Among the members of the new party's executive committee were Crittenden, former Democratic Senator William Cabell Rives of Virginia, 1852 Whig vice presidential nominee William Alexander Graham of North Carolina, former Congressman John P. Kennedy of Maryland, and newspaper editor William Gannaway Brownlow of Tennessee. In the North, the party drew support from conservative former Whigs like Edward Everett and Robert Charles Winthrop. Many of these Northerners, including Everett, were followers of Daniel Webster, a Whig senator from Massachusetts who had died in 1852.