The Compromise of 1850 in two minutes
- The Mexican Cession reopened the fight over slavery in the territories. The Wilmot Proviso (1846) passed the House but not the Senate, and the Free Soil Party formed in 1848.
- The Gold Rush led California to seek admission as a free state, which would upset the balance of 15 free and 15 slave states. Texas also claimed half of New Mexico.
- Henry Clay proposed a compromise in January 1850. Calhoun, in a speech read by Senator Mason, warned of disunion, Webster backed compromise on March 7, and Seward invoked a higher law.
- Clay's omnibus bill collapsed on July 31, 1850, after Taylor died and Fillmore became president. Stephen Douglas then passed its parts as five separate bills in September.
- The laws admitted California free, paid Texas $10 million to drop land claims, let Utah and New Mexico decide on slavery, ended the D.C. slave trade and toughened fugitive slave enforcement.
- The Fugitive Slave Act gave accused people no jury or testimony and could compel citizens to help. Black Bostonians rescued Shadrach Minkins in 1851, but officers sent Thomas Sims back to Georgia.
- On the exam: expect the compromise in questions on sectionalism and popular sovereignty. Argue that it delayed rather than ended conflict, since the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 ended the truce.
Topic 5.4 key terms
- Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Part of the Compromise of 1850, signed September 18, 1850. It let slaveholders claim people who had escaped slavery, even in free states. Federal commissioners decided each case with no jury, and the accused could not testify.
- Compromise of 1850
Five laws Congress passed in September 1850 to settle the fight over slavery in the land won from Mexico. California entered as a free state, Utah and New Mexico could decide on slavery later, the Fugitive Slave Act got tougher, and the slave trade (not slavery) ended in Washington, D.C.
- Higher law
The idea that a moral or divine law outranks a government's written laws. William Seward used the phrase in the Senate in March 1850, about slavery in the western territories. Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act soon used it about conscience.
- Wilmot Proviso
1846 amendment to ban slavery in any land taken from Mexico. The House passed it more than once. The Senate never did.
- Popular sovereignty
The idea that settlers in a territory, not Congress, decide whether to allow slavery there. Lewis Cass made it famous in 1847.
- Free-Soil Party
1848 party formed by antislavery 'Conscience Whigs,' antislavery Democrats known as 'Barnburners,' and others. It fought slavery's spread into new land, not slavery where it already existed.
- Contextualization
AP skill: explain how the wider circumstances around an event shaped it. Here, the Gold Rush is why California could vote before Congress could argue.
- Sectionalism
Putting your region's interests ahead of the nation's. By 1849, North and South voted as blocs on slavery, more than as parties.
- Great Triumvirate
Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the three senators who dominated national politics for a generation. Clay stood for compromise, Calhoun for the South, Webster for the Union. The debate of 1850 was their last together.
- Omnibus bill
One bill that bundles many separate measures. Clay's committee combined California, the territories and Texas's boundary, so senators had to take all of it or none, and an attack on any one part could sink the rest.
- Nashville Convention
A June 1850 meeting of delegates from nine slave states to plan Southern resistance if slavery were barred from the West. Its platform asked to extend the 36°30′ line to the Pacific. Moderates kept it from calling for secession.
- Armistice
A pause in a war, not a peace treaty. Potter used the word because the Compromise stopped a fight without settling what caused it.
- Federal commissioner
An official appointed by the federal courts to hear fugitive slave cases. Under the Act of 1850 he decided alone, with no jury and no testimony from the accused, and his fee was higher if he returned the person.
- Georgia Platform
Resolutions passed by a Georgia convention in December 1850. Georgia accepted the Compromise of 1850 on one condition: the North had to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. It helped Southern Unionists hold off secession talk.
- Vigilance committee
A group formed in Boston in 1850 by Black and white residents to warn fugitives of slave catchers and help them get away.
- Habeas corpus
A court order telling officials to bring a prisoner before a judge and show a legal reason for holding him. Sims's lawyers asked Massachusetts's highest court for it. Chief Justice Shaw refused, ruling that the Fugitive Slave Act was constitutional.
- The five laws of 1850
California entered as a free state. Utah and New Mexico became territories under popular sovereignty. Texas gave up land claims for $10 million. Washington, D.C. ended its slave trade, but not slavery. And a much tougher Fugitive Slave Act passed.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Chain
April 1851
Key terms: Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Compromise of 1850, Higher law
Boston · April 1851
In April 1851, the city of Boston put a chain around its own courthouse.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court forced to stoop under chains to enter the temple of Justice!
Another judge refused to stoop. The police made a gap for him.
Upstairs, federal officers held Thomas Sims, a bricklayer who had escaped slavery in Georgia. The chain was there to stop Boston from rescuing him.
Congress passed this law to save the Union. When the law and your conscience disagree, which one do you obey?
To see why Boston chained its own courthouse, start with a map.
Whose West?
1846–1849
Key terms: Wilmot Proviso, Popular sovereignty, Free-Soil Party, Contextualization, Sectionalism
The war with Mexico added more than half a million square miles. The Missouri line of 1820 stopped at the old border. Nobody had decided about the rest.
In 1846, David Wilmot proposed banning slavery from all of it. The House passed his proviso. The Senate killed it. Four answers, and Congress couldn't agree on any. So in 1848, the voters got to choose.
In 1848, the answers ran for president. Democrats chose Lewis Cass: let the settlers decide. Whigs chose Zachary Taylor, a war hero with no platform, who had never cast a vote.
Antislavery Democrats and Whigs formed the Free-Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren. Van Buren carried no state, but his votes in New York helped Taylor win.
Then came gold. By the end of 1849, about a hundred thousand newcomers had poured into California.
California skipped the territory stage, banned slavery unanimously, and asked to join as a state.
That's contextualization in one picture: the Gold Rush changed the argument before Congress could have it.
Since 1820, states had come in pairs. California had no partner.
When Congress met that December, the House needed nearly three weeks and sixty-three ballots just to choose a Speaker.
Texas claimed half of New Mexico, Santa Fe included. Southern leaders had called a convention to meet at Nashville.
Men in Congress said 'disunion' out loud. Into this walked a seventy-two-year-old from Kentucky.
The Last of the Giants
January–March 1850
Key terms: Great Triumvirate, Compromise of 1850, Contextualization, Higher law
Henry Clay had helped settle Missouri in 1820 and the tariff crisis in 1833. Sick with tuberculosis, he had come back for one more.
Clay's plan: California joins free. The rest of the Mexican land gets no rule on slavery. Texas is paid to give up land. Washington's slave trade ends. The fugitive slave law gets tougher.
Everyone had to swallow something.
Henry Clay
I have never before arisen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.
John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was dying, too weak to read his own speech. Senator James Mason of Virginia read it for him.
James M. Mason
I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion.
He said the cords holding the Union together were snapping, one by one. The Methodists split into Northern and Southern churches in 1844. The Baptists followed in 1845.
The North ran the House. The Senate stood at 15 to 15.
James M. Mason
The South asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take.
Three days later, all Washington wanted a seat.
Daniel Webster
I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American.
Daniel Webster
An honorable member whose health does not allow him to be here to-day…
An unnamed senator
He is here.
Daniel Webster
I am very happy to hear that he is.
Nature, he said, would keep slavery out of New Mexico.
Daniel Webster
I mean the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth.
On returning people who had escaped slavery, he sided with the South.
Daniel Webster
In that respect, the South, in my judgment, is right, and the North is wrong.
Read alone, this speech sounds like courage or like betrayal. Set it beside what else happened that March, and you can see what he feared: a South ready to leave.
John Greenleaf Whittier
So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
John Greenleaf Whittier
Which once he wore!
Antislavery New England called him a traitor. Hundreds of Boston men signed a letter thanking him.
Four days later, Seward of New York went further.
William H. Seward
But there is a higher law than the Constitution.
He meant the western lands. Soon it was aimed at the fugitive law.
All Aboard
April–September 1850
Key terms: Omnibus bill, Nashville Convention, Compromise of 1850, Popular sovereignty, Armistice
On April 17, Jane Grey Swisshelm became the first woman to sit in the Senate press gallery. Vice President Fillmore, she recalled, had warned her it would be “very unpleasant for a lady.”
That afternoon, Senator Foote pulled a loaded pistol on Senator Benton.
Thomas Hart Benton
Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!
Senator Dickinson of New York took the pistol and locked it in his desk.
Jane Grey Swisshelm
You are nothing the poorer when the deed is done. It is the mother and her children who are called upon to foot the bill.
Clay's committee packed the biggest pieces into one bill. Washington called it the omnibus, after the city's horse-drawn buses. Everybody rides together.
President Taylor opposed it. He enslaved more than a hundred people, yet wanted California and New Mexico admitted now, as states, with no deal.
In June, delegates from nine slave states met in Nashville to plan for a South shut out of the West. The moderates held. For now.
On July 4, Taylor sat through two hours of speeches in the sun. The story goes he ate cherries and iced milk. Five days later, he was dead.
Millard Fillmore wanted a deal. Webster left the Senate to be his secretary of state.
Henry Clay
I owe a paramount allegiance to the whole Union—a subordinate one to my own State.
On July 31, the omnibus came apart. New Mexico fell off. Then Texas. Then California.
Thomas Hart Benton
The omnibus is overturned, and all the passengers spilled out but one. We have but Utah left.
Clay went off to Newport, Rhode Island, to rest.
Stephen Douglas of Illinois was thirty-seven and about five foot four. They called him the Little Giant. His idea: stop asking anyone to vote for all of it.
Five laws, signed in September. Washington fired a hundred guns. One man wrote that it was “a night on which it was the duty of every patriot to get drunk.”
Almost nobody had voted for the whole Compromise. The historian David Potter called it “a truce perhaps, an armistice.”
Millard Fillmore
A final settlement.
Then people read the fine print.
The Fine Print
September 1850–February 1851
Key terms: Federal commissioner, Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Georgia Platform, Higher law, Vigilance committee
Reading clerk of the Senate
In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.
A person seized under this law could not testify. There was no jury.
The commissioner got ten dollars if he sent the person south, and five if he set them free.
Reading clerk of the Senate
All good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law.
Every citizen could be ordered to help.
The Constitution said a person held to service who escaped must be delivered up. Some Northern states forbade their officials to help. Senator Mason of Virginia filed a bill to enforce it.
A Georgia convention accepted the Compromise on one condition.
Reading clerk of the Senate
Upon the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill by the proper authorities depends the preservation of our much-loved Union.
Millard Fillmore
God knows that I detest Slavery, but it is an existing evil … and we must endure it.
Millard Fillmore
I know no higher law that conflicts with it.
The law put every Black person in the North at risk. In Rochester, a Black Baptist church had 114 members. All but two left. The pastor went first.
Families left for Canada.
In Boston, Black and white citizens packed Faneuil Hall.
Frederick Douglass spoke for the people the law was hunting.
Frederick Douglass
We one and all … are resolved rather to die than to go back.
Two Georgia slave catchers came for William and Ellen Craft. The committee had them arrested until they left town. The Crafts sailed for England.
In February 1851, federal officers seized Shadrach Minkins, a Boston waiter. That afternoon, Black Bostonians, Lewis Hayden among them, carried him out. He was in Canada within a week.
Three days later, Fillmore issued a proclamation against the rescue.
Daniel Webster
It is, strictly speaking, a case of treason.
No one was convicted.
The next case would go differently. It came in April.
Under the Chain
April 1851
Key terms: Habeas corpus, Federal commissioner, Higher law
On the night of April 3, Boston police seized Thomas Sims on a false charge of theft. He fought back.
This time, the authorities were ready. Up went the chain.
In 1836, Chief Justice Shaw freed an enslaved girl who had been brought to Boston. In 1851, he denied Sims habeas corpus and upheld the federal law.
A federal commissioner heard the case, with no jury. On April 11, he ordered Sims returned to Georgia.
Before dawn, about three hundred police marched him down State Street, some with swords the federal government supplied. Past the Old State House. Vigilance Committee members stopped where soldiers had shot Crispus Attucks in 1770. Down Long Wharf, to the brig Acorn.
Sims landed in Savannah on April 19, the anniversary of Lexington and Concord. Theodore Parker made sure Boston noticed. Sims was whipped in public. Thirty-nine lashes.
Parker drafted a poster. It warned Black Bostonians that the city's police were now
KIDNAPPERS AND Slave Catchers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will not obey it, by God.
The chain came down. The law stayed.
A Higher Law
1851 → 1877
Key terms: Contextualization, The five laws of 1850, Armistice
The Compromise drew new lines on the map. The Fugitive Slave Act drew one through every Northern town.
Both sides believed they were saving something. The Union, or their souls.
The armistice lasted four years. A novel came first. Then Kansas.
In April 1863, as Grant's army closed on Vicksburg, Sims escaped again, with his wife and child. Grant gave him a pass. He made it back to Boston.
In 1877, Sims got a job as a messenger at the Justice Department. The attorney general was Charles Devens, the marshal who had marched him to Long Wharf.