AHC WI: Millard Fillmore Wins 1852 Election

As it says on the tin. The PoD must be after the Compromise of 1850. Millard Fillmore must be a Whig. Go ahead!
 
With Winfield Scott's showing against Franklin Pierce, and with Millard Fillmore being disliked because of the compromise of 1850, I don't think the Whigs could win with any candidate short of the democratic candidate being caught with a dead girl or live boy.
 
Getting him the nomination is the easy part. Just have Webster die a few months early, and get his supporters to back Fillmore.

The problem is the general election. The Whigs' economic program no longer had much political appeal once the discovery of gold in California helped assure a plentiful currency better than any bank could do, and the Whigs were more divided on slavery and the Compromise of 1850 than the Democrats were. True, Fillmore will do better than the Seward-supported Scott in the South. (In addition to Kentucky and Tennessee, which Scott carried, Fillmore can probably carry North Carolina and maybe Louisiana and Delaware.) But in the North, I can see a lot of anti-slavery Whigs defecting to the Free Soilers.

Still, it can be argued that Scott's refusal to explicitly endorse the Compromise in public and his support by Seward may have hurt him as much as it helped him *even in the North.* In New York for example Scott ran 7,000 votes behind Whig gubernatorial candidate Washington Hunt (who nevertheless lost to Horatio Seymour). Obviously, Scott was "cut" by some anti-Seward Whigs. Michael Holt lists Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Indiana and Maine as other northern states where there were some conservative Whig defections to Pierce. (And of course some simply abstained.) Admittedly, not all of the defections were due to Scott (or at least his supporters) being seen as too anti-slavery. Some for example were doubtless due to Protestant dislike of Scott's clumsy attempts to woo immigrant and Catholic voters. Still, Robert Toombs may have had a point in gloating after the election that "it must have satisfied the northern Whigs that free soil don't pay any better at the North than at the South." (Quoted in Holt, *The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party*, p. 760.)

In short, Fillmore, because he was more clearly pro-Compromise and because he would not have tried to woo Catholic voters as Scott (completely unsuccessfully [1] ) did, would probably have been a stronger candidate overall. Still, I just don't see him carrying the big northern states he will need to win, even with an improved showing in the South. Though of course it might help if Pierce got publicly drunk in an undeniable way...

All in all, though, a frustrated Whig campaigner in Pennsylvania, though talking about the Scott campaign, probably said something equally applicable if Fillmore had been nominated: "'To make a fight in November was something like pissing against the wind, when blowing about sixty miles to the hour." http://books.google.com/books?id=_KhoAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA754

[1] As Tom Corwin would later lament about Catholic voters, "we know they *all* voted the other ticket." http://books.google.com/books?id=5woSAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA41
 
Yes, it is very hard to have the Whigs win. Could the Democrats split in 1852?I know that's unlikely but is there any way for that to happen?

Also, could Webster's supporters really go to Fillmore? Webster was from New England after all.
 
Yes, it is very hard to have the Whigs win. Could the Democrats split in 1852?I know that's unlikely but is there any way for that to happen?

Also, could Webster's supporters really go to Fillmore? Webster was from New England after all.

He was from New England but he was very unpopular with anti-slavery men after his Seventh of March speech. His supporters were in general the most conservative element in New England and thus closer to Fillmore's views than Scott's supposed ones. (Actually, Scott was as pro-Compromise as Fillmore; but because he refused to make this support public, and because his supporters included people like Seward, he was distrusted by northern conservatives as well as southerners.)
 
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