<P> The election of 1852 marked the beginning of the end for the Whigs . The deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster that year severely weakened the party . The Compromise of 1850 had fractured the Whigs along pro - and anti-slavery lines, with the anti-slavery faction having enough power to deny Fillmore the party's nomination in 1852 . The Whig Party's 1852 convention in New York City saw the historic meeting between Alvan E. Bovay and The New York Tribune's Horace Greeley, a meeting that led to correspondence between the men as the early Republican Party meetings in 1854 began to take place . </P> <P> Attempting to repeat their earlier successes, the Whigs nominated popular General Winfield Scott, who lost decisively to the Democrats' Franklin Pierce . The Democrats won the election by a large margin: Pierce won 27 of the 31 states, including Scott's home state of New Jersey . Whig Representative Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slain . The party is dead--dead--dead!" Increasingly, politicians realized that the party was a loser . </P> <P> In 1854, the Kansas--Nebraska Act, which opened the new territories to slavery, was passed . Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs remained strongly opposed . Most remaining Northern Whigs, like Lincoln, joined the new Republican Party and strongly attacked the Act, appealing to widespread northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise . Other Whigs joined the Know - Nothing Party, attracted by its nativist crusades against so - called "corrupt" Irish and German immigrants . In the South, the Whig party vanished, but as Thomas Alexander has shown, Whiggism as a modernizing policy orientation persisted for decades . Historians estimate that, in the South in 1856, former Whig Fillmore retained 86 percent of the 1852 Whig voters when he ran as the American Party candidate . He won only 13% of the northern vote, though that was just enough to tip Pennsylvania out of the Republican column . The future in the North, most observers thought at the time, was Republican . Scant prospects for the shrunken old party seemed extant, and after 1856 virtually no Whig organization remained at the regional level . Twenty - six states sent 150 delegates to the last national convention in September 1856 . The convention met for only two days and on the second day (and only ballot) quickly nominated Fillmore for president, who had already been nominated for president by the Know Nothing party . Andrew Jackson Donelson was nominated for vice president . Some Whigs and others adopted the mantle of the Opposition Party for several years and enjoyed some individual electoral successes . </P> <P> In 1860, many former Whigs who had not joined the Republicans regrouped as the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated only a national ticket . It had considerable strength in the border states, which feared the onset of civil war . Its presidential candidate, John Bell, finished third in the electoral college . </P>

Who supported the republican party that was formed in 1854