CALIFORNIA

PART 2

THE FIGHT FOR SLAVERY IN CALIFORNIA BY JAMES

M. MCPHERSON.

Sayda Vega

History 141

Class number 50587

*The annexation of Texas to the U.S in 1845 and the conquest of the Mexican American War reduced the size of Mexico by more that half and increased the size of the United States by a third.

-”Congressman David Wilmot introduced his famous ‘Proviso’ stipulating that in any territory acquired from Mexico ‘neither slavery or involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.’”

-But slavery continue to grow even more with the expansion of cotton into eastern Texas.

-Abraham Lincoln won presidency in 1860.

-President James K. Polk

-Senator Daniel Webster

-Kentucky Governor John J. Crittenden thought that the fact of carrying on slaves to New Mexico was not a big deal.

-The states of Utah and New Mexico were the first who legalized slavery in 1852 and 1859 respectively.

-In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California from Mexico to the U.S.

-By 1849 many people coming to California from different places such as Chile, China, Mexico, Australia, and France because of the finding of gold mines.

-”The national House of Representatives with its Northern majority passed legislation to organize California as a free territory.”

-By Oct 1849 it was proposed a state constitution but it banned slavery.

-Mississippi’s senator Jefferson Davis

-With the finding of gold mines in California, the Spaniard first bought Africans to the country.

-Senator Henry Clay’s compromise was set up to. “offset the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of slave trading in the District of Columbia.”

-Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the earlier ban on slavery in Louisianan Purchase territory north.

-Act of 1852 permitted a slave owner to stay indefinitely in California with his human property.

-The slavery of the Northern part of the state was in the gold mines, while in the Southern part were growing cotton, rice and sugar.

-“Southern politicians wanted to add Cuba to the U.S. with its almost 400, 000 slaves.

-“All the filibusters efforts to organize another slave state in order to offset California came to grief.”