With the election of General Taylor, the various issues of the slavery question were left undecided and unchanged. Indeed, the progress of the canvass had presented a political anomaly. General Cass was born in New England of Puritan stock. All his mature life had been spent in the free North-West. He was a lawyer, a statesman, always a civilian, except for a single year in the volunteer service of 1812. General Taylor was born in Virginia, was reared in Kentucky, was a soldier by profession from his earliest years of manhood, had passed all his life in the South, was a resident of Louisiana, engaged in planting, and was the owner of a large number of slaves. Yet in the face of these facts General Cass ran as the distinctively pro-slavery candidate, and General Taylor received three-fourths of the votes of New England, and was supported throughout the North by the anti-slavery Whigs, who accepted William H. Seward as a leader and Horace Greeley as an exponent. But his contradiction was apparent, not real. It was soon found that the confidence of the Northern men who voted for Taylor had not been misplaced.
As his inauguration approached, the anxiety in regard to his public policy grew almost painfully intense throughout the country. There had never been a cabinet organized in which so deep an interest was felt,--an interest which did not attach so much to the persons who might compose it as to the side--pro-slavery or anti-slavery-- to which the balance might incline. When the names were announced, it was found that four were from the south side of Mason and Dixon's line, and three from the north side. But a review of the political character of the members showed that the decided weight of influence was with the North. John M. Clayton of Delaware, Secretary of State, nominally from the South, had voted for the Wilmot Proviso, and had defended his action with commanding ability. William M. Meredith of Pennsylvania was one of the ablest lawyers of the country, a scholar, a wit, an orator; his training had not, however, fitted him for the Treasury Department to which he was called. Thomas Ewing of Ohio, selected to organize the Department of the Interior, just then authorized by law, was a man of intellectual power, a lawyer of the first rank, possessing a stainless character, great moral courage, unbending will, an incisive style, both with tongue and pen, and a breadth of reading and wealth of information never surpassed by any public man in America. Jacob Collamer of Vermont, Postmaster-general, was an able, wise, just, and firm man, stern in principle, conservative in action. The Attorney-general was Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, an ardent Whig partisan, distinguished in his profession, born and living in a slave State, but firmly devoted to the Union, as in later life he abundantly proved. The pronounced Southern sentiment, as represented by Toombs and Stephens, had but two representatives in the cabinet,--George W. Crawford of Georgia (nephew of the eminent William H. Crawford), Secretary of War; and William Ballard Preston of Virginia, Secretary of the Navy,--able and upright men, but less distinguished than their associates.