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The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War...
Compromise of 1850, in U.S. history, a series of measures proposed by the ‘great compromiser,’ Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and passed by Congress in an effort to settle several outstanding slavery issues and to avert the threat of dissolution of the Union.
The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that temporarily defused tensions between slave and free states in the years leading up to the American Civil War.
The Compromise of 1850 consists of five laws passed in September of 1850 that dealt with the issue of slavery and territorial expansion. In 1849 California requested permission to enter the Union as a free state, potentially upsetting the balance between the free and slave states in the U.S. Senate.
Congress faced with the large acquisition of territory from the Mexican American War needed a drastic compromise. The Compromise of 1850 was Henry Clay and later Congress’s solution to the problem.
The bills provided for slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty in the admission of new states, prohibited the slave trade in the District of Columbia, settled a Texas boundary dispute, and established a stricter fugitive slave act. By 1850 sectional disagreements related to slavery were straining the bonds of union between the North and South.
The Compromise of 1850 attempted to relieve those tensions, but many in the North felt the South's demands were unreasonable, especilly the hated Fugitive Slave Act, requiring northerners to return fugitives escaping enslavement in the South, and criminalizing any attempt to assist them.