Finally, Senator Stephen Douglas proposed a plan to unify the North and South. His idea was to divide Clay's plan into a series of bills. Members of Congress could vote for the bills they approved and not vote for the bills they opposed. The new laws, known as the Compromise of 1850, were passed by Congress. Many people thought that the compromise would settle the issue of slavery. It did prevent a war-- but only for ten years.

In 1848 two prominent moral reformers and advocates of women's rights, Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia Quaker, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of Troy Seminary who refused to be merely "a household drudge,” decided to call a convention to discuss "the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” The hastily organized Seneca Falls convention, the first of its kind, issued on July 19, 1848, a clever paraphrase of Jefferson's Declaration, the Declaration of Sentiments, mainly the work of Mrs.