Compromise of 1850

In US history, legislative proposals designed to resolve the conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery in the new territories. The Compromise was triggered by the request of California to be admitted to the Union as a state without slavery. Various concessions had to be made to the slavery states before California was allowed to do so. Although the Compromise failed to permanently resolve the conflict, it temporarily revitalized the Union, postponing the US Civil War for ten years.

The Compromise of 1850 was put forward by US senator Henry Clay, and debated in the Senate for nine months. It aimed to settle five questions in dispute between the proslavery and antislavery factions in the USA. It was agreed: (1) that Texas should be paid $10 million to relinquish its claim upon any portion of New Mexico; (2) that California should be admitted as a state under a constitution that prohibited slavery; (3) that New Mexico and Utah should be organized as territories without any regulation in respect of slavery, leaving it up to their settlers to vote whether there should be ownership of slaves or not; (4) that the slave trade should be prohibited from the District of Columbia, but be interfered with nowhere else by federal law; and (5) that the whole judicial and administrative machinery of the federal government should be put at the disposal of the southern slave-owners for the recovery of fugitive slaves found within the free states, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.