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Northern states passed Personal Liberty laws to counteract the Fugitive Slave Law. These were meant to make the law equitable and to protect the rights of Freedmen and escaped slaves without nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law.
The only new law was the Fugitive Slave Act. It was not 'given to the Southern states'. It was enforced in every state of the Union. But it was a gesture of appeasement to the Southern states, in order to keep them onside at a time when it was getting harder to create new slave-states.
It offended many law-abiding Northern citizens who objected to being turned into unpaid slave-catchers, and threatened with $1000 fine if they failed to report anyone who looked like a runaway slave. Meanwhile it pleased the South, by appearing to confirm the legitimacy of slavery. Thus it drove the two sides further apart.
Texas would relinquish the land it was arguing with Mexico over but would receive ten million dollars in compensation (which it would use to pay off its debts to Mexico); the slave trade would be abolished in Washington, D.C., though slavery itself was still permitted; California was admitted as a free state; and the Fugitive Slave Act, which punished people harboring fugitive slaves and allowed for the return of those slaves to their masters was passed.
The Compromise of 1850 helped to resolve the conflict of territory and slavery which had arose from the Mexican and American War. This series of 5 laws provided a sure way to balance the interests of the states that lied to the south of Missouri and the northern free states. When California was added this allowed the Union to add to their troops because the state of California could not be divided and was therefore declared a free state for the purpose of the war.