Those antislavery Whigs who supported Taylor in the belief that he would take their side—William H. Seward and Abraham Lincoln, for example—turned out to be right. Southerners should have paid more attention to a speech by Seward at Cleveland. Affable, artful, sagacious, an instinctive politician but also a principled opponent of slavery, Seward would soon emerge as one of Taylor’s main advisers. “Freedom and slavery are two antagonistic elements of society,” he told a Cleveland audience. “Slavery can be limited to its present bounds"; eventually “it can and must be abolished.”32 But in the
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