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The Old Senate Chamber
The Compromise of 1850
The United States might well have divided a decade before the Civil War
had the Senate not achieved the Compromise of 1850. At issue was whether
slavery would be permitted in the vast western territories the United States
had gained from the Mexican War. In February 1850, the veteran Kentucky
Whig Senator Henry Clay rose in the Senate chamber to propose an omnibus
bill admitting California as a free state, letting the people of New Mexico
decide the slavery issue there, fixing the Texas boundary, prohibiting
the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and toughening federal fugitive
slave laws. Clay hoped to prevail by offering something for everyone. The
ensuing debate produced dramatic speeches by Clay, Daniel Webster, and
the dying John C. Calhoun.
Demonstrating the level of tension on the Senate floor, Mississippi
Senator Henry S. Foote, at one point in the deliberations, pulled a pistol
against Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. "Stand out of the way, and
let the assassin fire!" Benton bellowed at the senators separating them,
but Foote was quickly disarmed and order restored in the chamber. By July,
the omnibus bill had stalled and an exhausted Clay, who had spoken some
seventy times for the compromise, left on vacation. During his absence,
the young Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas took the unwieldy bill apart
and won passage of its individual provisions. By September, the Compromise
was completed and the Union saved--for ten years more.
For further reading:
Hamilton, Holman. Prologue to Conflict: The
Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)