It was difficult to say which of the great parties was the weaker, the Whigs with both Webster and Clay sulking, or the Democrats with the shrewd Van Buren awaiting his opportunity to punish his enemies. The opportunity came in the nomination of Van Buren by the Liberty Party Convention, which met later in the summer at Syracuse. The Van Buren wing of the New York Democracy approved the Syracuse Convention, and the Free-Soil party began its first and only campaign with the ex-President as its candidate. Van Buren received nearly 300,000 votes in November and prevented Cass from becoming President. He had avenged himself. The South found her alliance with the Northwest broken, but a Southern slave-owner was to be the next President. As so often happens in American history, the election settled nothing, for the victorious Whigs, as in 1840, had no program, and their candidate had no political record. When the Administration began its work, it was found expedient to underwrite practically all that the Polk Administration had accomplished. There was no idea of reopening the bank or financial questions; and the tariff was already so successful that it would have been plain folly to change it. In the foreign policy of the country the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with England dealt with the proposed isthmian canal. By this agreement the two contracting parties promised not to acquire further interests in Central America, and thus in a way nullified the concessions of Colombia of 1846, under which Polk had hoped for the building of a canal across Panama. The one absorbing question after the inauguration of Taylor was that which both the great parties had side-stepped during the campaign, namely, what should be done with slavery in the Territories. The Southern Whigs sought day and night to gain the ear of the President, and the Southern Democrats were not less persistent. Both aimed at the same thing, the extension of their favorite institution. And now that the fight for slavery in Oregon was recognized as lost, this Southern wooing of the new President became the more intense. It was a desperate situation for the South. The Northwest was rapidly expanding toward the Pacific and building up free States which might at any time repudiate their allegiance to the South. Now the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo opened a great hinterland for the South, extending by the easiest passes over the mountains to California. But the abolitionists declared that the South should not expand in that direction save at the expense of slavery. The President's attitude might determine the matter.