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Northerners who were already horrified by slavery were roused to fury by two events in 1854 the pubication of the so called Ostend Manifesto and the Kansas-Nabraska Act. The document known as the Ostend Manifesto  was a message sent to the secretary of state by three American diplomats who were meeting in Ostend, Belgium. President Franklin Pierce, who had taken office in 1853, been trying to purchase the island of Cuba diplomats urged the U.S. government to seize Cuba by force if Spain continued to refuse to sell the island. Early the same year, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill in congress that sparked an uproar.

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People in the North and south were unhappy with the Fugitive Slave Act, though for different reasons.Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a person arrested as a runayway slave had almost no ledal rights. Many runaways fled all the way to canada rather than risk being caught and sent back to their owners. Others decided to stand and fight. The Fugitive Slave Act also said that any person who helped a slave escape, or even refused to aid slave catchers, could be jailed. Oppsition to the act was widespread in the north. When slave catchers came to Boston,they were hounded by crowds of angry citizens shouting "Slave hunters there go the slave hunters."

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Sound Smart: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 | History

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One of the legislative bills that were passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 was a new version of the Fugitive Slave Act. At first, Clay introduced an omnibus bill covering these measures. Calhoun attacked the plan and demanded that the North cease its attempts to limit slavery.

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The Compromise of 1850 Explained: US History Review

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For the next three years, congress debated what to do about slavery in the territory gained from Mexico, southerners wanted all of meexican cession open to slavery, but norherners wanted all of it closed. Southerners proposed a bill that would extend the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific. Then late in 1849, California applied for admission ro the Union as a free state. Northerners in congress welcomed california with open arms, but Southerners rejected California's request. The year ended with congress with congress deadlocked over California's request for statehood.

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As the gag rule kept the slavery issue out of congress for ten years. And then, in 1846 president James James Polk sent a bill to congress asking for funds for the war with Mexico. The wilmot Proviso stated that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist" in any part of the territory that might be acquried from Mexico as a result of the Mexican American War. Southners in congress strongly opposed Wilmot's amendment and maintained that congress had no right to decide where slaveholders could take their property

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Nat Turner's rebelion was one of the largest slave revolts, but individual salves also continued to rebel by running away to freedom in the North. To slave holders, these Northerners were no better than bank robbers because they saw a slave as a valubale piece of property. And every time a slave escaped, it was like seeing theie land vanish into thin air. The salveholders demanded that congress pass a fugitive slave law to help them recapture their property.

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As John Quincy Adams predicted, for a time the "contest" over slavery was settled. However a powerful force was building that soon pushed the issue into the open again The Second Great Awakening. During the 1830s, abolitionists flooded Congress with antislavery petitions, but they were told that congress had no power to interfere with slavery in the states. Rather than confrnt this question, congress voted in 1836, the to tableor set aside indefinitely all antislavery petitions. In 1839, the gag rule prevented consideration of an antislavery proposal by John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of congress. Abolitionists were far from silenced by the refusal of congress to debate slavery.

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The Missouri Compromise  is an agreement made by congress in 1820 under which Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine was amitted as a free slave state.The Missouri Compromise kept the Union together but it pleased few people. At the sassme time congress drew an imaginary line across  the Louisiana purchase at latitude 36. In North, congressmen who voted accept Missouri as a slave state were called tratiors and in the South slaveholders deeply resented the ban on slavery in territories that might later become states. As secretary of state John Quincy Adams recognized the compromise had not settled the future of slavery in the United States as a whole.