might be acquired by the United States. This was passed in the House by a vote of 115 to 105, but the Senate refused to concur and passed a bill of its own without the amendment. The House acquiesced, owing largely to the influence of General Lewis Cass. As the 1848 presidential election took shape, the Democrats rejected the Wilmot Proviso in their platform and selected Cass as their candidate to run on a popular sovereignty platform. The new Free Soil Party rallied around the Wilmot Proviso, and nominated Martin Van Buren on a platform calling for "No more slave states and no more slave territory." By 1848 Wilmot was thoroughly identified as a Free Soiler, but, like many other Free Soilers, he did not oppose the expansion of slavery based on a legal rejection of the short-term existence of the institution itself, but rather because he felt slavery was detrimental to the interests of whites. In fact, he sometimes referred to the Wilmot proviso as the "White Man's Proviso". In a speech in the House, Wilmot said, "I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen [and] I would preserve to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor." Around the same time, however, Wilmot, in a New York speech, spoke of the ultimate demise of slavery when he argued, "Keep it within given limits ...and in time it will wear itself out. Its existence can only be perpetuated by constant expansion. ... Slavery has within itself the seeds of its own destruction." Wilmot was presented as the Free Soil candidate for Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1849 and was soon at odds with the mainstream Pennsylvania Democratic Party led by James Buchanan. Wilmot was forced to withdraw from the 1850 Congressional elections in favor of the more moderate Galusha A. Grow. State judicial service Wilmot was President Judge of the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas for the Thirteenth Judicial District from 1851 to 1861. He took a leading part in the founding of the Republican Party in 1854. He was Chairman of the Republican Party platform committee, was a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention and worked vigorously for the first Republican presidential candidate, John