AP® United States History review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/us-history/units/5/5-4)
Unit 5 · Topic 5.4
5.4 The Compromise of 1850
When California asked to join the Union as a free state in 1849, it threatened the balance between free and slave states and set off a national crisis. The Compromise of 1850 settled it for the moment, but its new Fugitive Slave Act angered many Northerners and pulled them into the conflict over slavery.
Key terms
- Compromise of 1850
- popular sovereignty
- Fugitive Slave Act
- Stephen Douglas
- Free-Soil Party
See it on a map: 1848: The Mexican Cession · 1850: The Compromise of 1850 · Today: Fifty states
The crisis
The Gold Rush filled California so fast that it skipped the territorial stage and applied directly for statehood as a free state in 1849. At the time there were fifteen free and fifteen slave states. Admitting California would give free states a majority in the Senate, the one place where the South had equal power.
Other issues piled on: the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican Cession, a border dispute between Texas (a slave state) and New Mexico Territory, Northern anger at the slave trade in the nation's capital, and Southern anger that Northerners were not returning people who escaped slavery. Some Southern leaders talked openly of secession.
The great debate of 1850
Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed a set of compromises. In a famous debate, John C. Calhoun, near death, warned that the South would leave the Union unless its rights, including slavery in the territories, were guaranteed. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts backed compromise to save the Union, angering abolitionists. William Seward of New York argued that a 'higher law' than the Constitution, God's moral law, forbade slavery's expansion.
Clay's package, bundled together in one bill, failed. President Zachary Taylor, who opposed it, died in July 1850, and the new president, Millard Fillmore, supported compromise. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois then split the package into separate bills and assembled different majorities for each. They passed in September 1850.
What the Compromise did
| Provision | Who it pleased |
|---|---|
| California admitted as a free state | North |
| New Mexico and Utah organized as territories, with slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty | Seen as a concession to the South, since slavery was not banned |
| Texas gave up its claim to part of New Mexico; the federal government took over $10 million of Texas's debt | Texas and its creditors |
| Slave trade (but not slavery) abolished in Washington, D.C. | North |
| A strict new Fugitive Slave Act | South |
The Fugitive Slave Act
The new law put the federal government behind the capture of people who had escaped slavery. Federal commissioners decided cases without a jury, and the accused person could not testify. Commissioners received $10 if they returned the person to the claimant and $5 if they set the person free. Ordinary citizens could be required to help with captures, and anyone who aided an escape faced a fine of up to $1,000 and six months in jail.
Free Black Northerners could be kidnapped and enslaved with little defense, and thousands fled to Canada. Many Northerners who had ignored slavery now saw it reach into their own communities. Crowds rescued captured people in Boston and Syracuse in 1851, and some Northern states passed personal liberty laws to obstruct the act. When Anthony Burns was returned to slavery from Boston in 1854, it took federal troops and a cost of thousands of dollars to do it.
The Free-Soil Party, formed in 1848, kept pressing to keep slavery out of the territories, and the act's harshness helped build the antislavery coalition that later formed the Republican Party.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Evaluating a compromise
Short-answer practice: Briefly explain ONE way the Compromise of 1850 increased sectional tension rather than reducing it.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Pick a provision that backfired.
- Step 2: Explain how it affected one section.
- Step 3: Show how that reaction deepened the conflict.
Answer: Model answer: The Compromise of 1850 included a strict Fugitive Slave Act that required Northerners to help capture people who had escaped slavery and denied the accused a jury trial. Seeing people seized in their own cities, such as Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854, turned many previously indifferent Northerners against slavery, leading to rescues, personal liberty laws and growing support for antislavery politics.
Common mistakes
- Saying the Compromise of 1850 abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. It banned only the slave trade there; slavery itself was abolished in the capital in 1862.
- Confusing popular sovereignty in New Mexico and Utah (1850) with the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854), which applied popular sovereignty to land north of 36°30′.
- Assuming the Fugitive Slave Act helped the South in the long run. It pushed many Northerners toward antislavery views.
On the exam
- The Compromise of 1850 is a classic example of a compromise that delayed but did not prevent conflict. Know its terms and its unintended effects.
- Expect sources from the 1850 debate (Calhoun, Webster, Seward) or from Northern protests against the Fugitive Slave Act.
Connected topics
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Check yourself
4 questions on 5.4 The Compromise of 1850. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Which provision of the Compromise of 1850 caused the most anger in the North?
"Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted."
Source: Amendment proposed by Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania to a bill funding negotiations with Mexico, August 1846.
Which of the following political developments grew most directly out of support for the principle in the proviso?
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. . . .
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction."
Source: Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, adopted by the South Carolina secession convention, December 24, 1860.
The laws described in the first paragraph were most likely passed by Northern states in response to
"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity . . . ."
"By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon's line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. . . . An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so."
Source: Frederick Douglass, abolitionist speaker and editor who had escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, speech to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852.
Douglass says the act described in the second paragraph made slavery "an institution of the whole United States" mainly because the law
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