Clay had re-entered the Senate in 1849, for the purpose of compromising the sectional difficulties as he had compromised those of 1820 and of 1833.  His speech, as given, will show something of his motives; his success resulted in the “compromise of 1850.”  By its terms, California was admitted as a free State; the slave trade, but not slavery, was prohibited in the District of Columbia; a more stringent fugitive slave law was enacted; Texas was paid $10,000,000 for certain claims to the Territory of New Mexico; and the Territories of Utah and New Mexico, covering the Mexican acquisition outside of California, were organized without mentioning slavery.  The last-named feature was carefully designed to please all important factions.  It could be represented to the Webster Whigs that slavery was excluded from the Territories named by the operation of natural laws; to the Clay Whigs that slavery had already been excluded by Mexican law which survived the cession; to the northern Democrats, that the compromise was a formal endorsement of the great principle of popular sovereignty; and to the southern Democrats that it was a repudiation of the Wilmot proviso.  In the end, the essence of the success went to the last-named party, for the legislatures of the two territories established slavery, and no bill to veto their action could pass both Houses of Congress until after 1861.

The Supreme Court had already decided that Congress had exclusive power to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, though the fugitive slave law of 1793 had given a concurrent authority of execution to State officers.  The law of 1850, carrying the Supreme Court’s decision further, gave the execution of the law to United States officers, and refused the accused a hearing.  Its execution at the North was therefore the occasion of a profound excitement and horror.  Cases of inhuman cruelty, and of false accusation to which no defence was permitted, were multiplied until a practical nullification of the law, in the form of “personal liberty laws,” securing a hearing for the accused before State magistrates, was forced by public opinion upon the legislature of the exposed northern States.  Before the excitement had come to a head, the Whig convention of 1852 met and endorsed the compromise of 1850 “in all its parts.”  Overwhelmed in the election which followed, the Whig party was popularly said to have “died of an attempt to swallow the fugitive-slave law”; it would have been more correct to have said that the southern section of the party had deserted in a body and gone over to the Democratic party.  National politics were thus left in an entirely anomalous condition.  The Democratic party was omnipotent at the South, though it was afterward opposed feebly by the American (or “Know Nothing “) organization, and was generally successful at the North, though it was still met by the Northern Whigs with vigorous opposition.  Such a state of affairs was not calculated to satisfy thinking men; and this period seems to have been one in which very few thinking men of any party were at all satisfied with their party positions.