Lincoln’s Whig Party passed on their traditional party leader Henry Clay to nominate General Zachary Taylor as their nominee for the 1848 presidential nomination. Taylor had been the hero of Buena Vista in the recently ended Mexican War, and the public was clamoring for the war hero to be the next commander-in-chief. Lincoln himself spoke out in Taylor’s favor at the Whig convention held in Philadelphia. To balance the ticket featuring the Southern Taylor, the Whigs chose northern Whig Millard Fillmore as the vice-presidential nominee. On July 27, 1848, congressman Lincoln rose in the House of Representative chambers (now Statuary Hall) to address the “presidential question,” i.e., why Taylor would be a good Whig.
Taylor was an odd choice for the Whigs, to put it mildly. The Whigs went on record opposing the legality of the war and Lincoln had railed against it, although he and the party made sure to support the troops with adequate supplies. And yet here they were begging for Taylor to be their party’s nominee for president. Even more perplexing, Taylor was a southern plantation owner enslaving hundreds of people, which contradicted the Whig concern (at least for the Northern Whigs) that slavery would expand into the extensive territory taken from Mexico (today’s states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming). While not an issue at the time, one of his six children, Sarah, was briefly married to Jefferson Davis, then a subordinate officer to her father in the Black Hawk War. [Very briefly, it turns out, as both contracted malaria on their honeymoon and while Taylor survived, Sarah died three months after their wedding.]
And then there was the question of whether Taylor was even a Whig. He had been in the military most of his life and was at best apolitical, considering himself an independent. Some of his views did seem to be in line with Whig priorities, primarily that the president should defer to the congress for the making of laws and avoiding the veto unless the proposed law was clearly unconstitutional. But others were unknown (he rarely expressed them) and he was not in favor of restarting the national bank or raising tariffs, two traditional Whig priorities. And what about slavery?
Interestingly, despite being a southerner and a slaveholder, Taylor was against the expansion of slavery into the newly gained western territories. This was not so much an antislavery position as it was his belief that slavery was impractical in the drier climate of the southwest, the inaccessible mountains of the Rockies, or the cold of the remaining Louisiana Purchase territories of the upper Midwest. Since you could not produce sufficient cotton and sugar in those areas to make it profitable, he argued, it made no sense to expand there.
All these points were addressed by Lincoln in his 1848 House speech. Critics in both his own party and the Democratic Party questioned whether Taylor believed in Whig principles. Lincoln insisted that Taylor’s principles were secure, that he would not be an activist president, allowing congress (especially the Whigs in congress) to set the agenda for the nation. If congress managed to pass the Wilmot Proviso banning slavery in all the new western territories, Taylor would sign the bill. Overall, he would be a good Whig. In contrast, Lincoln charged, the Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, had shown in his senate career that he could not be trusted, having flipflopped on internal improvements and other issues supported by Whigs and blocked by Democrats. After his House speech, Lincoln promoted Taylor’s candidacy at several other venues in the Washington area.
But there was a bigger problem. While it seemed no one in the party was overly ecstatic about the Zachary Taylor/Millard Fillmore ticket, Conscience Whigs in New England were particularly incensed. More radical than moderate Whigs in their belief that slavery must be barred from spreading into the territories, the Conscience Whigs argued that Taylor showed the party had lost its way. In response, they teamed up with the “Barnburner” Democrats of upstate New York to start a separatist Free Soil Party, nominating former Democratic president Martin Van Buren to rival both the Whigs and the Democrats.
Realizing the danger of this splinter group to Taylor’s election chances, the Whigs sent dozens of party leaders to New England to make the Taylor case. The Illinois State Whig Committee named Lincoln a Taylor elector-at-large and sent him to Massachusetts to bring the Free Soilers back into the fold. While there, Lincoln would discover more fissures in the party. He also was exposed to a growing abolitionist fervor that influenced his thinking for years to come. All of this I discuss in depth in my newest book, Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours.
[Photo by Mathew Brady, February 1860, Library of Congress, Public Domain]
Now Available: Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours. Or Order directly at:
Amazon Barnes & Noble Books-a-Million Bookshop
Join me on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.
You also follow my author page on Facebook and on Instagram.
David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of many books on Abraham Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison.
Abraham Lincoln became nationally famous in large part because of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the series of joint political debates between himself and incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Lincoln lost that senate race to Douglas, but it positioned him as a potential presidential candidate. The following spring, Lincoln was invited along with other likely presidential contenders to attend an April 1859 dinner in Boston celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. That may have been a recognition of his minor celebrity status following the debates, but later that year, business magnate and influencer Jesse Fell coaxed Lincoln into providing an autobiographical sketch that was expanded and widely distributed across the country. In addition to enough viability to garner an invitation to give the Cooper Union speech, several of his New England hosts introduced him as presidential or vice-presidential material.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
Abraham Lincoln was not happy. He had worked hard to get Zachary Taylor elected as president as a Whig, and yet he was being passed over for the lucrative General Land Office job. Worse, he was being ignored, something the man who had been Whig leader in the Illinois legislature and recent representative to Congress. On May 16, 1849, he made his dissatisfaction with Taylor’s appointment of Justin Butterfield to the Land Office in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln traveled through upstate New York in early 1861 on his way to Washington, DC for his inauguration, stopping in Westfield, Buffalo, Albany, Peekskill, and New York City. Twelve years before, in 1848, he stopped in Buffalo and saw Niagara Falls on his way home between sessions of congress after he toured around eastern Massachusetts giving speeches in support of Zachary Taylor as the Whig nominee for president [Spoiler: Taylor won] In late April of this year, traveled much the same route in northern New York on my way to the Lincoln Forum spring conference at Hildene in Manchester, Vermont.
Abraham Lincoln stood at the podium in the U.S. House of Representative chambers on July 27, 1848. His topic – the presidential question. Notwithstanding the negative reaction to his previous “spot resolutions” speech, Lincoln was still considered an effective speaker and thus was called upon to help convince people that Zachary Taylor was the correct choice as the Whig nominee for president. Lincoln had strongly supported the nomination of Taylor over the aging Henry Clay, previously Lincoln’s beau ideal of a statesman. He even spoke at the nominating convention in favor of Taylor.
