What Was The Basis For The Compromise Of 1850

For a long time many northerners were opposed to the idea of slavery. To the north slavery was morally wrong. It wasn’t that they felt that they were equal humans because many northerners were still racist, but the slaves were taking away jobs that could be used a paying jobs for whites. The people up North especially felt that the immigrants coming in could go south and use the jobs on the plantations and stay away from their northern factory jobs. Another big debate which made the north dislike slavery was that whenever a new territory was acquired the southern slave’s states would want it to expand slavery while the north wanted it to expand their businesses. The north not being big cash crop farmers did not have the need for owning slaves.

California after the Mexican American War and established its government and applied for American statehood. There were debates on the lands acquired from the Mexican American War. Many disputes on the professionalism of our capital were bring had. Runaway slaves were not being returned. All these issues were the basis for the Compromise of 1850. Congress was facing many issues at one time so Henry Clay takes the opportunity to step up and creates the compromise. It addresses all the issues that congress is dealing with and on January 29 1850 he presents his creation to Congress. The four major issues facing the nation at this time were California’s admittance to America and if it would be a free state or a slave state, the border issue of New Mexico, the northerners claim that there should be no more slavery in the capital, and the issues that runaway slaves were not being returned because of the weak fugitive slave law. The bill proposed that California is admitted as a free state and the rest of congresses session they will be mute on topic of slavery. Next the federal government will pay Texas 10 million dollars for the debt it owed because it did not get the land. After it ended slave trade in the capital but not slavery itself, it just prohibited the selling of slaves. Finally it stated that congress will not regulate interstate trade and it will issue a very strict fugitive slave

It was proposed by Stephen A. Douglas–Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the influential Lincoln-Douglas debates–the bill overturned the Missouri Compromise’s use of 36°30’ line as the boundary between slave and free territory. This was Douglas’s effort to bring Nebraska into the union and paved way for the north to make a transcontinental railroad. By the time Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861 after an internal civil war, southern states had begun to secede from the Union. The conflicts that arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage led to the period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, and helped paved the way for the American Civil War