The candidacy of Zachary Taylor, strongly supported by Thurlow Weed, checked and even defeated the sectional purposes of the radicals. Taylor was the master of a great plantation in Louisiana, and John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, Ballard Preston, of Virginia, and Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, all good pro-slavery men, rallied at once to the popular military chieftain. Clay was promptly snubbed and Webster's claims were unceremoniously brushed aside. The Whig Convention of 1848 met in Philadelphia in May. It was under the control of Weed and his Southern allies. Taylor was nominated, and Webster, Clay, and the other disgruntled leaders finally gave him their support. Nothing was said of the great issue, the spread of slavery over the new accessions; and the party, as in 1840, went before the country without a platform. Nor was the candidate allowed to make speeches or write public letters, which was doubtless wise, for Taylor knew little of public questions. It was said that he had never voted, and he claimed to belong to no party. The Whigs took him on his reputation as a soldier and on the recommendation of the great New York "boss." His candidacy probably saved the party from breaking into two hostile wings. When the Democratic Convention assembled in Baltimore in May, 1848, Cass met with little opposition. His stout imperialism had won him the leadership of the expansionist West and South. The radical pro-slavery men of the lower South, who feared his former friendliness to the Wilmot Proviso leaders, had been satisfied, with a few exceptions, by the Nicholson letter of December, 1847, in which Cass laid down the doctrine that the settlers in any new region should be allowed to determine for themselves whether they would have slaves or not. It was the same idea which Douglas made famous in his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and which the country then dubbed "squatter-sovereignty." Cass was nominated and the Nicholson letter was made the platform; all the leaders of the party gave him hearty support, save those who had been humiliated at Baltimore four years before by the defeat of Van Buren. Van Buren himself doubtless remembered that Cass had lent assistance to the astute Southern politicians who had compassed his fall.