Henry Clay was known as "the Great Compromiser," and it was meant as a compliment.
It's funny, in an unpleasant way. All but one the sectional conflicts of the antebellum era were over slavery. The exception was the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, and even that one was indirectly about slavery, because, as John C. Calhoun saw it, if the North was able to impose an unacceptable tariff on the South, the next thing you know, the North will be trying to ban slavery in the South.
The others were the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso (1846) the Compromise of 1850, the Ostend Manifesto (1854) the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), "Bleeding Kansas" (1856-61) the Dred Scott Decision (1857), and John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid (1859).
Also, because of the slavery issue, Congress could not pass a homestead act or a pacific railroad act.
Considering all that, it is mind-boggling that for a century-plus after the Civil War, American schoolchildren (at least in some parts of the country) were taught that the Civil War was not about slavery.
