1848.— The Mexican War had been the dom inant issue for a couple of years before, and the Democrats had striven to make it destruct ive to the Whigs by forcing them into ob noxious declarations of principle; but the latter voted supplies for it and evaded abstract pro nouncements as to its righteousness. The Wil mot Proviso (q.v.) was a heavier blow, for the Southerners looked on it as a primary touch stone of sectional loyalty, which stood above party loyalty. The one salvation was a popular moderate candidate who could be accepted by the voters to whom the Democrats were simply impossible; and such a one was found in Gen. Zachary Taylor. A Louisiana slaveholder, no Southerner could suppose he would sign a bill endangering his own property; known to dislike the veto, he could be trusted by the North to obey the verdict of Congress if it passed the Proviso; a popular hero, he commanded the great unreflecting brute vote which supposes military and civil functions somehow related. He was elected by reason of a split in the New York Democracy, the country being about evenly divided; that he was elected at ill, how ever, is remarkable proof of the terror of the conservative masses at having the slavery fire brand thrown into politics. It was this vote which elected the Whigs Clay and Taylor (the former really elected so far as the Democratic competitor went), and the Democrats Pierce and Buchanan, each in the hope of suppressing the question altogether.
1852.— Taylor died in 16 months and the Vice-President, Fillmore, completed the term; but all through the four years each of the two parties of unlimited slavery extension and slavery restriction was drawing its ranks to gether and forming into the parties soon to con test the final mastery. In place of Whig and Democrat, it was increasingly North and South. Unfortunately, the South was willing to fight and the North as yet was not; and the so-called Compromise of 1850, like most compromises, was practically all on one side, the Northern Whigs letting the measure go by default. They
did not like it, but the South insisted and they had much more confidence in placating their own constituents for adhering to it than the South for not doing so; once passed, therefore, they proclaimed it a sacred and irrepealable decision, as being a “compromise,° and the Fugitive Slave part as being a sacred obligation to uphold. As always, the "reopening of agita tion" was executed by the Southern wing; before the Presidential nominations were made, they had determined to force the Whigs to an absolute declaration of party policy, a touch stone of legitimate membership. First at the Whig caucus of 20 April, then at the Baltimore national convention of 16 June, they insisted on the party recognizing the Compromise as a finality; in the platform, the last article, of great length and minuteness, made the Fugitive Slave Law, by name, a part of the organic con stitution of the party. This was death, and the Southern Whigs must have so intended it. General Scott, as a military hero, was made the candidate. The Southern Whigs, instead of voting for him on account of the Fugitive Slave plank, largely voted against him because the anti-slavery men in the convention, for no assignable reason, had voted for him, and he was said to be partial to Seward; the Northern Whigs largely voted against the platform and the Whigs carried only four States, Massachu setts, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee, and less than a third of the next Congress even nominally, a third even of that being Southern ers who soon became Democrats. The Whig party was no more; °died of an attempt to swallow the Fugitive Slave Law" was the epitaph proposed for it.