ABSTRACT
The Compromise of 1850, an outgrowth of the results of the Mexican-American War, left the institution essentially intact, although it did bar the slave trade in Washington, D.C., strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, and admitted California as a free state. Despite prodding from antislavery activists, Lincoln’s war plans followed a cautious policy of bringing the slave states back into the Union in any way possible. He eventually came to see the slavery issue as part of the strategy, and a major Union victory at Antietam in 1862 allowed him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1819, Alabama entered the Union as a slave state, which balanced the number of free, and slave states, and therefore, senators. Maine’s petition for statehood in 1820 threatened to throw off the balance. In the Compromise of 1820, Congress agreed to admit Maine as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and prohibited slavery in the Western territories north of the southern Missouri border.
