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
Famous quotes containing the words clay, douglas, draft and/or compromise:
“When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
So, to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“I want to die while you love me,
And never, never see
The glory of this perfect day
Grow dim, or cease to be!”
—Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886–1966)
“News is the first rough draft of history.”
—Philip L. Graham (1915–1963)
“To achieve the larger goal of teaching her children consideration of others, a mother can tolerate some frustration of her own wishes, she can delay having what she wants, she can be flexible enough to compromise. And this is exactly what her child must also learn: that it is possible to survive frustration, it is possible to wait for what he wants, it is possible to compromise without capitulating.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)