If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied, the conquest of Mexico in 1848 acted like a poison to the United States, then the first signs of its effects can be seen in the presidential election of 1848. In that year, as the Democratic and Whig parties maneuvered to claim the office, the question of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico threatened to create sectional schisms within national politics. The failure of the two political parties to address the divisive issue led anti-slavery activists to form a new political party, the Free Soil Party, which sought to harness disaffected voters and elect former president Martin Van Buren to the White House on a platform of opposing the extension of slavery into the new territories. This issue and the role it played in the presidential campaign is at the core of Joel Silbey's book, which offers readers a history of a campaign that was in many ways a harbinger of the conflicts to come.

Silbey begins with a description of the political scene in the 1840s, one in which the "Second American Party System" was in full force. Having fully matured after their formative period in the early 1830s, Whigs and Democrats fought each other for office along well-established ideological lines, offering competing visions of national development and political power. The election of 1844 brought James Polk to the presidency, a Democrat of great determination whose controversial policies rapidly polarized public opinion. Though he declined to run for another term, the 1848 presidential election was fought in Polk's shadow, as it was his expansionist program which brought the issue of extending slavery to the forefront of national politics. Despite the best efforts of the Free Soilers, however, Silbey argues (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his longstanding advocacy of the primacy of party politics in the era) that prevailing partisan affiliations proved in the end to be more enduring than anti-slavery passions, with the Southerner Zachary Taylor emerging triumphant in the end.

A longtime historian of the period, Silbey provides a brisk and informative narrative account of the 1848 presidential election. Though lacking some of the insightful analysis of some of the other volumes in the University Press of Kansas's "American Presidential Elections" series, this is nonetheless a useful addition to it, one that makes a convincing case for the resiliency of the party system. Yet as Silbey points out in his conclusion, the Free Soil supporters would gain their own victory down the road, as Abraham Lincoln would win election a dozen years later on what was essentially the Free Soil platform. In this sense, the lasting significance of election of 1848 was as just one of the initial stages in the long, drawn-out crisis that would ultimately lead to secession and civil war, one that the two parties' policy of avoidance did nothing to address. ( )

An interesting story of an important election in which the parties managed to survive the passions and divisions created by the Mexican War. This isn't one of the best of the University of Kansas Presidential election series. It's a bit dry for such a close and interesting election that involved such commanding figures of the Jacksonian era as Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and Van Buren and Lincoln, representing the political future and surprisingly in this election an advocate of slaveholder Zachary Taylor. A more interesting recounting of this election, but one exclusively from the Whig perspective, can be found in Michael Holt's Rise and Fall of the Whig Party. ( )