The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor, a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against 127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes. But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress and the country were hotly contending over the social and political organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States, the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California. He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with