After gaining independence from Great Britain and the United States’ formation, a split was outlined in the American state between two economically, politically, demographic, and culturally different areas – the North and the South. The Southern states are traditionally agricultural, initially surpassing the Northern ones in terms of economic indicators.
It was in the South that slavery was practiced, and only 6% of the state population were slave owners, of which, in turn, 7% owned more than 90% of all slaves (Piqueras et al. 15). However, despite a very narrow stratum of slaveholders, there was a positive attitude towards slavery associated with the peculiarities of their economic and political structure in the Southern states.
In 1819, Missouri tried to join the United States, which contradicted the “Northwest Territories Act,” which explicitly prohibited slavery. The creation of a slave state in “free” territories worried the northerners’ public and politicians, as it created a precedent for the spread of the settlement of slavery. The search for a compromise solution began, J. Talmadge proposed the first option. The Talmadge Amendment envisaged the incorporation of Missouri into the United States as a slave state.
Thus, the state had to turn from a slave to a free state gradually. However, the Senate did not accept this amendment, approving Missouri’s entry into the United States in the slave status. The House of Representatives, on the other hand, passed the amendment. At the conference on making a unified decision, the idea of compromise was presented by Henry Clay, nicknamed “the master of compromise” (Fortaleza 5). He proposed to accept the state of Missouri as a slave state, at the same time acknowledging the state of Maine as a free state to maintain political balance.
In 1820, the Missouri Compromise became an obstacle to the further spread of slavery. With the emergence of new states, confidence in the reliability of this barrier began to fade. Texas became the part of the Union as a slave state, but California, New Mexico, and Utah, awaiting admission to the United States, did not recognize slavery and did not intend to allow it, threatening the slave states with upsetting the political balance. Southerners insisted that any form has the right to call itself a slave state (Fortaleza 5).
They proposed extending the Mason-Dixon dividing line to the Pacific coast to include all the conditions south of it as slaves. This proposal was vehemently opposed by the free states, which argued that no state has the right to declare itself a slave state. The Missouri slaveholders continued to fight the declaration of neighboring Kansas free from slavery, fearing that their state would be bordering on three free ones (Kansas, Illinois, and Iowa) and would become the object of active activity of opponents of servitude.
The “gold rush” that began after the discovery of gold deposits in California in January 1848 complicated the decision of the US Congress to admit this territory to the Union. Before creating the administrative bodies of the new state, its status had to be determined. President Polk’s farewell message to Congress, which for the first time mentioned the discovery of the richest gold deposits in California, inflamed the political situation in the country. The question of the spread of slavery to the newly acquired territories took on new dimensions.
The solution to the controversial issue, proposed by the experienced “master of compromises” Senator G. Clay, then somewhat modified by his colleagues, seemed to satisfy all but the most belligerent Northern Whigs. According to this decision, California was proclaimed to be a free state within the Union; the rest of the land received from Mexico was divided between New Mexico and Utah without mentioning their status as slave or free territories (Fortaleza 3).
The part of New Mexico that Texas claimed was transferred to the latter because it was paid $ 10 million. The mechanisms for catching and returning fugitive slaves to their original owners were subject to tightening, and the slave trade was prohibited in the metropolitan District of Columbia.
Discussion and approval of this compromise solution took place simultaneously with adopting the more stringent Fugitive Slave Act, which strengthened the previous legislation and gave the federal government almost unlimited rights to capture escaped slaves. The fugitive slave was deprived of his usual legal rights, particularly the right to review his case in court and to a jury (Maizlish 31). Under this law, anyone hiding or assisting a fugitive slave was punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or damages.
However, the resistance was shown by the African American northerners, often in a rather severe form, and the actions of many northern communities and states nullified the practical application of this law. Northern communities of free blacks provided shelters and organized special guard committees to protect slaves fleeing from the South from the paid agents of slave owners flooding the north’s states. In many northern states, armed clashes took place between abolitionists and agents of the slave owners, sent there to find and capture the fugitives.
The acceptance of a compromise is called the central event in American history in the 1950s. The new act overshadowed other accomplishments of the Fillmore administration, such as the approval of federal appropriations for the construction of railways, previously carried out only on state budget funds, and in the field of foreign policy. Clayton-Bulwer Treaty on the status of the planned construction of the channel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (Carriere 692).
In 1854, a treaty of peace, friendship, and trade with Japan, which was extremely beneficial for the United States, was concluded, and four years later, diplomatic relations were established with her (Carriere 692). The adoption of this bill formally abolished slavery; however, it did not solve disagreements between the northern and southern regions.
The Compromise of 1850 gave the country a temporary respite but did not and could not solve slavery. Moreover, it became evidence of the US political leadership’s inability to contain the further division of the country. Its adoption helped to strengthen the influence of the slave states on political and economic life.
No attempts by individual slave owners to “catch” their slaves in the northern states met with residents’ resistance. This included physical reprisals against their persecutors and the initiation of legal proceedings against them on charges of kidnapping and illegal imprisonment. Secret roads continued to function in the country. Northerners continued to help runaway black slaves travel to the northern states, Canada, the West Indies, Haiti or Liberia, to the distant African continent.
After the conclusion of the Compromise of 1850, about 15 thousand free black people immigrated there (Maizlish 19). The profound economic and social crisis between the northern and southern states continued to deepen. Peaceful solutions to escalating the conflict lacked due to Northerners’ and Southerners’ different labor approaches, which led to the Civil War outbreak.
Works Cited
Carriere, Marius. “Review of A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War, by Stephen E. Maizlish”. Journal of Southern History, vol. 85 no. 3, 2019, pp. 691-692. Project MUSE. Web.
Fortaleza Klinger, Julius Nathan. “Road to the Civil War: The Missouri Compromise”. Perceptions, vol. 4, no. 2, 2018, pp.1-5. Web.
Maizlish, Stephen E. A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
Piqueras, José Antonio, et al. Slavery and Historical Capitalism During the Nineteenth Century. Lexington Books, 2017.