In 1850, Congress faced a confrontation between slave and free states, which was solved with the Compromise of 1850.
The Compromise of 1850 was a set of five bills passed by the Congress of the United States in September 1850, which appeased a political confrontation between slave states and free states. This crisis, which lasted five years, had its origin in the disagreement on the status that territories acquired after the Mexican-American War should receive, and reached its maximum degree of tension with the problem of fugitive slaves in those years.
The compromise was drafted by Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and negotiated by Clay himself and Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. The controversy that deeply aggravated the crisis arose from the attitude that the northern states had towards the fugitive slaves, since there was an increasing disposition on the part of the northerners to avoid the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 (this law obliged those slaves who escaped from the southern states to be returned to their owners). The response to the pressures of the southerners ended in unfair captures of free African Americans who were dragged to the southern states to be subjected to slavery. This controversy led to a whole confrontation that endangered the Union when it also had to define the status that the new territories should assume after the war against Mexico with respect to slavery.
In short, of the three new territories annexed by the United States, California became a free state while Utah and New Mexico became slave territories.
