1848 Whig National Convention
Date: From 1848-06-07 to 1848-06-09
Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The 1848 Whig National Convention was a presidential nominating convention held from June 6 to June 9, 1848, in Philadelphia. Delegates met in the aftermath of the Mexican War, which brought the United States extensive new territories but in turn revived the expansion of slavery into the new domains as a national political issue. Like their fellow Democrats, who held their convention in Baltimore two weeks earlier, the Whigs hoped--unsuccessfully, as it turned out--to keep slavery out of the campaign.
Adopting the same strategy that won them the presidency in 1840, Whig delegates abandoned old stalwarts Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and nominated General Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, as their presidential candidate. A apolitical slaveholding southerner, Taylor seemed the perfect candidate to unite the southern and northern wings of party. Convention managers nominated Millard Fillmore, a New Yorker who steadfastly endorsed the Wilmot Proviso but otherwise did not oppose slavery, to pacify Clay's supporters and anti-slavery "conscience" northern Whigs outraged over Taylor's candidacy. Whig delegates adopted no official platform, content to allow Taylor to run on his military record. Abraham Lincoln represented Illinois at the convention.
Elbert B. Smith, The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 22-23; Yanek Mieczkowski, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections (New York: Routledge, 2001), 45; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 320-30; Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson, National Political Platforms 1840-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 14-15; The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, 7 June 1848, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1848-06-07; 8 June 1848, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1848-06-08; 9 June 1848, http://www.thelincolnlog.org/Results.aspx?type=CalendarDay&day=1848-06-09.