merchant) were, with a few others of like strength and stature, the Whig body-guard who forced a way for voters through the dense crowd, and interposed for the rescue of the threatened. There is no lack of amusing anecdotes of this species of service rendered by Mr. Chandler to the Whig party; and it was at times attended by serious danger. In later years he credited Mr. Sheley with having saved his life in one of these election disturbances, and frequently recalled reminiscences of the muscular exploits of those days. It was not until Mr. Chandler was a Whig of nearly twenty years' standing, that he became that party's candidate for any office, or that he actively interested himself in its committee work and practical management. He cast a void vote for Harrison in 1836, before Michigan had been formally admitted; he attended the monster meetings and sang campaign songs in the log cabins of 1840, and gave then a valid vote to Harrison; he denounced Tyler's political treason, and in 1844 cheered for Clay and Frelinghuysen; he opposed General Cass in 1848, and at that time delivered his maiden speech, in support of "Zach." Taylor; but it was not until 1851 that he manifested any especial taste for or skill in politics, or that he allowed his name to be used as a candidate for position. The Whigs of Michigan were as a rule of New England extraction, and the masses of the party were always staunchly anti-slavery in sentiment. They charged General Cass's denunciation of the "Quintuple Treaty" to a disposition to seek Southern approval by indirectly shielding the slave trade: they opposed the annexation of Texas, applauded the Wilmot Proviso, and were restive under Southern aggression and slaveholding arrogance at the capital. The few Congressmen whom they were able to elect voted uniformly for free institutions and against the extension of human bondage. Michigan's first Whig Senator, Augustus S. Porter, while still new in his seat, opposed alone Calhoun's resolutions in "the Enterprise case" (a vessel employed in the coastwise slave trade had touched at Port Hamilton in the British West Indies, and some negro chattels who formed part of her cargo had taken advantage of English law to assert their manhood and freedom), and cast a solitary vote to lay them upon the table. Of this act Joshua R. Giddings wrote: "Seeing that eminent Senators around him interposed no objection to the passage of the resolutions, Mr. Porter, obeying the dictates of his own judgment and conscience, heroically met the overwhelming influence arrayed against him, and showed the most cogent reasons for rejecting the resolutions, by exhibiting the absurdity of the attempt to induce the British government to acknowledge the laws of slavery and the slave trade to exist and be enforced within her ports." Both Mr. Porter and William Woodbridge voted against the resolution for the annexation of Texas. In the House of the Twenty-seventh Congress Jacob M.