Stephan Douglas News Today

The Compromise of 1850 was made up of five bills that attempted to resolve disputes over slavery in new territories added to the United States in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It admitted California as a free state, left Utah and New Mexico to decide for themselves, defined a new Texas-New Mexico boundary, and made it easier for slaveowners to recover runway slaves.

Billy Graham once counseled: “the deeper issue for you isn’t economic but spiritual.” On the economic side, prior to the Civil War, tariffs on imports into southern ports, notably Charleston, South Carolina, provided the majority of the revenue for the U.S. Federal Government. A Federal income tax did not exist yet. Tariff taxes on foreign made goods caused them to be more expensive, causing people to buy domestically produced goods, mostly manufactured in Northern factories. The...