In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot introduced an amendment to a bill, which was put forward to the U.S House of Representatives during the Mexican war. It proposed to ban slavery and unintentional servitude on the lands that were seized by U.S from Mexico during the war. This amendment came to be known as Wilmot Proviso.
The Wilmot Proviso was introduced twice to the House. First time it was proposed in 1846 along with the then-U.S President James Polk's request of 2 million dollars for negotiation with Mexico. The House passed the amendment but the Senate adjourned it without any vote or debate.
The proviso was again reintroduced in the next session of congress in 1847. This time the appropriation was of 3 million dollars. Wilmot once again proposed his antislavery amendment along with it. The bill once again passed the House, but the Senate decided to pass its own bill. The bill created by the Senate did not include the proviso in it. The proviso was added along with several other bills but none of them passed.
The proviso often passed the House because the northerners, who were supporting the proviso, were more in numbers in the House of Representatives as compared to the southerners, who did not support the proviso at all. But the proviso never passed the Senate as it had equal number of representatives from the north and the south. As long as the proviso did not have an advantage from either of the sides, it could not be sent forward to the president.
The southerners strongly believed that slavery should be considered legal in the United States. But the northerners opposed the expansion of slavery. Some of the reasons behind northerners opposing slavery were moral grounds. They argued that African Americans were no different than them and were also humans, where as others where opposing it because of the fear of economic competition that they would get from the slave traders or owners.
This unrest among the two zones resulted in increasing the clash between the north and the south; which ultimately resulted in becoming one of the causes of civil war.
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