Compromise Measures of 1850 or the Compromise
of 1850, was a series of five legislative enactments, passed
by the U.S. Congress during August and September 1850. These
measures, essentially the work of Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky,
were designed to reconcile the political differences then dividing
the antislavery and proslavery factions of Congress and the nation.
The measures, sometimes referred to collectively as the Omnibus
Bill, dealt chiefly with the question of whether slavery was
to be sanctioned or prohibited in the regions acquired from Mexico
as a result of the Mexican War.
Two of the five measures represented concessions by
the South to the North, authorizing abolition of the slave trade
in the District of Columbia and admission of California as a
free state.
The third bill, a substantial concession to the South,
was the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850*, which provided for
the return of runaway slaves to their masters; the subsequent
enforcement of this law was bitterly opposed by the abolitionists,
who obtained broad popular support on this issue in the North.
By the terms of the fourth measure, the territory
east of California ceded to the United States by Mexico was divided
into the territories of New Mexico (now New Mexico and Arizona)
and Utah, and they were opened to settlement by both slaveholders
and antislavery settlers. This measure superseded the Missouri
Compromise of 1820.
The fifth measure provided that Texas, already in
the Union as a slave state, be awarded $10 million in settlement
of claims to adjoining territory, further strengthening the South.
The compromise measures resulted in a gradual intensification
of the hostility between the slave and free states.
*Fugitive Slave Laws were acts passed by the
United States Congress in 1793 and 1850, which were intended
to facilitate the recapture and extradition of runaway slaves
and to commit the federal government to the legitimacy of holding
property in slaves. Both laws ultimately provoked dissatisfaction
and rancor throughout the country.
Northerners questioned the laws' infringements on
civil liberty and deplored the national character they lent to
the South's institution. Southerners complained that the laws
were circumvented both because of legal deficiencies (especially
the law of 1793) and growing popular hostility to enforcement.
The controversy grew with the Republic itself.
Northern Resistence to the
Laws
Owing to northern resentments, the acts of 1793 and
1850 faced legal challenges, primarily in the form of jurisdictional
disputes over state personal liberty laws. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania
(1842), the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against a Pennsylvania
citizenship statute and upheld the first fugitive slave law's
constitutionality. Nevertheless, some states continued to pass
laws strengthening the applicability of habeas corpus writs and
prohibiting state officials from accepting jurisdiction under
federal law.
In Ohio, the chief objective was less a desire to
expand black rights than to ensure that outright kidnapping was
not condoned. (Ohio did not repeal its virulently discriminatory
Black Code until 1849.) Southerners objected strenuously to personal
liberty laws as a violation of sectional equity and reciprocal
trust; but the 1850 act, seen in the North as punitive and tyrannical,
only aroused greater sectional animosities. Northern opposition
was most dramatically illustrated when an abolitionist Boston
mob tried to rescue Anthony Burns, a fugitive from Virginia,
in May 1854. The mission failed. Commissioner Edward Loring had
Burns remanded to slavery, and U.S. troops escorted him through
sullen crowds to a waiting ship. The effort cost the federal
government more than $100,000.
The legal conflict that pitted northern personal liberty
statutes against federal fugitive slave measures reflected the
concepts of double sovereignty that citizens of the federated
Union then entertained. Southerners insisted on the sovereignty
of the states, but in this controversy northerners "nullified"
unwelcome federal laws. Although the constitutionality of the
fugitive slave laws was unquestioned, only the force of arms
could finally define the nature of the Union, its source of authority,
and the boundaries of liberty. |
