Compromise of 1850 Forming a Essay

The problem of fair treatment of the South was the major issue as Calhoun saw it as well. Though he died shortly after this speech was read (too ill to read it himself, Calhoun was escorted from the floor after someone read it in his place), Calhoun is still considered one of the primary instigators of the Civil War. In this speech, he cites not slavery but general under-representation of the South as the primary reason making Southern states and their representatives feel as though continuance in the Union were impossible. Northern domination of the government had indeed been occurring, but diminishing the importance of slavery in regards to the question at hand, which was largely concerned with the condition of the new territories, seems disingenuous on Calhoun's part. Ignoring the moral issue of slavery, with which the North had a right not to be associated, also ignores a major reason of the North's dominance and increasing lack of compromise with the South in the halls of government.

Daniel Webster does the best job of remaining objectively devoted to the law out of these three men, but he does so at some moral cost. His initial statement that the North is wrong in failing to returned escaped slaves to the South denies the moral prerogative of those states and their citizens, yet Webster is correct in holding these states and their representatives to their oaths. This illustrates quite clearly the central conflict between morality and adherence to immoral laws. Ethics and morals are often confused as synonymous, but in this situation they collided as polar opposites, at least for those members of the North who saw the immorality of slavery. Seward went perhaps too far with his morals; Webster's ethics are intact, but his moral…