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Why did some Southeners threaten to secede over California's application for statehood?

Southern politicians in Congress made these threats because they were angry that California's constitution, which had to be approved to admit it to statehood, outlawed slavery within its borders. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, the aging politician most associated with this position, argued that the ability to bar slavery from new states in the West doomed the slaveholding South to permanent minority status within the Union. This was an old argument that dated back to the debate over the admission of Missouri in 1820. Like the Missouri crisis, the California crisis was resolved by a complex political compromise that called for the admission of California as a free state. Calhoun spoke against this aspect of the compromise, and many northerners were outraged by the harsh terms of the Fugitive Slave Act. The compromise in many ways set the tone of the spiraling crisis over slavery that divided the nation in 1860. 

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