unclear. The admission of new states, or the organization of territories in the remaining unorganized portion of the Louisiana Purchase, could also potentially reopen the polarizing debate over slavery. Not all accepted the Compromise of 1850; a South Carolina newspaper wrote, "the Rubicon is passed ... and the Southern States are now vassals in this Confederacy." Many Northerners, meanwhile, were displeased by the Fugitive Slave Act. The debate over slavery in the territories would be re-opened in 1854 through the Kansas–Nebraska Act. In hindsight, the Compromise merely postponed the American Civil War for a decade, contrary to the expectations of many at the time, who felt the issue of slavery had finally been settled. During that decade, the Whig Party completely broke down, to be replaced with the new Republican Party dominant in the North, while Democrats reigned in the South. 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 Antebellum period. 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. The delay of hostilities for ten years allowed 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. According to historian Mark Stegmaier, "The Fugitive Slave Act, the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, the admission of California as a free state, and even the application of the formula of popular sovereignty to the territories were all less important than the least remembered component of the Compromise of 1850—the statute by which Texas relinquished its claims to much of New Mexico in return for federal assumption of the debts." Other proposals Proposals in 1846 to 1850 on the division of the Southwest included the following (some of which are not mutually exclusive): The Wilmot Proviso banning slavery in any new territory to be acquired from Mexico, not including