Compromise of 1850
Poets involved
What happened
In Washington, D.C., Senator Henry Clay introduced a series of resolutions aimed at diffusing the sectional crisis over slavery's expansion into territories acquired after the Mexican-American War. The compromise admitted California as a free state, strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, and organized New Mexico and Utah without restrictions on slavery. It temporarily averted secession but deepened divisions over the moral and political future of the nation.
Literary impact
The Compromise and its Fugitive Slave Act provoked immediate poetic responses from abolitionist writers. John Greenleaf Whittier's 'Ichabod' (1850) expressed disillusionment with Daniel Webster's support of the compromise, while Walt Whitman published several poems in New York newspapers urging Northern congressmen to oppose the measures. These works helped establish poetry as a vehicle for political protest in the antebellum period.
Source: Wikipedia
