Daniel S. Dickinson was a New York Senator from 1844 to 1851. Dickinson and Webster were members of the Senate Select Committee of Thirteen which arranged the compromises allowing "the passage of bills, admitting California to the Union as a State; defining the boundaries of Texas; organizing the Territories of New Mexico and Utah by acts silent on the subject of slavery, prohibiting the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and amending the fugitive slave law." Earlier, in 1846, Webster and Dickinson had been on opposite sides in the debate about the annexation of Texas.