two candidates in the field, Lewis Cass for the
South, and Martin Van Buren for the North.

The Whig Party, taking advantage of the knowledge gained in previous
campaigns, looked around for a famous general, and managed to agree upon
Zachary Taylor, who had made an exceedingly brilliant record in the war
with Mexico. He was sixty-five years old at the time, a sturdy giant of
a man, reared on the frontier, hardened by years of Indian warfare,
whose nickname of "Old Rough and Ready" was not a bad description. He
caught the popular fancy, for he possessed those qualities
which appeal to the plain people, and this, assisted by the division in
the ranks of his opponents, won him a majority of the electoral votes.
He took the oath of office on March 4, 1849, but, after sixteen months
of troubled administration, died suddenly on July 9, 1850.

Millard Fillmore, who had been elected Vice-President, at once took the
oath of office as chief executive. He was a New York man, a lawyer, had
been a member of Congress, and, as Vice-President, had presided over the
bitter slavery debates in the Senate. His sympathies were supposed to be
anti-slavery, yet he signed the Fugitive Slave Law, when it was placed
before him, much to the chagrin of many people who had voted for him. He
signed his own political death-warrant at the same time, for, at the
Whig National Convention in 1852, he was defeated for the nomination for
President, after a long struggle, by General Winfield Scott, another
veteran of the Mexican war. Four years later, Fillmore, having managed
to regain, the confidence of his party, secured the Whig nomination
unanimously, but was defeated at the polls, and spent the remaining
years of his life quietly at his home in Buffalo.

Against General Scott, the Democrats nominated Franklin Scott Pierce,
the nomination being in the nature of an accident, though Pierce was in
every way a worthy candidate. His family record begins with his father,
Benjamin Pierce, who, as a lad of seventeen, stirred by the tidings of
the fight at Lexington, left his home in Chelmsford, musket
on shoulder, to join the patriot army before Boston. He settled in New
Hampshire after the Revolution, and his son Franklin was born there in
1804. He followed the usual course of lawyer, congressman and senator,
and served throughout the war with Mexico, rising to the rank of
brigadier-general, and securing a reputation second only to that of
Scott and Taylor.