The Compromise of 1850 was an intricate package of five bills, passed on September 4, 1850, defusing a four-year confrontation between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North that arose from expectation of territorial expansion of the United States with the Texas Annexation (December 29, 1845) and the following Mexican-American War (1846–1848). It avoided secession or civil war at the time and quieted sectional conflict for four years until the divisive Kansas–Nebraska Act.
SHORT TERM EFFECTS
Texas gave up its claim to New Mexico but received debt relief, El Paso, and the Texas Panhandle. The South did not get their keenly desired Pacific territory in Southern California or extension of the Missouri Compromise line allowing slavery anywhere south of parallel 36°30' north. As compensation, the South got the possibility of slave states via popular sovereignty in the new New Mexico Territory and Utah Territory, which however were unsuited to plantation agriculture and populated by non-Southerners; a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, which in practice outraged Northern public opinion; and preservation of slavery in the national capital, though the slave trade was banned there except in the Virginia portion of the District of Columbia which rejoined Virginia.
LONG TERM EFFECTS
Civil war