The Gold Rush filled California so fast that it asked to join the Union in 1849 as a free state. That would give the free states a majority in the Senate. Southern leaders threatened to leave the Union. The aging Henry Clay, who had helped settle the Missouri crisis thirty years earlier, offered a package of compromises.
Key idea
The Compromise of 1850: California joined as a free state; New Mexico and Utah territories would decide slavery by popular sovereignty (a vote of their settlers); the slave trade (not slavery) ended in the District of Columbia; Texas gave up land claims in exchange for \$10 million toward its debts; and a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act required Northerners to help return people who escaped slavery.
Why it works
Each side got something it wanted badly, and each swallowed something it hated. The North got California and an end to the slave market in the capital. The South got the Fugitive Slave Act. The fight was long: Clay's package failed as one bill, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas passed it as five separate bills, each with a different majority. President Zachary Taylor, who opposed parts of it, died in July 1850; President Millard Fillmore signed the bills in September.
Worked example: Why the Fugitive Slave Act backfired
The 1850 act let federal commissioners decide claims that a person had escaped slavery. The accused had no jury trial and could not testify, and commissioners were paid \$10 for ruling for the claimant but \$5 for ruling against. Why did it turn many Northerners against slavery?
- Before 1850, escapes seemed a Southern matter to most Northerners.
- Now federal marshals could require bystanders to help catch people, and helping someone escape brought fines and jail.
- Free Black Northerners could be seized with little chance to prove their freedom, and thousands fled to Canada.
- Seeing arrests in Boston and other cities, many Northerners who were not abolitionists came to oppose the law.
Answer: It made Northerners take part in slavery and denied the accused basic protections, so it angered many who had stayed out of the issue.
Common mistake
The Compromise did not end slavery in Washington, D.C. It ended the buying and selling of enslaved people there. Slavery in the District ended in 1862, when Congress freed the enslaved people there and paid their owners. Check the wording: "slave trade" is not "slavery."
In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel written partly in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. It sold about 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year and moved many Northern readers. Southern critics called it a false picture of slavery.