How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [101]
The Lincoln-Douglas debates, stripped of their backhanded compliments and oratorical ornaments, were about slavery. More precisely, they were about Douglas’s record in the U.S. Senate regarding slavery: his coauthorship of the Compromise of 1850 and sole authorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Today these laws are mainly names memorized for tests. Back then they tested the nation’s ability to survive. The Compromise of 1850 created a crack in America’s largest political dam; the Kansas-Nebraska Act caused the dam to collapse.
That dam was the Missouri Compromise, enacted in 1820 to settle the slavery disputes that had flared anew after the Louisiana Purchase. It stipulated that no new state or territory north of 36°30’ could have slavery, with the exception of Missouri. It blocked the conflict well enough for the Louisiana Purchase, and even when Texas later joined the nation. But after the vast acquisition of lands in the Mexican War, the South could see that continuing the dividing line at 36°30 would no longer maintain parity between free states and slave states. Added to the South’s concerns were California (filled with gold) and New Mexico (filled with Mexicans). These three issues created an explosive political mix.
Slave and free states, 1848
California had organized its own boundaries without waiting for congressional authorization—boundaries so large that they crossed the Missouri Compromise line. But Congress had yet to vote on whether or not to accept those boundaries.
The region now known as New Mexico was populated by people who had not sought to join the United States. Minimizing their potential animosity was crucial, since their population was centered in Santa Fe, easily accessible to Mexico. The Polk administration assured the region’s residents that, unless their local laws violated the Constitution, their laws would remain in force. Their laws prohibited slavery.
Both the events in California and the emerging territory of New Mexico raised hopes in the North and caused alarms in the South. A new level of intensity infused editorials in Southern newspapers. “It was to be hoped that the rapacity of the … North would have been satisfied with having monopolized the whole of California,” Georgia’s Savannah Morning News commented, “and that for the sake of appearances at least, they would for a time have abstained from any interference with the territory lying contiguous to, and belonging to, the slave states.”
Stephen Douglas was now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, which had responsibilities for proposing where territorial boundaries would be located and for structuring territorial governments. If his committee chose to deviate from the Missouri Compromise, it could send such legislation to the Senate floor. Because the Missouri Compromise was the lynchpin in the dispute over slavery in new territories, Chairman Douglas was sitting in a highly precarious chair. It was the chair in which he most wanted to sit; if he could sufficiently satisfy both North and South, his chances of winning the presidency would be greatly enhanced.
He sought to achieve that goal through the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills dealing with California statehood, the creation of the New Mexico Territory, the Texas-New Mexico boundary, slave trade in the District of Columbia, and fugitive slaves. Taken together, they were designed to counterbalance each other in terms of the slavery dispute.
Douglas himself wrote the bills involving New Mexico. In his Texas-New Mexico boundary bill, the United States purchased land from Texas (still greatly in debt from its years as a republic) and annexed that land to New Mexico. In his bill creating the New Mexico Territory, its citizens were allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to permit slavery. The same choice was also given to California. The Missouri Compromise