the Nicholson letter was made the platform; all the leaders of the party
gave him hearty support, save those who had been humiliated at Baltimore
four years before by the defeat of Van Buren. Van Buren himself
doubtless remembered that Cass had lent assistance to the astute
Southern politicians who had compassed his fall.

It was difficult to say which of the great parties was the weaker, the
Whigs with both Webster and Clay sulking, or the Democrats with the
shrewd Van Buren awaiting his opportunity to punish his enemies. The
opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party
Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren
wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the
Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President
as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November
and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The
South found her alliance with the Northwest broken, but a Southern
slave-owner was to be the next President.

As so often happens in American history, the election settled nothing,
for the victorious Whigs, as in 1840, had no program, and their
candidate had no political record. When the Administration began its
work, it was found expedient to underwrite practically all that the Polk
Administration had accomplished. There was no idea of reopening the bank
or financial questions; and the tariff was already so successful that it
would have been plain folly to change it. In the foreign policy of the
country the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England dealt with the proposed
isthmian canal. By this agreement the two contracting parties promised
not to acquire further interests in Central America, and thus in a way
nullified the concessions of Colombia of 1846, under which Polk had
hoped for the building of a canal across Panama.

The one absorbing question after the inauguration of Taylor was that
which both the great parties had side-stepped during the campaign,
namely, what should be done with slavery in the Territories. The
Southern Whigs sought day and night to gain the ear of the President,
and the Southern Democrats were not less persistent. Both aimed at the
same thing, the extension of their favorite institution. And now that
the fight for slavery in Oregon was recognized as lost, this Southern
wooing of the new President became the more intense. It was a desperate
situation for