Compromising Peace

Although the Mexicans had lost an empire in the American Southwest, they may have enjoyed watching the victors fight over the spoils of war - and fight they did.  Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania attached an amendment to a bill in 1846 to bar slavery from any new territory acquired from Mexico.  The Wilmot Proviso failed both times in the Senate, but the nation was in an uproar.  Without compromise, the new territories would remain in judicial limbo, and compromise didn't seem possible.

Southerners in Congress muttered threats of succession, northerners weren't going to allow slavery west of the Mississippi under any law.  Debates raged for two years.  Henry Clay of Kentucky, known in history as the "Great Compromiser" gave one of his last speeches in Congress in 1850.  He proposed, along with Stephen Douglas of Illinois, that California be admitted as a free state and that the residents of the rest of the new territories decide for themselves whether to be a free or slave state.  Along with that,  harsher fugitive slave laws were enacted and Washington, DC was left as a slave district, although slave trade was no longer legal.

The Compromise of 1850, as it is recorded in the history books, left the slave problem unresolved in most of the West, but Congress, and even a few anti-slave advocates like Daniel Webster, supported it to save the Union.  The slavery question was far from settled and it was a time of polarization in the United States in the 1850s.

Next time - the Gadsen Purchase
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Today in Pioneer History:  On May 11, 1934, a massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta.