Compromise of 1850

Context

Slavery had been a point of division between the northern and southern states at least since the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In fact, citizens in both the North and South at that time widely believed that slavery was slowly headed toward extinction. However, after the 1793 invention of the cotton gin made the plantation system more profitable, the South became increasingly attached to slavery and more firmly resistant to its abolition. Moreover, the arguments regarding slavery became part of a broader economic rivalry between the regions. An unstable harmony was maintained through the balanced admission of new free states and slave states during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

In 1819 a proposal to admit Missouri as a free state immediately raised objections from southern leaders, sparking a crisis that the former president Thomas Jefferson called “the most portentous one that has yet threatened our Union” (Ellis, p. 264). Talk of disunion and civil war began to be heard. Finally, a compromise was reached: Missouri would be admitted without restrictions on slavery, but slavery would be prohibited in all other parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′ north. While the Missouri Compromise was not rooted in any constitutional principle, most political leaders accepted it as a permanent arrangement.

The 1830s saw the rise of antislavery sentiment in the North and the increasingly militant defense of the institution in the South. The hope of maintaining peace between the sections fell victim to the desire of Americans in the North and in the South to acquire more national territory. The annexation of Texas in 1845 led to war with Mexico, which eventually resulted in the transfer of more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States. In August 1846 the Pennsylvania representative David Wilmot offered an amendment prohibiting slavery in territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso failed to pass the Senate but was continually debated for the next several years. Southerners openly talked about accomplishing disunion if the proviso became law. Other proposals were floated in Congress, such as to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific and to allow territorial governments to settle the slavery question themselves. None of these ideas mustered enough support to pass. Meanwhile, the territories of California and New Mexico lacked organized governments. President Zachary Taylor, though he himself was a slaveholder, took a hard line against southern secessionist threats. The situation in Congress was becoming dangerously heated when Senator Henry Clay presented his set of compromise proposals in January 1850.