ll the people. But
the Free Soil leaders wisely determined that if they were
to have a political party, they must have candidates for State
officers as well as National. It is impossible to organize
a political party with success whose members are acting together
in their support of one candidate and striving with all their
might against each other when another is concerned. My father
was urged to be the Free Soil candidate for Governor. Charles
Francis Adams and Edmund Jackson visited him at Concord to
press it upon him as a duty. Charles Allen wrote him an earnest
letter to the same effect. But he was an old friend of Governor
Briggs and disliked very much to become his antagonist. He
looked to the Whig Party for large accessions to the Free
Soil ranks. A large plurality of the people of the community
were still devoted to that party. He doubted very much the
wisdom of widening the breach between them by a conflict on
other questions than that of slavery. So he refused his consent.
Stephen C. Phillips, an eminent Salem merchant, and a former
Member of Congress, was nominated. The result was there was
no choice of State officers by the people, and the election
of the Whig candidates was made by the Legislature.

The next year it occurred to the leaders of the Free Soil
and Democratic Parties that they had only to unite their
forces to overthrow the Whigs. The Free Soil leaders thought
the effect of this would be the eventual destruction of the
Whig Party at the North,--as afterward proved to be the case,--
and the building up in its place of a party founded on the
principle of opposition to the extension of slavery. So in
1849 there was a coalition between the Free Soil and the Democratic
Parties in some counties and towns, each supporting the candidates
of the other not specially obnoxious to them, neither party
committing itself to the principles of the other party or
waiving its own. In the fall of the next year, 1850, this
policy was pursued throughout the State and resulted in the
election by the Legislature of a Democratic Governor, Mr.
Boutwell, and of Charles Sumner as the successor of Daniel
Webster in the Senate. The experiment was repeated with like
success in the fall of 1851.

These two parties had little in common. They could not well
act together in State matters without some principle or purpose
on which they were agreed other than mere desire for office
and opposition to the Whig