Did California was admitted to the Union as a slave state?
First, it is true that California was admitted as a free state — this was one of the five provisions of the “Compromise of 1850” (proposed in January; this specific measure passed Sept 9). Note that, unlike other states that had gone through a “territorial” phase with a government set up by Congress, the residents wanted to skip all that and apply for IMMEDIATE statehood. (The Gold Rush of 1848-49 and the population explosion that resulted accelerated everything.) The South opposed it, not because they expected California to become a slave state, but because its addition would shift the balance of power (more free than slave states) AND accepting it seemed to imply the CONDEMNATION of slavery, which many Southerners regarded as a great insult to their honor. (All of this helped gain some of the concessions to the South in the Compromise, esp. a tougher Fugitive Slave Law.) BUT the Compromise of 1850 was not quite the end of the matter. What a lot of folks are unaware of is that there
