By Allen Guelzo, Princeton University
Facing vehement defections from Democratic unity by John Calhoun, David Wilmot, and Lewis Cass over his Appropriation Bill and Missouri Compromise Extension, James K. Polk announced that he would not seek a second term as president in 1848. Zachary Taylor’s resultant nomination for the presidential election eventually led him to victory.
Nominations for the Presidential Elections
The party’s convention, as might have been expected, nominated Lewis Cass for the presidency, but agitated northern Democrats wanted the Wilmot Proviso or nothing.
In June of 1848, a group of antislavery northern Democrats met in Utica, New York, to organize a splinter movement, based on the principle that Congress had full authority to ban slavery from the territories.
Two months later, in Buffalo, New York, a national Free Soil convention assembled under a great tent with luminaries as varied as David Wilmot and the black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, among the delegates.
In a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party’s leadership, the “free-soilers” nominated Martin Van Buren as their presidential candidate under the banner, “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men”.
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The Whigs Take a Decision
Even more ominous, though, the split-off of the free-soilers from the Democratic Party marked the movement of the slavery issue from that of being the kind of moral question posed by William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists, to being a sectional political issue capable of wrecking even the sturdiest of national institutions.
The Whigs might have suffered the same splintering, had it not been clear that the divisions among the Democratic Party were the Whigs’ golden opportunity. Rather than risk North-South bickering within the Whig Party, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, for the presidency.
Zachary Taylor
Although Taylor was a southerner and a slaveholder, he was, nevertheless, a highly popular war hero who had made no known commitment to any of the potential solutions of the territorial question.
After reflecting upon the wisdom of nominating a candidate with no inconvenient political views to disturb the voters, the Whig Party decided to do likewise, and adopted no party platform for the election campaign. By the end of that summer, through the Whigs generally keeping their mouths shut, it was certain that General Taylor was going to beat Lewis Cass easily.
Taylor’s Strong Political Stance
However, Zachary Taylor, to nearly everyone’s surprise, turned out not to be the quite superannuated mindless old soldier that people thought he was. In fact, he turned out to have a mind of his own on the issue of the territories and the future of the Mexican Cession.
By the time Taylor was inaugurated in March of 1849, the California Gold Rush was in full swing, and Sacramento, near the site of the original gold strike, had exploded from being a village of four houses into a city teeming with 10,000 people.
In order to provide California and the New Mexico Territory with some sense of public order, a bill for territorial organization had to be offered at once, and Taylor dispatched his own personal emissaries to prod California and New Mexico into organizing new governments. Taylor was responding to more than just the practical demands of organizing the disorganized situation in California, though.
Taylor Pushed California Toward Statehood
A political novice to be sure, Taylor had fallen under the sway of some of the Whig Party’s most radical antislavery thinkers, especially William Henry Seward of New York. Under their influence, Taylor had become determined to secure California and New Mexico as free and Whig, even at the risk of more southern threats of disunion.
By December of 1849, President Taylor had pushed the Californians to the point where they were ready to make an application to Congress for immediate statehood, bypassing the territorial phase and therefore also bypassing the whole question of Congress’s authority over the territorial stages completely. The application would come for California to join the Union as a free state.
Taylor’s Opponents
Southerners read President Taylor’s proposal as nothing less than the Wilmot Proviso in disguise, though, and in the early spring of 1850, southern fire-eaters, like Robert Barnwell Rhett, were calling for a convention of the slaveholding states to discuss what their future could be in the Union.
At the same time, Taylor faced a challenge from within his own party in the person of Henry Clay, who still believed—even at age 73 and after a series of unsuccessful presidential nominations—that he would have made a better Whig president than Zachary Taylor, another military chieftain.
Common Questions about Zachary Taylor Standing up for Statehood
In Buffalo, New York, a national Free Soil convention assembled under a great tent with luminaries as varied as David Wilmot and the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, among the delegates. In a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party’s leadership, the “free-soilers” nominated Martin Van Buren as their presidential candidate.
By December of 1849, President Taylor had pushed the Californians to the point where they were ready to make an application to Congress for immediate statehood, bypassing the territorial phase and therefore also bypassing the whole question of Congress’s authority over the territorial stages completely. The application would come for California to join the Union as a free state.
Zachary Taylor faced a challenge from within his own party in the person of Henry Clay.
