The Compromise with Texas?? Peter Knupfer (bio) Mark J. Stegmaier. Texas, New Mexico, and the Comprise of 1850: Boundary Dispute and Sectional Crisis. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996. xii + 448 pp. Maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00. This is the first major study of the Compromise of 1850 in almost thirty years. Based on thorough research, displaying a sound grasp of the nuances of territorial, state, and national politics, and written in a clear and comprehensible style, this study of territorial politics and national compromise makes a major contribution to our understanding of the great dilemmas facing the republic in 1850. The country faced a true emergency that year. California, its gold fields swelling with disorderly settlers, sought entry into the Union as a free state, over the strenuous objections of southerners fearful of losing their influence in the Senate. Free soilers and abolitionists in the House of Representatives backed legislation to ban slavery in the District of Columbia. Southern legislators, furious over free state interference with the rendition of fugitive slaves, demanded tough federal enforcement of the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause. Northern and southern state legislatures passed resolutions binding their representatives and senators for or against a ban on slavery in new territories acquired from Mexico as a result of the late war. And slave-state Texas threatened to impose its will on about half of New Mexico territory, under a claim dating to its successful bid for independence from Mexico in 1836. All of these issues confronted a Congress packed with novices and deeply divided along sectional lines. Conventional accounts of the crisis emphasize the larger quarrel over slavery that inspired the Great Debate in the Senate from January through July 1850, featuring such luminaries as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, William Henry Seward, Jefferson Davis, and a galaxy of lesser but rising stars. In contrast to this emphasis on the Senate drama, Stegmaier argues that the conflict over Texas’s claim to half of New Mexico was the flashpoint of the controversy in 1850 and therefore posed a greater threat to the Union than quarrels over fugitive slaves, slavery in the District of Columbia, or the admission of California as a free state. The oratory in the [End Page 237] Senate, Stegmaier says, “had practically little to do with the actual dynamics of Congress’s attempts to resolve the issues” (p. 2). Although he recognizes the transcendent importance of the slavery question, the central thrust of his argument and the great body of his impressive research concentrate on the bedeviling problem of adjusting the conflict between Texas and New Mexico. That issue, he says, was fraught with danger because of all the issues facing the country in 1850, it offered the most immediate prospect of a violent confrontation between the federal government and a state. “No other topic of debate included elements that, if not settled, could have directly led to military action, bloodshed, and civil war,” Stegmaier announces at the start. “Political leaders in Washington and the public at large slowly awakened to the realization that if the boundary dispute could not be peacefully settled neither could any other issue. Conversely, people understood that, once the boundary question was resolved, the settlement of all the other pending issues would easily follow” (p. 2). The story that follows differs little in its general outline from accounts by Allan Nevins, Holman Hamilton, and David Potter; the significance of the work lies in the emphasis on the boundary question and in the details that Stegmaier has uncovered in local records and contemporary newspapers. In 1836, after it had won its independence from Mexico, Texas claimed a southwestern boundary along the Rio Grande river up to the 42nd parallel, including Santa Fe and El Paso. The Texas legislature, Stegmaier notes, established this boundary as an advanced position for expected negotiations with the Mexican government, but the passage of time turned this flexible claim into a Lone Star sine quo non as Texas joined the Union and the problem of slavery in the West became more acute in the nation’s political debate. The treaty of annexation did not specify a southwestern boundary for...
Read full abstract
Jun 1, 1998
Paul Barnes 
Open Access