does anyone know about the compromise of 1850?

Answer 1

The Compromise of 1850 (also called the Pearce Act) was a series of Congressional legislative actions to regulate the spread of slavery in the territories acquired during the Mexican-American War (1846–48). In five laws balancing the interests of the slaveholding states of the American South and the free states, California was admitted as a free state, Texas received financial compensation for relinquishing claim to lands east of the Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico, the United States territory of New Mexico (including present-day Arizona and Utah) was organized without any specific prohibition of slavery, the slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished in Washington, D.C., and the stringent Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves.

The measures, brokered largely by Stephen Douglas, with support from United States Senate luminaries Henry Clay, known to American history as "The Great Compromiser," and Daniel Webster, one of the United States' most famous orators, with the influence of the Fillmore Administration (and opposition of the Taylor Administration), temporarily defused sectional tensions in the United States, postponing the secession crisis and the American Civil War. However, it repudiated the oft proposed Wilmot Proviso, which if enacted would have banned slavery in Federal territories or at least those acquired from the Mexican-American War. The Compromise further endorsed the doctrine of "Popular Sovereignty" for the New Mexico Territory. The various compromises lessened political contention for four years, until the relative lull was shattered by the divisive Kansas-Nebraska Act.