Wirt Dbq

After leaving his position as Attorney General, Wirt settled in Baltimore, Maryland. He became a candidate for President in 1832, nominated by the Anti-Masonic party. This party held the first ever national nominating convention in the U.S history on September 11, 1830 in Philadelphia establishing the tradition. The date was chosen to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Morgan Affair. However, no candidate was agreed upon. The actual nomination occurred a year later during the second convention in Baltimore. On September 28, 1831, Wirt became a presidential candidate after the fifth ballot. Amos Ellmaker became his running mate. Wirt is the only person from Maryland to ever become a Presidential candidate who won any electoral votes.

He hoped for enthusiastic national support to an electoral alliance between Anti-Masons and National Republicans that would overpower the Jacksonian Democrats. When his expectations did not work, he wrote in frustration about his presidential aspirations: "What the use ... it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket." In the election, Wirt carried Vermont with seven electoral votes, becoming the first candidate of an organized third party to carry a state, and he remains the only Presidential candidate so successful who came from Maryland. When The Providence American newspaper suggested that Wirt could run again in 1836, he quickly declined. Wirt became involved with his son-in-law in establishing a German immigrant colony in Florida on lands he bought but never inspected personally; this business venture failed. Wirt practiced law until his death. He got ill on February 8, 1834 in Washington, D.C. where he attended the proceedings of the Supreme Court. His biographer John P. Kennedy wrote that the early diagnosis of a cold was followed by identifying the symptoms of erysipelas or St. Anthony 's fire. He died on February 18,