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After nominating General Taylor for president in 1848, the Whigs have a hard time deciding on a running mate. It has to be a northerner, but who?

Abbott Lawrence, Thomas Ewing, and the New York rivals William Seward and Millard Fillmore are all considered but none can get a majority. Eventually, the convention turns to a "dark horse"--retiring congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a former Clay man who had backed Taylor. His longtime record as a partisan Whig and his antiwar and antislavery positions will help mollify northern Whigs upset at the nomination of a slaveholding general without a clear Whig background. Yet he is no extremist--he voted appropriations for the war he denounced Polk for starting, warned that the promulgation of abolition doctrine "tends to increase rather than abate" the evils of slavery, and said that while Congress had the power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, it should not exercise it except at the request of the people of the District. Some southerners are still a bit concerned about him, but Alexander Stephens reassures them on Lincoln's moderation. Still, some southerners worry that as vice-president Lincoln could break a tie vote in the Senate on the Wilmot Proviso. However, leading Taylor men assure the South that if Taylor is elected the whole Proviso will be moot--slavery can't really take root in the Southwest anyway, and Taylor will find some way of getting the Southwest into the Union without the humiliating Proviso.

Taylor and Lincoln are elected, and Taylor dies on schedule in 1850...
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