Compromise Measures of 1850

Compromise Measures of 1850 or Compromise of 1850, series of five legislative enactments, passed by the U.S. Congress during August and September 1850. These measures, essentially the work of Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, were designed to reconcile the political differences then dividing the antislavery and proslavery factions of Congress and the nation. The measures, sometimes referred to collectively as the Omnibus Bill, dealt chiefly with the question of whether slavery was to be sanctioned or prohibited in the regions acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican War. Two of the five measures represented concessions by the South to the North, authorizing abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and admission of California as a free state. The third bill, a substantial concession to the South, was the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which provided for the return of runaway slaves to their masters; the subsequent enforcement of this law was bitterly opposed by the abolitionists, who obtained broad popular support on this issue in the North. By the terms of the fourth measure, the territory east of California ceded to the United States by Mexico was divided into the territories of New Mexico (now New Mexico and Arizona) and Utah, and they were opened to settlement by both slaveholders and antislavery settlers. This measure superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The fifth measure provided that Texas, already in the Union as a slave state, be awarded $10 million in settlement of claims to adjoining territory, further strengthening the South. The compromise measures resulted in a gradual intensification of the hostility between the slave and free states. See also Clay, Henry; Fugitive Slave Laws; Kansas-Nebraska Act.