Yet, even in the North, there was a strong Democratic element, and, but for the intrusion of the slavery question, the party would have controlled the government for many years to come.  But the North was gradually coming to feel that the slavery question was more important than the more abstract one of national aggression; the more so since, by insisting upon the enforcement of such measures as the Fugitive Slave Law, the South was, as it were, keeping open and bleeding a wound which might to some extent have healed.  In 1848 the split came, and the Democratic party put two candidates in the field, Lewis Cass for the South, and Martin Van Buren for the North.

The Whig Party, taking advantage of the knowledge gained in previous campaigns, looked around for a famous general, and managed to agree upon Zachary Taylor, who had made an exceedingly brilliant record in the war with Mexico.  He was sixty-five years old at the time, a sturdy giant of a man, reared on the frontier, hardened by years of Indian warfare, whose nickname of “Old Rough and Ready” was not a bad description.  He caught the popular fancy, for he possessed those qualities which appeal to the plain people, and this, assisted by the division in the ranks of his opponents, won him a majority of the electoral votes.  He took the oath of office on March 4, 1849, but, after sixteen months of troubled administration, died suddenly on July 9, 1850.

Millard Fillmore, who had been elected Vice-President, at once took the oath of office as chief executive.  He was a New York man, a lawyer, had been a member of Congress, and, as Vice-President, had presided over the bitter slavery debates in the Senate.  His sympathies were supposed to be anti-slavery, yet he signed the Fugitive Slave Law, when it was placed before him, much to the chagrin of many people who had voted for him.  He signed his own political death-warrant at the same time, for, at the Whig National Convention in 1852, he was defeated for the nomination for President, after a long struggle, by General Winfield Scott, another veteran of the Mexican war.  Four years later, Fillmore, having managed to regain, the confidence of his party, secured the Whig nomination unanimously, but was defeated at the polls, and spent the remaining years of his life quietly at his home in Buffalo.

Against General Scott, the Democrats nominated Franklin Scott Pierce, the nomination being in the nature of an accident, though Pierce was in every way a worthy candidate.  His family record begins with his father, Benjamin Pierce, who, as a lad of seventeen, stirred by the tidings of the fight at Lexington, left his home in Chelmsford, musket on shoulder, to join the patriot army before Boston.  He settled in New Hampshire after the Revolution, and his son Franklin was born there in 1804.  He followed the usual course of lawyer, congressman and senator, and served throughout the war with Mexico, rising to the rank of brigadier-general, and securing a reputation second only to that of Scott and Taylor.