Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 22: The Compromise of 1850

I want to give some attention to the Compromise of 1850 in this year’s “heritage” posts.

That compromise provided a stopgap solution to the problems raised by the theft of one-third of Mexico’s land, including Texas and California, in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. In those days, seizure of the territories of neighboring countries was standard operating practice for the US. Lots of slaveowners were hot for the annexation of Cuba back then, too.

The evil spirit of American history, John C. Calhoun, was still in the Senate then. He wanted all of the newly-seized territory to be open for slavery. Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay came up with a package of compromises, which Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois (of the Lincoln-Douglas debates fame) steered through Congress. Michael Woods summarizes its provisions this way:

The compromise admitted the free state of California; organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah under the slippery principle of popular sovereignty; reduced Texas’s size but promised to pay its massive debt; restricted the sale, though not the ownership, of enslaved people in Washington, D.C.; and established a draconian Fugitive Slave Act, which made recovery of alleged runaways a federal priority. (1) [my emphasis]

This situation was a major advance for the Slave Power in the South. More slave states had been added to the list. The slave state/free state balance in the Senate was still intact. But the writing was on the wall. The slave states intended to increase their power until they became dominant in the national government.

The Fugitive Slave Act was seen by many in the free states as making them even more complicit in what they viewed as the evil institution of slavery. It also trampled on the “states rights” of the free states. In fact, this was part of a series of efforts by the slave states to override the rights of free states. It was only after Lincoln was democratically elected to the Presidency in 1860 that the slave states suddenly became obsessed again with state sovereignty over federal. The Nullification Controversy of 1832 had been a trial run by the South for this approach.

The phrase “popular sovereignty” was a euphemism for allowing territories to decide themselves by popular vote (among white men, of course) whether they should enter the Union as a slave or free states, and Congress should defer to that choice. The practical outcome of this was displayed in the mini-civil-war in Kansas Territory later that decade, when pro- and anti-slavery forces attempted to achieve a majority in the territory to decide on the slavery issue.

Woods identifies three basic strands of thought on the Compromise of 1850: the triumph of statesmanship and moderation (at the expense of the slaves, of course); viewing the agreement as “a cowardly act of appeasement” (which it was): and, a “skeptical interpretation” that emphasizes “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence.”

The praise of the statesmanship of the compromise involves some colorful figures as major actors. But Woods politely but accurately describes Calhoun’s villainy even in the 1850 compromise this way:

Given his efforts to forge a southern political bloc and the secessionist threat embedded in his March 4 address, he fits less easily into the role of patriotic patrician. In the final volume of a massive biography, Charles W. Wiltse insisted that Calhoun remained committed to the Union. More recent interpreters view the glass as half empty: increasingly convinced that northerners would not concede to proslavery demands, Calhoun went to his grave striving to maintain the Union on southern terms while reserving secession as a last resort. From this perspective, Calhoun’s final appeal was less a plea for national unity than a sectional ultimatum. [my emphasis]

Calhoun was a defender of slavery. The only “patriotism” involved was that he would have preferred to make the entirety of the United States a safe haven for human slavery.

As Woods notes, “some historians condemn the Compromise of 1850 as a shameful capitulation to slaveholders.” It certainly was, and it only served to encourage the Slave Power to expand its pressure against democracy.

What Woods refers to as interpretations that emphasize “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence” mainly have to do with some of the larger implications it had for the American West. For instance, “the [popular sovereignty] doctrine raised a host of other questions in Utah, where Mormon leaders strove to maintain local control over issues ranging from Indian policy to polygamy.”

Notes:

(1) Woods, Michael E. (2019): The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past. Journal of the Civil War Era 9:3, 438-456. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755582>