Speeches on the Compromise of 1850

Summary

These three Senate speeches were the central statements in the long debate of 1850 over the lands won from Mexico, and the last great addresses of the three statesmen of their generation. The Mexican War had added California and the Southwest. Gold-rush California asked to enter the Union as a free state, which would end the balance of fifteen free and fifteen slave states; Texas claimed much of New Mexico; Northerners objected to the slave trade in the national capital; and Southerners complained that free states obstructed the return of fugitive slaves. On January 29, 1850, Henry Clay, aged seventy-two, offered eight resolutions: admit California; organize the rest of the cession without any restriction or condition on slavery; fix the Texas boundary and have the United States pay the part of Texas's public debt tied to its former revenues; keep slavery in the District of Columbia but end the trade in slaves brought there for sale; pass a more effective fugitive law; and declare that Congress had no power over the slave trade between states. In his speech of February 5 and 6 he defended each resolution as a mutual concession of feeling rather than principle and closed by warning that disunion and war were the same thing. On March 4 John C. Calhoun, too ill to speak, sat in the chamber while Senator James Mason of Virginia read his address. Calhoun argued that the Union was endangered because the equilibrium between the sections had been destroyed by federal legislation and Northern agitation, that the spiritual, political, and social cords binding the states were snapping one by one, and that neither Clay's plan nor appeals to the Union could save it; only a full settlement on the principle of justice, including an amendment restoring the South's power of self-protection, could do so. On March 7 Daniel Webster spoke, he said, not as a Massachusetts man or a Northern man but as an American. He reviewed the history of slavery and the Constitution, argued that the laws of climate and geography already excluded slavery from New Mexico, so that the Wilmot Proviso was needless, conceded the South's complaint about fugitive slaves, rebuked abolitionist societies and Southern talk of disunion alike, and declared that peaceable secession was impossible. Clay's measures failed as a single bill in July, but after President Taylor's death they passed separately in September under Stephen A. Douglas's management. The library text gives Clay's resolutions and speech, Calhoun's speech, and Webster's Seventh of March speech.

Top Lessons

• What a compromise asks of each side

  Clay insisted that his plan asked neither section to give up a principle, only feelings and opinions held about matters in dispute. He went resolution by resolution to show a give and take. Calhoun replied that the South had nothing left to surrender and asked for justice rather than compromise. The contrast shows two different understandings of what settling a quarrel requires.

• Diagnosing a political illness

  Calhoun treats the crisis as a disease with a cause. He argues that discontent is a symptom, traces it to the loss of sectional balance, and describes the cords of union breaking one by one, first in the churches. Whatever one concludes about his remedy, his speech is a model of reasoning from symptom to cause.

• Speaking against one's own section

  Webster opened by declaring that he spoke as an American rather than as a Massachusetts man, and he went on to grant Southern complaints about fugitives and to rebuke Northern agitation as well as Southern threats. Many of his New England supporters turned against him. The speech raises the question of what a representative owes his constituents and what he owes the whole country.

• Three old men facing the end of the Union they built

  Clay prays not to survive the Union's dissolution, Calhoun is too weak to read his own speech and dies within the month, and Webster asks what he would be if he were an American no longer. The speeches carry the weight of a generation that had known the founders and feared outliving their work.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The medical interest is biographical. Calhoun was gravely ill through the winter of 1849-1850, and his contemporaries and biographers describe his final illness as pulmonary consumption (tuberculosis); he could not deliver his own speech and died on March 31, 1850. Clay, who was also in failing health, died of tuberculosis in Washington in June 1852. The scene of a dying Senator sitting wrapped in the chamber while a colleague read his words was much remarked at the time. Nineteenth-century diagnoses of consumption were clinical rather than bacteriological, since Koch did not identify the tubercle bacillus until 1882.

• Calhoun's speech of March 4, 1850, opening

  The address was read by James Mason because Calhoun was too ill to speak; it is the last formal speech of a dying man.

• Clay's speech, February 5-6, 1850, final sentence

  Clay prays not to survive the dissolution of the Union, a reference to his age and health two years before his death.