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’s gauzy platform, which avoided any discussion of important national issues, including the divisive Wilmot Proviso. He said that he would “very willingly” throw his support “in favor of a different candidate if it could be seen that it would hasten the triumph of Universal Freedom.” Thurlow Weed, desiring above all to win, insisted that Taylor was fundamentally a nationalist who would protect Northern interests better than the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of Michigan. Cass was considered a “doughface”—a Northern man with Southern principles. Moreover, the Democratic platform explicitly opposed Wilmot’s attempt to introduce the slavery issue into congressional deliberations. Finally, Seward, like Lincoln and Bates, supported Taylor, in the hope that his candidacy would allow the minority Whigs to attract Northern Democrats and independent voters, and thereby widen their base.

Chase, once again, pursued a different strategy. With the question of slavery in the territories at the forefront of national politics, he believed the time had come for a broad Northern party that would unite Liberty men with antislavery Democrats and “conscience” Whigs. He joined together with others, including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, to convene an antislavery party convention in Buffalo, in August 1848. Ten thousand men answered the call. The spirited gathering elected Chase president of the convention and placed him in charge of drafting a platform for the new party, the Free Soil Party.

During the deliberations, a Buffalo delegate wrote to Bates asking if his name could be entered as a candidate for the vice presidency. That Bates would even be considered illustrates the fluidity of parties at this juncture, for even though he opposed slavery’s expansion, he himself remained a slaveowner, his belief in the inferiority of the black race reflecting his Southern upbringing. In contrast to Seward and Chase, he supported Northern codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office. When one of his female slaves escaped to Canada, he had been incredulous. “Poor foolish thing,” he wrote in his diary. “She will never be as well off as she was in our house.” She had left behind three daughters, whom he promptly sold, “determined at once to be no longer plagued with them.”

Not surprisingly, Bates declined the Free Soil nomination. While he endorsed the party’s “true doctrine” that “Congress ought never to establish slavery where they did not find it,” he did not believe that this sole principle could sustain a national party. Even if offered the chance to be president, he claimed, he would never agree to “join a sectional, geographical party.”

After several days of deliberation, the Buffalo convention nominated former president Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice president. Following the motto suggested by Chase of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men,” the party pledged to “prohibit slavery extension” to the territories, setting in motion a hard-fought three-way contest.

In September 1848, with Congress in recess, Lincoln made his first foray into presidential politics, campaigning for Zachary Taylor throughout the Northeast. Arriving uninvited in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was happy to oblige the chairman of a Whig gathering who found himself without a speaker. Reporting on Lincoln’s impromptu speech, the Boston Daily Advertiser observed that the tall congressman had “an intellectual face, showing a searching mind, and a cool judgment,” and that he carried “the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations.” When he finished, “the audience gave three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig member from that State.”

During this campaign swing, at a great Whig rally at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Seward and Lincoln met for the first time. Lincoln later acknowledged that his meeting with Seward that night “had probably made a stronger impression on his memory than it had on Governor Seward’s.”

Both men were seated