gers, Slave or Free!" But as regards Slavery their decision was
emphatic and apparently irreversible.

The Southerners were at once angry and full of anxiety. It seemed that
they had been trapped, that victories won largely by Southern valour
were to be used to disturb still more the balance already heavily
inclining to the rival section. In South Carolina, full of the tradition
of Nullification, men already talked freely of Secession. The South, as
a whole, was not yet prepared for so violent a step, but there was a
feeling in the air that the type of civilization established in the
Slave States might soon have to fight for its life.

On the top of all this vague unrest and incipient division came a
Presidential election, the most strangely unreal in the whole history of
the United States. The issue about which alone all men, North and
South, were thinking was carefully excluded from the platforms and
speeches of either party. Everyone of either side professed unbounded
devotion to the Union, no one dared to permit himself the faintest
allusion to the hot and human passions which were patently tearing it in
two. The Whigs, divided on the late war, divided on Slavery, divided on
almost every issue by which the minds of men were troubled, yet resolved
to repeat the tactics which had succeeded in 1840. And the amazing thing
is that they did in fact repeat them and with complete success. They
persuaded Zachary Taylor, the victor of Monterey, to come forward as
their candidate. Taylor had shown himself an excellent commander, but
what his political opinions might be no-one knew, for it transpired that
he had never in his life even recorded a vote. The Whigs, however,
managed to extract from him the statement that if he had voted at the
election of 1844--as, in fact, he had not--it would have been for Clay
rather than for Polk; and this admission they proceeded, rather
comically, to trumpet to the world as a sufficient guarantee from "a
consistent and truth-speaking man" of the candidate's lifelong devotion
to "Whig" principles. Nothing further than the above remark and the
frank acknowledgment that he was a slave-owner could be extracted from
Taylor in the way of programme or profession of faith. But the
Convention adopted him with acclamation. Naturally such a selection did
not please the little group of Anti-War Whigs--a group which was
practically identical with the extreme Anti-Slavery wing of the
party--and Lowell, in