Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 23: More on how the Compromise of 1850 was terrible

The major provisions of the Compromise of 1850 included a resolution of issues involving the territories seized from Mexico in the war of 1846-48 (la Guerra de los Estados Unidos contra México). Three of the five major provisions of the compromise involved admitting California to the Union as a free state, setting the boundaries of Texas to exclude what became New Mexico, and organizing/establishing the territories of Utah and New Mexico with the question of slavery to be left to “popular sovereignty” in the territories.

This is a map showing the boundaries of Mexico as of 1824 (1):

A fourth element was abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia but allowing slavery itself to remain legal there. This was a cosmetic concession to remove the embarrassing presence of the buying and selling of human beings as property in the national Capital.

The fifth element was the explosive establishment of a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Law. Its provisions were drastic enough that even former slaves who had been established as free persons in free states for decades became subject to new legal proceedings to return them to bondage.

As unstable and unjust as the Compromise of 1850 was, it can be and has been argued in retrospect that it bought time for the Northern states to strengthen their economy and infrastructure enough to defeat the South in the war set off by the latter in 1861 in defense of slavery.

Frank Heywood Hodder in an article published posthumously in 1936 offered that defense of the compromise:

The defense for the Compromise lies in the f act that, had not some settlement of the outstanding questions been reached in 1850, the secession movement would certainly have been started in the South and could not have been stopped. The building of the railroa.ds in the succeeding decade changed the situation completely. Ten railroads linked the Ohio with the Great Lakes in 1860 where there had been but one in 1850. Five roads joined the Mississippi and Ohio valleys in 1860 where there was none in 1850. The result was the new alignment of the East and the West that saved the Union in the Civil War. (2)

That counterfactual judgment is speculative, of course. But it’s hard to imagine that the advantages the North had in population and industrial development would not have been at least as superior to that of the South in the early 1850s as they would become a decade later. And the North would have had American patriotism and the moral cause of fighting against slavery and the Slave Power then just as they did later.

To tease out that what-if scenario, we would also need to speculate about whether the same Southern coalition of states could have been persuaded to join a Confederacy in 1850. The polarizing experiences of the 1850s like the guerilla war in Kansas and the Dred Scott decision certainly played a polarizing role in hardening Southern resistance to freeing the slaves. The recent shared experience if the Mexican War could have made senior officers more reluctant to enter into a treasonous uprising in 1850.

We would also have to speculate whether President Millard Fillmore (he held the office 1850-1853) would have been more effective and careful in reacting to Southern attempts to secede as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860-61. That’s also speculation. But the answer there is almost certainly: No, he would not have.

But understanding potential and feasible alternative decisions and speculating on their impacts is also part of understanding the situation in which the actual decisions were made.

Notes:

(1) File:Mexico 1824. Wikimedia Commons 06/29/2015. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico_1824_(equirectangular_projection).png#filehistory> (Accessed: 2024-23-04).

(2) Hodder, Frank Haywood (1936): The Authorship of the Compromise of 1850. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22:4, 525-536. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1897319>