With the nation facing the potential threat of disunion over the passage of the Compromise of 1850, Georgia, in a special state convention, adopted a proclamation called the Georgia Platform. The act was instrumental in averting a national crisis. Slavery had been at the core of sectional tensions between the North and South. New territorial gains, westward expansion, and the hardening of regional attitudes toward the spread of slavery provoked a potential crisis of the Union, which in many ways portended the tragic events of the 1860s. In 1850, however, compromise and conciliation remained viable alternatives to secession and war. There were many southerners in the decades before the Civil War(1861-65) who preferred disunion over any concessions