America’s Great Debate: Clay, Douglas & the Compromise that Preserved the Union

The Compromise of 1850 began in 1849 with the newly acquired California wishing to be admitted as a free state. This admittance, much like the earlier application of Missouri, would upset the balance of slave and free state representatives in Congress. To resolve the issue, Clay created a series of resolutions he wished to be adopted by Congress. After seven months of debate in the Senate, his legislative package was voted down.

John C. Calhoun was too ill to deliver his speech on Clay’s Compromise himself, so it was read by another senator with Calhoun present in the Senate Chamber. Calhoun, so ill he had to be helped out of the Chamber after the speech by two of his friends, died on March 31, Calhoun warns the Senate that it must take measures to ensure the Southerners can remain in the union "with their honor and their safety" intact.

Webster viewed slavery as a matter of historical reality rather than moral principle. He argued that the issue of its existence in the territories had been settled long ago when Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and divided regions into slave and free in the 1820 Missouri Compromise. He believed that slavery where it existed could not be eradicated but also that it could not take root in the newly acquired agriculturally barren lands of the southwest.

William Henry Seward delivered a speech that he called "Freedom in the New Territories." Southern extremists argued that the Constitution alone provided sufficient authority for the extension of slavery to the territories. Seward acknowledged that the Constitution's framers had recognized the existence of slavery and protected it where it existed, but the new territory was governed by a "higher law than the Constitution" -- a moral law established by "the Creator of the universe." He warned the South that slavery was doomed and that secession from the Union would be futile.

The Compromise of 1850, a series of five statues shepherded to passage by Stephen A. Douglas, was approved in September. This Compromise: called for the admittance of California as a free state, set the present boundaries for Texas, allowed the territories of New Mexico and Utah to be organized on the basis of popular sovereignty, strengthened the fugitive slave law, abolished the slave trade in Washington D.C. Such provisions directly contradicted certain tenets of the Missouri Compromise, resulting in discontent among many northerners.

This map shows how the United States had become a nation containing two, rival social and economic systems by In 1850 the Congress, led by Stephen Douglas of Illinois, hammered out a convoluted compromise legislation that promised to ease the mounting political tensions between the two sections. But Douglas' drive to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories west of Iowa and Missouri for statehood only reopened the sections' competition for political primacy. The question remained: Would the new states of Kansas and Nebraska allow slavery, or ban it? This issue brought Abraham Lincoln from political retirement and helped to organize the new Republican Party.

“Calhoun’s monument … is the desolated, ruined south; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty destroyed or maim’d; all the old families used up — the rich impoverish’d, the plantations cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of southerner blacken’d with every shame – all that is Calhoun's real monument.” – Walt Whitman

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