hi my name is Matthew pinsker I'm a historian and here are a few things you need to know to sound smart about the Compromise of 1850 in 1850 things are way more complicated than before because it's the aftermath of the Mexican war with the acquisition of territory in the West in an era of great sectional Strife this is right after the Gold Rush in California of 1849 and there's an awful lot of pressure over what to do about admitting a state in the west that doesn't have a history of slavery and might alter the sectional balance between slave and free states in the US Senate and in January of 1850 a senator named Henry Clay who's famous as a compromiser in American history he offered a package of proposals to try to adjust the sectional debate between the country over this issue and the debate in the Senate was fierce and intense some of the most dramatic scenes in American history and they turned over the architecture the engineering of this compromise package to Steven Douglas a younger senator from Illinois a Democrat and Douglas decided that the only way to get enough support for all of the different elements of the compromise was to break it apart and treat it separately when it achieved final form as a series of separate bills in the fall of 1860 there were only five bills one was about the admission of California as a state a free state one was about the organization of the Southwest territories New Mexico and Utah without regard to slavy one was about the adjustment of the border with Texas and New Mexico one was about the elimination of the slave trade in the district of Colombia and the fifth and final bill and most important for southerners a tougher Federal Fugitive Slave Law afterwards enough people were relieved that they felt like they had achieved a kind of compromise but most historians realize it was a shaky one at Best and even though it appeared for a couple of years that it would succeed very quickly the fabric of the so-called Compromise of 1850 fell apart young people in large numbers came out en joined what became known as the red guards these largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate assault and in some cases even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party