If there's one thing opposing sides love, it's compromise, right?

So wrong.

The Compromise of 1850 was a group of five legislative measures aimed at relieving sectional tensions over the expansion (or not) of slavery into new states and territories acquired in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

Let's take it checklist-style:

• California admitted as a free state
• The Texas-New Mexico boundary settled in favor of Texas (a slave state)
• The new territories of Utah and New Mexico allowed to determine slave- or free-state status by popular sovereignty (the popular vote)
• The slave trade ended in the District of Columbia
• The Fugitive Slave Law strengthened, allowing slaveholders to more easily recover escaped slaves

The Compromise of 1850 attempted to placate both slave and free states by splitting new territory equally. But it didn't work. The newly strengthened Fugitive Slave Law especially rubbed abolitionists and even moderate Northerners the wrong way, as it required free states to become complicit in returning escaped individuals to slavery and even provided for federal officers to participate in the process. You can bet Douglass had the Fugitive Slave Law in mind when he gave "The Hypocrisy of American Slavery."

And probably every other day of his life.