Phillips’ old friend Charles Sumner moved to the forefront of a “Conscience Whig” insurgency, which demanded that the party’s “Cotton Whig” leadership join its outcry against the further expansion of slavery. Winthrop, Webster, and Everett responded for the party at first by making anti-Texas statements, while assuring their southern Whig allies that they meant not a word of them. Soon a serious factional breach between Conscience and Cotton Whigs opened in Massachusetts and other northern states.
