Millard Fillmore’s efforts to enforce the fugitive slave law won him the support of southern Whigs for re-nomination. But the president had alienated antislavery Whigs, especially the Seward faction in Fillmore’s own state of New York. Seward favored the nomination of Winfield Scott, a Virginian (but not a slaveholder). The Whig convention presented the curious spectacle of most southern delegates favoring a northern candidate, and vice versa, while many anti-war Whigs of four years earlier once again backed a general who had led American troops to victory in the war these Whigs had opposed.
