• Whig opposition to Mexican-American War
• David Wilmot’s proposal and purposes (1846)
• Northern antislavery, racism, and free labor ideology
• Southern response
• Proviso’s defeat (1846-48)

• Democrats nominate Lewis Cass on "popular sovereignty" platform
• Whigs nominate Zachary Taylor on no platform
• Free Soil Party founded
• Free Soilers nominate Van Buren on platform opposing slavery’s expansion
• Taylor wins and Second Party System survives

California Gold Rush

• Presidential and popular responses to news of gold in California
• Underside of the Gold Rush: exploitation and extermination

• Taylor’s plan for California and New Mexico
• Southern concerns
• Clay’s alternative plan
• California to be admitted as free state
• Remainder of Mexican Cession to be organized as one or more territories without restriction on slavery
• Slave trade, but not slavery, to be abolished in Washington, D.C.
• More stringent fugitive slave law to be enacted
• Senate debate
• Millard Fillmore succeeds Taylor as president
• Stephen Douglas engineers passage of Compromise of 1850

• Southern conventions
• Abolitionist mobilization
• Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-52)

• Democrats nominate Franklin Pierce
• Whigs nominate Winfield Scott
• Pierce wins and Second Party System again survives