History of the United States I / Unit 14 USH1 1960 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Five Bills, Five Majorities
The idea
Henry Clay proposed a single omnibus resolving four interlocking questions: admit California free, reject the Wilmot Proviso for the rest of the Mexican Cession, fix the New Mexico and Texas boundary so Texas could not expand, pay Texas's republic-era debts, and end the slave trade but not slavery in the capital while strengthening federal fugitive slave law. The omnibus failed. After eight months of deadlock Stephen Douglas of Illinois took the package apart and pushed through five separate bills. The first was a Fugitive Slave Act offering federal bounties to slave-catchers. The second admitted California as a free state. The third settled the boundary in New Mexico's favour and paid the Texas debts. The fourth banned the slave trade in Washington while slavery itself continued there. The fifth applied popular sovereignty to territorial slavery, which meant Congress declining to decide. Most Americans believed the Union had been saved by the settlement.
In practice
A compromise assembled from five different majorities, so that no member of Congress ever had to vote for the whole of it, and none did.
Where people slip
This is the twin for the entry and it changes what the Compromise of 1850 was. A student who pictures a grand bargain, argued out and then accepted by a majority persuaded of it, has the wrong object in mind. The Compromise of 1850 was never passed by a majority that supported it. Douglas found that a package nobody would swallow whole could be swallowed in pieces, because a northerner could vote for California and against the Fugitive Slave Act while a southerner did the reverse. That is a procedural achievement rather than a political settlement, and it explains why the agreement held for four years and then failed the moment anyone reopened it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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