2022/09/16 by Michael Magliari · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #American Constitutional Law and Politics #American History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaac343
openalex publication_date 2022/09/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
On June 6, 1850, amid the epic congressional debates over the extension of slavery into the western territories recently seized from Mexico, the U.S. Senate took up a bold and unanticipated proposal by the antislavery Democrat Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin. Introduced the day before as an amendment to Henry Clay's controversial “omnibus bill,” Walker's one-sentence addition called for the immediate abolition of what he labeled “peon slavery,” a form of unfree labor that bound untold numbers of Native American workers in California and New Mexico, the newly conquered lands that composed the sprawling Mexican Cession of 1848. Walker's amendment did not receive a warm welcome from Clay. The great Whig parliamentarian from Kentucky had spent months crafting a grand bipartisan bargain between North and South over the contentious question of whether African American chattel slavery should be permitted to advance westward. Only the day before, Clay and his allies had successfully fended off yet another attempt by northern Free-Soilers to enact the explosive Wilmot Proviso, which would have forever banned the South's “peculiar institution” throughout the new territories. Now, however, a little-known senator from Wisconsin had suddenly come up with what might aptly be dubbed the “Walker Proviso.” Hoping to salvage a victory for free soil and free labor, Walker pointedly raised the issue of debt peonage, which he denounced as “a species of slavery … which I think ought to be abolished.”1