California, a state rich in natural resources with a long coastline, was a very ideal piece of land to many. As such, when America gained California, there was conflict over how it should be admitted into the union. The 36 30 line meant to dictate which slaves were slave or free split California in half. Eventually, California was admitted as a free state in the Great Compromise of 1850. This compromise allowed California to be admitted as a free state while also revising the Fugitive Slave Act, which now required US citizens to aid slaveholders by reporting all runaway slaves. The Great Compromise proved that the Missouri Compromise did not consider all situations, with the 36 30 parrelell being useless in the case of California. Without properly …show more content…
Therefore, western expansion was an important contriution to growing sectional tensions between the North and South from 1800 to 1850 because while events like the MIssouri Compromise of 1820 and the Great Compromise of 1850 attempted to create a fair and balanced way to admit free and slave states, the North and South would still have underlying tensions due to the contsraints within the compromises and their incredibly different ideologies regarding slavery.
Furthermore, western expansion was an essential contriution to growing sectional tensions between the North and South from 1800 to 1850 as rapid expansion increased economic and cultural tensions between the North and South, creating a divide between the two regions. In the early 19th century, the South was extremely economically proftiable. The vast majority of this profit came from the cash crop cotton. The South believed in the "King Cotton" ideology, believing that cotton was a superior crop and creating large plantations to farm cotton was essential to economic growth. Inventions like Eli Whitneys' Cotton Gin also greatly contributed to cotton's success in the South, along with their accesibility to cheap labor through the