Henry Clay and Douglas Draft Compromise
Congress convened on December 3, 1849. On January 29, 1850, Whig Senator Henry Clay gave a speech which called for compromise on the issues dividing the Union. However, Clay's specific proposals for achieving a compromise, including his idea for Texas' boundary, were not adopted in a single bill. Upon Clay's urging, senator Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, divided Clay's bill into several smaller bills, and passed each separately. When he instructed Douglas, Clay was nearly dead and unable to guide the congressional debate any further. The Compromise came to coalesce around a plan dividing Texas at its present-day boundaries, creating territorial governments with "popular sovereignty" (without the Wilmot Proviso) for New Mexico and Utah, admitting California as a free state, abolishing the slave auctions in the District of Columbia, and enacting a new fugitive slave law.
Read more about this topic: Compromise Of 1850
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So fine, that it the guest betray’d.
Else the soule grew so fast within,
It broke the outward shell of sinne,
And so was hatch’d a Cherubin.”
—Thomas Carew (1589–1639)
“For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
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has done the lover mortal hurt.”
—Keith Douglas (1920–1944)
“Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)