(bright music) (pensive music) - In 1850, the president of the United States was Zachary Taylor.

He had been raised in the South, born in Virginia, and Southerners thought they had a sympathetic voice in the White House.

But Taylor surprised them.

It turned out, while he was a Southerner in his roots, he was not a Southerner in his sentiments.

What Taylor ultimately did was present sort of a bulwark against the expansion of slavery, not seeking to snuff it out, but keep it from getting wider or bigger.

And at that time in Congress, a bill was brought up under the auspices of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and, later, Stephen Douglas of Illinois.

And this bill became the Compromise of 1850, it was a package of legislation.

Well, in the midst of this debate, on July 9th, 1850, Zachary Taylor drops dead.

And the vice president of the United States, Millard Fillmore, became the new president.

Now, Millard Fillmore was not from the South.

He was from Cayuga County, New York, rural New York State, and he had been an indentured servant when he was a boy.

Now, many worried in the South that Fillmore was going to be an anti-slavery activist.

He was not.

However, Fillmore understood that something had to be done to keep slavery from ever reaching the West Coast.

California had been chafing for years under its territorial status, and California wanted to become a state in the Union.

The question was, since California is both a Northern and a Southern state, given that it's so long, was it gonna be a slave state or a free state?

- The South is expanding to the West, creating plantations.

And so they're seeing the Mexican War, seeing the Louisiana Territory, feeling that they can expand their property, their boundaries.

(bright music) - Now, the South understood if this stops slavery there, slavery could wither and die.

But if slavery goes all the way to the West Coast, it's gonna be a hell of a thing to try to get rid of it.

So, they fought that, and in return, Fillmore offered kind of a compromise, he said, all right, the Western territories of New Mexico and Arizona would be severed from Texas, Texas would end where it does now, basically, and they would be given discretion on slavery later on down the line.

And California could be admitted to the Union immediately as a free state and we will abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C.

But, as far as slavery goes in the rest of the country, we will enact a Fugitive Slave Act.

The Southerners have been complaining for years that the slaves that had made their way north to Northern cities and towns were not brought back.

They were left alone, in spite of the fact that there had been anti-slavery legislation passed by Congress in 1793, an act that was really only sporadically enforced and was very locally unpopular.

So what he did was he signed the legislation and it put the Fugitive Slave Act into effect.

The Fugitive Slave Act empowered the U.S.

marshals, who were federal officials, that you've gotta go in there and you've gotta arrest these runaway slaves.

So the Fugitive Slave Act changed things in the minds of many people who had settled here.

You had a number of immigrants in Wisconsin who had come here from other places, the Irish, and then you had the German Acht-und-vierzigers, the 1848ers.

These were more radical Germans, often craftsmen, skilled laborers, who had tried to overthrow the petty aristocracy of the German states.

Here they were, on free Wisconsin soil.

And in desecration of that free Wisconsin soil, free men, according to our state, were being put into chains and taken south to continue a servitude that they had rather justly and cleverly escaped from.

And so this mobilized them.

(bright music)