Compromises, Fugitive Slave Law & Kansas · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Five bills that did not add up to one

The Compromise of 1850 did five things. California entered as a free state. Utah and New Mexico territories were organised with the slavery question left to their settlers. The public slave trade in Washington, DC was abolished, though holding people there remained legal. Texas gave up its claim to a large piece of New Mexico and the federal government assumed ten million dollars of Texan debt. And a far harsher fugitive slave law replaced the weak one of 1793.

Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun made their last great speeches on it; Calhoun, too ill to stand, had his read aloud for him and died within a month. Webster backed the compromise including the fugitive law, and his reputation in Massachusetts never recovered.

Douglas's procedural trick deserves attention. By splitting the package, he let northern members vote for California and abstain on the fugitive law, and southern members do the reverse. Each bill passed; no coalition ever supported the whole settlement; and so the settlement had no constituency willing to defend it when it came under strain.

It bought four years. Measured against what came after, that is not nothing, and some historians argue the delay mattered because the North grew faster than the South in those years. It is also the last time the old method worked at all.

Part 2 · The law that came north

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is worth reading closely because its details explain the reaction. An accused person could not testify in their own defence and got no jury. The case was heard by a federal commissioner who was paid ten dollars if he ruled for the claimant and five dollars if he ruled for the accused. Any citizen could be deputised into a posse and fined or jailed for refusing.

Every one of those provisions was a gift to the abolitionists. A tribunal that pays the judge double for one verdict is not a court anybody can defend, and free Black northerners now faced being seized on an affidavit and shipped south with no way to answer. Thousands left for Canada in the following months.

The enforcement cases made the point in public. When Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston in 1854, it took federal troops and artillery to walk one man to the harbour through a crowd of thousands, at a cost to the government of around forty thousand dollars; Burns was marched past buildings hung with black cloth. Boston had voted for the compromise; Boston watched this and changed its mind.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote *Uncle Tom's Cabin* in direct response, serialised from 1851 and published as a book in 1852. It sold around 300,000 copies in its first year in a country of 23 million, and was staged in theatres for decades. Its sentimentality is easy to mock and its portrait of Black character has been criticised ever since, but it did what no pamphlet had: it made slavery a story about families to readers who had never thought about it.

Part 3 · Kansas-Nebraska and what popular sovereignty meant

In 1854 Douglas introduced a bill organising Nebraska and Kansas territories on popular sovereignty: the settlers would vote on slavery themselves. Both lay above the 36 degrees 30 minutes line, so the bill explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise. Douglas wanted a transcontinental railroad routed through Chicago and needed southern votes for it.

It passed, and it destroyed his party. Northern Democrats were wiped out in the next elections, the Whig Party collapsed entirely, and in 1854 the Republican Party was founded on a single plank: no slavery in the territories. A thirty-four-year settlement had been repealed to get a railroad.

In Kansas, popular sovereignty meant whoever showed up. Thousands of Missourians crossed the border to vote illegally in the 1855 election, electing a legislature that promptly made it a crime to argue against slavery; free-state settlers set up a rival government at Topeka. In May 1856 a proslavery posse sacked the town of Lawrence, and days later John Brown and his sons killed five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek with broadswords.

The violence reached Congress in the same month. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech insulting South Carolina, and Representative Preston Brooks walked onto the Senate floor and beat him with a cane until it broke, injuring him so badly he could not return for three years. Southern admirers mailed Brooks replacement canes. By 1856 the two sections could not be relied on to argue with words.

Part 4 · Why compromise stopped working

Compromise requires something divisible. Money, land and offices can be split; the 1820 line split the map and the 1850 bargain split a package of unrelated favours. What could not be split was whether a person is property, and every arrangement worked only by avoiding that question rather than answering it.

Each round also raised the stakes. In 1820 the argument was over one state; by 1850 it was over a region the size of western Europe; by 1854 the previous settlement itself was on the table, which told both sides that nothing agreed was safe.

The 1850 law added the decisive new element: personal implication. A northerner could support the Missouri Compromise and never think about slavery again, because it happened elsewhere. After 1850 it happened in their own courthouse and could require their own hands, and people who have been made complicit tend not to stay moderate.

By the end of 1856 the party system that had absorbed sectional conflict for twenty years was gone. The Whigs were dead, the Democrats were a southern party with a shrinking northern wing, and a party that existed only in the North had come second in a presidential election at its first attempt. The next lesson is about what happened when it came first.

One habit is worth carrying out of this lesson. When a settlement is described as a compromise, ask who had to give up something they considered a matter of right rather than a matter of interest. Interests can be traded and split; rights cannot, and a bargain that asks someone to trade one will hold only as long as nobody tests it.