The Texas Annexation resolution had required that if any new states were formed out of Texas’ lands, those north of the Missouri Compromise line would become free states.[2]
Senator Joseph Underwood referred to “the threatened civil war, unless we appease the hot bloods of Texas.”[3]
According to historian Mark Stegmaier, “The Fugitive Slave Act, the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the admission of California as a free state, and even the application of the formula of popular sovereignty to the territories were all less important than the least remembered component of the Compromise of 1850–the statute by which Texas relinquished its claims to much of New Mexico in return for federal assumption of the debts…”[4][5] Stegmaier also refers to “the principal Southern demand for a division of California at the line of 35° north latitude” (just north of Santa Maria and the Grapevine) and says that “Southern extremists made clear that a congressionally mandated division of California figured uppermost on their agenda.”[6]
During the deadlock of four years, the Second Party System broke up, Mormon pioneers settled Utah, the California Gold Rush settled California, and New Mexico under a federal military government turned back Texas’s attempt to assert control over territory Texas claimed as far west as the Rio Grande. The eventual Compromise of 1850 preserved the Union, but only for another decade. Proposals for compromise included: