Compromise of 1850

Senator Henry Clay's so-called "omnibus" proposal in late January 1850 to find a national accommodation over a variety of sectional issues plaguing the nation ultimately did lead to a compromise of sorts in September of that year. The compromise failed to settle any major arguments but did allow for a series of legislative agreements, including the admission of California as a free state and the passage of a tougher federal fugitive slave law that temporarily quieted the national debate over slavery. (By Matthew Pinsker)

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    Hodder, Frank Heywood. "The Authorship of the Compromise of 1850." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22, no. 4 (1936): 525-536. View Record
    Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: W W Norton & Company, 1983. View Record
    Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. View Record
    Huston, James L. "Southerners Against Secession: The Arguments of the Constitutional Unionists in 1850-51." Civil War History 46, no. 4 (2000): 281-299. View Record
    Lee, R. Alton. "Slavery and the Oregon Territorial Issue: Prelude to the Compromise of 1850." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1973): 112-119. View Record
    Parks, Joseph H. “John Bell and the Compromise of 1850.” Journal of Southern History 9 (August 1943): 328-356. View Record
    Smith, Earl. "William Cooper Nell on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850." Journal of Negro History 66 (1981): 37-40. View Record
    Stegmaier, Mark J. “Zachary Taylor Versus The South.” Civil War History 33, no. 3 (1987): 219-241. View Record
    Varon, Elizabeth R. Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. View Record
    How to Cite This Page: "Compromise of 1850," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/9584.