Exam 14: The Impending Crisis

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Cuba

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When Zachary Taylor took office in 1849, California, brimming with new settlers driven by the gold rush, applied for statehood. However, the major concern was if it would enter as a free or a slave state. Either way, its statehood was destined to upset the balance between free and slave states that had held since the Missouri Compromise of 1820.To allay these fears, Henry Clay, author of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and now a powerful senator, stepped forward with yet another compromise. In January 1850, Clay proposed a five-part bill, which came to be called the Compromise of 1850.The Compromise of 1850 included five key components:1. California would be admitted to the Union as a free state.2. The remaining land won during the Mexican-American War would be divided into two new territories, New Mexico and Utah, and would remain open to slavery until they became states, at which time the state legislatures could vote on the issue.3. To mollify antislavery northerners, the slave trade (but not slavery itself)would be banned in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C.4. Texas would relinquish its claim to land that extended all the way to Santa Fe, which would become part of New Mexico (these parts of New Mexico would be called "little Texas"), and in return receive $10 million in compensation.5. For southerners, the federal government would create and enforce a new and tougher Fugitive Slave Law. By punishing white northerners who helped slaves escape from the South, the measure sought to ensure that the North and the South would cooperate in protecting the slave system.The compromise contained elements to appeal to both sides, but it also set off a storm of political controversy. Opposed by hardliners on both sides of the slave-state issue, the compromise gave rise to the first focused talk of secession in the South. This alarmed President Taylor so much that he decided to oppose the compromise altogether. Months of impassioned arguments for and against the compromise went on in Congress. The debates marked the last time that the great triumvirate of powerful senators, Clay, Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, would discuss the nation's fate with their formidable oratorical skills. Clay and Webster allied in favor of the compromise, and Webster's "Seventh of March" speech rallied northern opinion for the compromise. On the opposite side, Calhoun, dying of tuberculosis, watched his friend James Mason deliver Calhoun's last speech in the Senate against the proposed compromise. But the compromise remained in limbo.