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Compromise Of 1850

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Most people say that slavery is the biggest and main cause of the Civil War, and they would be correct, but there are many other causes as well. Looking deeper into many of the options that were the big causes of the Civil War, one of the biggest was The Compromise of 1850. This is one of the main causes of the Civil War, along with slavery. The Compromise of 1850 happened when California entered as a free state and southerners were unhappy. The area from the Mexico Cession was divided into Utah & New Mexico. Where the slavery issue was to be decided by popular sovereignty. The Compromise of 1850 also ended the slave trade in Washington D.C. along with making a very strict fugitive slave law. Doing this, it settled the border problems between New Mexico & Texas with …show more content…

The Fugitive Slavery Law was very strict and it strongly required citizens to catch runaway slaves that was passed on September 18, 1850. If a person does not comply and is caught as a slave, they can be fined up to $1,000 or put in jail for 6 months. In addition to the law, judges received $10 if they returned a slave to their plantation and $5 if they freed the slave. Northerns also greatly hated this law because it forced them to participate in the system of slavery. Many blacks who were free got captured and sent back to slavery, even if they had been living in a free state for multiple years. One final important event in the war was the attack on Fort Sumter. The attack occurred on April 12, 1861, in Charleston Harbor at 4:30 am. This attack officially marked the beginning of the civil war. A war lasting 4 years, killing 620,000 Americans and freeing up to 3.9 million enslaved African Americans. It began with Confederate troops firing the first shots upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina. P. G. T. Beauregard leads his army to attack Robert Anderson. Anderson soon had to surrender the fort to the Confederate army on April 14,

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