Mexican War Dbq

The cause of the Great Debate began as the Mexican War when the United State acquired over 1 million square miles from Mexico. The big issue was whether or not to allow slavery to expand into the west. Division already existed prior to the War. For example, Methodists and Baptists had divided into northern and southern branches. The northern churches opposed slavery and the southern branches defended it. In 1846 David Wilmot, a Congressman from Pennsylvania, proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all the territory acquired from Mexico. This became known as the Wilmot Proviso and it destroyed all party lines because every northerner, Whig and Democrat supported it, and almost all southerners did not. This resolution passed the house but failed in the senate. This was the first attempt to address the controversy but

If slavery was not allowed to expand then the south would become a minority in the Union.

As a solution, Henry Clay offered the Compromise of 1850, it in he stated 4 main points. First, California would enter the Union as a free state, the slave trade but not slavery would be abolished in the nation’s capital, by law southerns would be allowed to reclaim runaway slaves and slavery’s status in the remaining territories acquired from Mexico, would be decided by the local white inhabitants. The Unites States would pay of Texas’s debt from their succession.

The Compromise of 1850 is what sparked the Great Debate. Daniel Webster was willing to abandon the Wilmot Proviso and accept a fugitive slave law to keep the peace between the north and south. John C. Calhoun insisted that the north had to yield for the Union to survive. President Zachary Taylor, believe that all Congress had to do was admit California to the Union. Millard Filllmore, his successor, supported the compromise and helped to secure the Compromise of