Download America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union AudioBook Free
The Mexican Battle introduced vast new territories into the United States, included in this California and the present-day Southwest. When yellow metal was learned in California in the great Gold Rush of 1849, the population swelled, and settlers petitioned for entrance to the Union. However the U.S. Senate was precariously well balanced with 15 free areas and 15 slave areas. Up to this point, states have been accepted in pairs, one free and one slave, to preserve that tenuous balance in the Senate. Would California be free or slave? So commenced a paralyzing problems in American federal government, and the longest debate in Senate history. Fergus Bordewich explains to the epic story of the Compromise of 1850 with skill and vigor, getting alive two years of senators who dominated the great debate. Luminaries such as John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay - who tried unsuccessfully to cobble collectively a compromise that could allow for California's entrance and simultaneously put an end to the country's agony over slavery - were nearing the finish of the long careers. Rising stars such as Jefferson Davis, William Seward, and Stephen Douglas - who in the end succeeded where Clay failed - would form the country's politics as slavery gradually fractured the nation. The Compromise kept the Union from collapse, but it have so at a great cost. The gulf between North and South over slavery widened with the strengthened Fugitive Slave Regulation that was area of the complex Compromise. In America's Great Debate, Fergus Bordewich calls for us back again to a period when bargain was essential, when men swayed one another in Congress with the energy of the ideas and their rhetoric, and when partisans on each area reached over the aisle to preserve the Union from tragedy.
