<P> Others argue that the Compromise only made more obvious the pre-existing sectional divisions and laid the groundwork for future conflict . They view the Fugitive Slave Law as helping to polarize the US, as shown in the enormous reaction to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin . The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law aroused feelings of bitterness in the North . Furthermore, the Compromise of 1850 led to a breakdown in the spirit of compromise in the United States in the antebellum period, directly before the Civil War . The Compromise exemplifies that spirit, but the deaths of influential senators who worked on the compromise, primarily Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, contributed to the feeling of increasing disparity between the North and South . </P> <P> The delay of hostilities for ten years allowed the free economy of the northern states to continue to industrialize . The southern states, largely based on slave labor and cash crop production, lacked the ability to industrialize heavily . By 1860, the northern states had added many more miles of railroad, steel production, modern factories, and population to the advantages already possessed in 1850 . The North was better able to supply, equip, and man its armed forces, which would prove decisive in the later stages of the war . </P> <P> Three major types of issues were addressed by the Compromise of 1850: a variety of boundary issues, the status of territory issues, and the issue of slavery . While capable of analytical distinction, the boundary and territory issues were actually included in the overarching issue of slavery . Pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests were each concerned with both the amount of land on which slavery was permitted and with the number of States in the slave or free camps . Since Texas was a slave state, not only the residents of that state but also both camps on a national scale had an interest in the size of Texas . </P> <P> The general solution that was adopted by the Compromise of 1850 was to transfer a considerable part of the territory claimed by the state to the federal government; to organize two new territories formally, the Territory of New Mexico and the Territory of Utah, which expressly would be allowed to locally determine whether they would become slave or free territories, to add another free state to the Union (California), to adopt a severe measure to recover slaves who had escaped to a free state or free territory (the Fugitive Slave Law); and to abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia . </P>

The compromise of 1850 aided in settling the actual border between texas and new mexico