Still, by April 1851, despite their unwillingness to waver, some Free Soilers were growing weary of the logjam and many vocal party members expressed only faint hope for Sumner’s success. They had failed to rally additional votes for him—recalcitrant Democrats still viewed him as too much of an agitator on the slavery question—and now it seemed the Webster Whigs were content to outwait or end-run them, to create enough doubt about Sumner’s viability that the stalemate would calcify and eventually, out of sheer weariness, enough Democrat votes would shift from the beleaguered Sumner to the
...more
