AS the country’s enumerators set out to collect data for the
young nation’s seventh federal census, Congress was once again
battling to find a compromise that would settle the slavery
agitation once and for all–AND preserve the Union. By the fall
of 1850, California had been admitted as a free state, Texas had
its boundaries redrawn to accommodate the eventual states of
Arizona and New Mexico, a severe Fugitive Slave Act had been
imposed nationwide, and the District of Columbia’s slave trade
(not slavery) had been banned. This was life after the
Compromise of 1850, an earnest attempt to save the Union from
disintegration. William, Anderson and siblings were living in a
world in which six of the first ten presidents were slave
holders, and the eleventh, President Polk (1845-1849), made
slave transactions from the White House. Abolitionists were a
small but increasingly vocal fraction of the northern
population. Pro-slavery advocates, like John C. Calhoun of South
Carolina, constructed arguments to guarantee sl