaves in the District of Columbia and then throughout the Union with the Thirteenth Amendment. So the Compromise of 1850, except for the settlement of the New Mexico-Texas boundary and the admission of California to the Union, was entirely unraveled in the space of fifteen years.

See also: FUGITIVE SLAVE ACTS; KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT OF 1854; MISSOURI COMPROMISE