Compromise Of 1850 Quotes

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people. January 1830

For a former slave and then an orator and an editor whose political consciousness had awakened with the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850, who had seen the fate of the slaves bandied about in one political crisis after another, and who had struggled to sustain hope in the face of the Dred Scott decision’s egregious denials, a resolute stand by the North against secession and the Slave Power was hardly a sure thing.

It is unclear how closely Grant followed current affairs as the national debate over slavery broadened and intensified. Through the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted as a free state while other territories wrested from Mexico were left free to adopt slavery or not. In exchange, the North appeased the South by submitting to a strict new fugitive slave law that made many northerners feel like accomplices in the hated institution of their southern brethren.

Under the Fugitive Persons Act, those who escape from service are to be captured and returned, anywhere they are found in the United States, slave state or free. All law enforcement agencies are obliged to assist in these operations when called upon (as, indeed, “all good citizens” are so obliged), but it is the US Marshals Service that is specifically charged with the job. This law was passed in the ancient year of 1793 under its old name, but it’s been updated repeatedly: strengthened in 1850, reinforced in 1861, revised and strengthened a half dozen times since. When, in 1875, Congress at last ended slavery in the nation’s capital, the slaveholding powers were appeased by the raising of fees for obstruction. When President Roosevelt, in 1935, proposed the creation of a “comprehensive regulatory framework” for the plantations (and the Bureau of Labor Practices to enforce it), he quieted howling southern senators with a sweeping immunity bill, shielding US marshals from zealous northern prosecutors. Tit for tat. Give and take. Negotiation and conciliation. Compromise. It’s how the Union survives. People

The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise. Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West.

California was large, and southern California was of the same latitude as Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. To some it seemed logical and fair to split California into two—one slave, one free. But California had already decided on its identity as a free state. A different compromise was required, an olive branch to southern slaveholders, assuring them that California’s addition as the thirty-first state would not weaken slavery in the Union. The price was the elaborate Compromise of 1850 and, within it, the Fugitive Slave Act. California would not have become a state without it. And the Union would divide further because of it, the victory lap of Manifest Destiny, of gaining California and all its gold, serving as a very clear beginning of the end.

The Compromise of 1850 was authored by the legendary Whig politician Henry Clay. In addition to admitting California to the Union as a free state to balance with Texas, it allowed Utah and New Mexico to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of what became known as “popular sovereignty”, which meant the settlers could vote on whether their state should be a free state or slave state. Though a Whig proposed popular sovereignty in 1850, popular sovereignty as an idea would come to be championed by and associated with Democratic Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas.  The Compromise also abolished the slave trade – though not the existence of slavery itself – in Washington, D.C.

The word conservative began to take on specific political meaning in the U.S. when antislavery northerners refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of the Compromise of 1850.