8.6: The Compromise of 1850

Because of the Wilmot's Amendment, the party organization that purposely tried to keep common issues running through both the North and the South was coming apart.

A Boston newspaper correctly predicted, "As if by magic, it [the proviso] brought to a head the great question which is about to divide the American people" (McPherson 2003). Along with the fervent (강렬한), nationalism spawned by Manifest Destiny and the Mexican Cession came an awakening sense of sectionalism.

Henry Clay had seen similar crises develop twice before: during the Missouri question in 1820 and the tariff issue in 1832.

Because he had previously mended tears in the national fabric, he hoped to help the two sides compromise. Clay visited his fellow Whig Daniel Webster and asked him for support. Webster agreed, and they began working on a compromise.

California's instant population growth quickly created a problem.

By the close of 1849, the region easily had the sixty thousand people necessary to become a state, but bringing new states into the Union again brought up the issue of slavery.

Clay submitted a package of measures to Congress in January of 1850.

California would enter the Union as a free state while the territories of Utah and New Mexico would decide by popular sovereignty whether to be free or slave. Texas would give up all the land in dispute with New Mexico but would be paid ten million dollars for the concession (양보). The slave trade would be banned from Washington, DC, but slavery itself could continue there. Finally, a new fugitive slave law would more effectively return escaped slaves to the South while increasing the punishments for those found helping these slaves.

After six months of debate, the entire package of compromise finally came to a vote—it was defeated.

Clay despaired, but Democrat Stephen A. Douglas separated the compromise bill into pieces. He had each provision voted on separately, and each part passed—one-fifth of the members of Congress compromised by voting for all the separate provisions. The Northerners voted only for those elements that were of benefit to the North while the other Southerners also voted along straight sectional lines.

On March 7, Webster began, "I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the United States Senate . . . I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause."

For three hours Webster asserted that he stood for the compromise, putting the Union as his leading consideration. William Seward, from New York, proclaimed that there was "a higher law"(He was referring to a sense of morals which condemned slavery.) than the Constitution that must be obeyed. Meanwhile, Southerners continued to plan and threaten what they might do if their rights were not protected.

Martin Van Buren, who helped design the two-party system to defuse the issue of slavery, abandoned the two-party ship.

He ran as the candidate of the Free Soil Party, which was in full favor of the Wilmot Proviso.

Northerners often aided the fugitives and hid them from officers of the law or bounty hunters that would return them, as Southerners said, to their rightful owners.

In this way Northerners robbed Southerners of millions of dollars in "property" every year.

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line,

John C. Calhoun tried unsuccessfully to form a Southern Rights Party.

Instead of defusing the tense situation, Taylor only made it more volatile. His proposal was a simple solution for the problem at hand, but it failed to take into account the real causes of Southern insecurities.

Most slaveholders realized that slavery would most likely never be profitable on western lands.

In the wake of the controversy over the Wilmot Proviso, other sectional issues emerged.

Northerners were alarmed at prospects in Texas. In the joint resolution admitting Texas to statehood (국가의 지위), Texas could be carved into as many as five states, all of which almost certainly would be open to slavery. Texas was currently engaged in a boundary dispute with New Mexico that might give it even more land to divide into slave states. If such a thing happened, pro-slavery forces would hold a majority in the Senate.

Many historians believe that Wilmot proposed this measure not only as a sectional blow against the South but also as a political weapon.

Polk had been playing hardball politics for months, pushing through bills that many Northern Democrats thought did little for them or their home states. In rebelling against Polk's plan for Mexican territories, Wilmot may have been trying to weaken Polk's political position and force him to negotiate more with his fellow Democrats. If that were the case, Wilmot got a lot more than he expected.

Taylor, the Whig war hero, won the privilege of

trying to heal the tensions that threatened to split the Union. In the end he did nothing of the sort.

The issue that provoked such heated debate between the North and the South was actually not slavery itself but the expansion of slavery.

The question that the Compromise of 1820 put to rest suddenly awoke at the prospect of winning new land from Mexico.

When the vote on the proviso (Wilmot's Amendment) was taken, representatives did not divide along party lines of Whigs versus Democrats.

They divided along sectional lines with Southerners opposing the measure and Northerners favoring it.

Southerners had their own disputes.

They feared the entry of California as a free territory, yet they were especially angry over the issue of escaped slaves.

Northerners also opposed slavery in Washington, DC.

They felt it was disgraceful for humans to be bought and sold within sight of the nation's capital.

And so all the elements of the Compromise of 1850 succeeded, and it appeared that "The Great Compromiser" Clay had once again engineered a solution to save the Union.

This effort would not last nearly as long as his compromise thirty years earlier. The tension aroused by the debates was now strung higher than before, and it would only be tightened in the decade to come. Many Northerners bristled (화가 난) under the fugitive slave law. It would not be long before their intellectual artillery and then their real guns would be blazing at each other again.

After taking office in 1849, Taylor insisted that the territories taken from Mexico be organized immediately.

The president proposed that both areas skip becoming territories and move straight into statehood. Both California and New Mexico had the necessary population, and California especially needed immediate law and order. Taylor hoped that both would be free states since he felt slavery couldn't flourish out there anyway. California swiftly applied for admission into the Union as a free state.

The House passed the Wilmot Proviso more than once, but the Senate always defeated it.

The Mexican Cession became part of the United States without the Wilmot Proviso and held slavery within its borders, but the issue remained very much alive.

What slaveholders really opposed was a Congress dominated by Northerners dictating what Southerners could and could not do.

The South feared becoming an outvoted minority in the Union with the admission of California. Southerners therefore tightly held on to their principles of constitutional states' rights.

Both parties tried to tiptoe around the slavery issue in the elections of 1848.

The Whigs ran the war hero, Zachary Taylor, who himself owned a plantation in Louisiana. The Whigs assured Southern voters that Taylor would have their interests at heart, but, at the same time, they promised Northerners that Taylor was a man of the people: if the representatives of the people in Congress passed the Wilmot Proviso then he would not veto it. The Democrats ran Lewis Cass from Michigan as their presidential candidate. They were too tired to play on both sides of the fence. Cass, as a Northerner, certainly was not in favor of slavery, but he also championed the concept of "popular sovereignty," which would allow each territory to vote for itself whether it would support slavery or not. Under this idea Congress would not have the power to declare territories to be free.

In 1846 David Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, proposed an amendment to Polk's bill that would supply Polk with two million dollars, which he could pay to Mexico for any land they gave up.

The Wilmot amendment, or proviso, stipulated (약정한) that slavery would not extend to any land won in the war.