Unit 5: Manifest Destiny, Civil War, and Reconstruction

The Compromise of 1850

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The Compromise of 1850, like the Missouri compromise before 30 years earlier, offered only a temporary solution to the sectional debate over the extension of slavery. A look at some of the background and the “fighting” in Congress is very reveling to the problems involved.

The California gold discovery of 1848 was the major issue. By 1849, the territory had a population of over 100,000. President Zachary Taylor asked California, New Mexico, and the Mormon state of Deseret (later named Utah) to draw up state constitutions. A state convention was held at Monterey, California, and the people of the territory overwhelmingly voted in favor of it – and voted on a constitutional draft favoring the prohibition of slavery.

Congress assembled in December 1849 after their end-of-the-year recess, and the debate over California (especially its “free” constitution), Deseret, and New Mexico began in earnest. Southerners were especially frightened. They repeated Calhoun’s warning that the South was about to become a hopeless, permanent minority. Mississippi issued invitations for a southern convention. Many Southerners expressed the hope that this convention to be held in Nashville, Tennessee would recommend the secession of the slave states from the Union. Northerners in Congress were just as angry and determined. (Both Northerners and Southerners came to the Capitol armed with revolvers and Bowie knives!) According to the Congressional Globe, the sessions were marked by “threats, violent gestures, calls to order, and demands for adjournment…The House was like a heaving bellows. The clerk called to order, but there was no one to heed him.”

Thus, when Henry clay offered his compromise – California free, popular sovereignty in New Mexico and Utah, boundary satisfied between Mexico and Texas and Texas to receive $10 million, slave trading (but not slavery) prohibited in the District of Columbia, and a more effective fugitive slave law – everyone was far from satisfied.

Some of the debate:

Henry Clay defended his proposals in a power speech to a packed Senate and gallery. He warned the South that they would win none of their objectives be seceding from the Union. Instead, they would risk “furious, bloody, implacable, exterminating war and bring about the end of the Union.” So the South “must go with this amiable arrangement.”

John Calhoun, like Clay and Webster, was now an old man. As spokesman for the South, he answered: “The South asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not take. She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and concession or surrender to make.” Unity of the Nation, said Calhoun, could only be preserved if the South was assured it could remain in the Union with safety and an effective voice.

Daniel Webster defended Clay’s proposals: “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American…I have no part to act, not for my own security or safety, for I am looking out for no fragment upon which to float away from the wreck, if wreck there must be, but for the good of the whole, and preservation of all…I speak for the preservation of the Union.” Webster went on to warn that peaceable secession was impossible. So, he supported wholeheartedly the compromise proposals. He was condemned by some as a traitor to the antislavery cause.

William Seward, a New York Whig, answered Webster with the following words: “I am opposed to any such compromise, in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed, because…I think all legislative compromises are radically wrong and essentially vicious.” He went on to say that the Constitution denied slavery and that it was contradictory for a “Christian nation” to protect the institution. He wound up his argument by appealing to a “higher law than the Constitution” – the moral law which was inalterably opposed to human bondage.

The debate went on for months. But two things happened to change the unwavering positions. Calhoun died in March 1850, and the Nashville Convention of Southerners met in June 1850. Moderates rather than radicals won control and they refused to recommend secession. As a result, the major opposition voices were silent now. Many Southern Congressmen were dared to vote for the Compromise bills now. And the last barrier – slave owning President Taylor died in early 1850. The new President Millar Fillmore recommended passage.

By September 1850, the five measures were passed and signed into law. Happy celebrations were held throughout the country. Webster wrote a friend:

Ican now sleep at night. We have gone through the most important crisis that has occurred since the founding of this government, and whatever may prevail, hereafter the Union stands firm.