William Lowndes Yancey was a political leader in the Antebellum South. As an influential "Fire-Eater", he defended slavery and urged Southerners to secede from the Union in response to Northern antislavery agitation.

The Compromise of 1850 was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850 that temporarily defused tensions between slave and free states in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Designed by Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, with the support of President Millard Fillmore, the compromise centered on how to handle slavery in recently acquired territories from the Mexican–American War (1846–48).approved California's request to enter the Union as a free state strengthened fugitive slave laws with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. defined northern and western borders for Texas while establishing a territorial government for the Territory of New Mexico, with no restrictions on whether any future state from this territory would be free or slave established a territorial government for the Territory of Utah, with no restrictions on whether any future state from this territory would be free or slave