The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy.
Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from 1833-34 to
1856,[1] the party was formed to oppose the policies of
President Andrew Jackson and the
Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of
Congress over the Executive Branch and favored a program of modernization and
economic development. Their name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of
1776 who fought for independence. The Whig Party counted among its members such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and their
preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. In addition to
Harrison, the Whig Party also counted four war heroes among its ranks, including Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig leader in frontier Illinois.
In its three decades of existence, the Whig Party saw two of its candidates, Harrison and Taylor, elected President of the United States. However, both died in office. John Tyler became president after Harrison's death, but was expelled from the party, and Millard Fillmore, who became president after Taylor's death, was the last Whig to hold the nation's
highest office.
The party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep
fissures in the party on this question, anti-slavery faction successfully prevented the nomination of its own incumbent President
Fillmore in the U.S. presidential election of 1852; instead,
the party nominated General Winfield Scott, who was soundly defeated. Its leaders quit
politics (as Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The voter base defected to the Republican Party, various coalition parties in some states, and to the
Democratic Party. By U.S. presidential election of 1856, the
party had lost its ability to maintain a national coalition of effective state parties and was third, trailing the Democratic and
Republican parties in the popular vote.
Origins and policies
The Whig Party was formed in the winter of 1833-1834 by former National Republicans such as Henry Clay
and John Quincy Adams, and by Southern States'
Rights supporters such as W. P. Mangum. Opponents of the party ridiculed it
as a reconstitution of the old Federalist party. Many southerners who
disliked Jackson's power grabs and stance during the nullification crisis, and
anti-masonites joined this party. In its early form, the Whig Party was united only
by opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson, especially his removal of the
deposits from the Bank of the United States without the consent of
Congress. The Whigs pledged themselves to Congressional supremacy, as opposed to "King Andrew's" executive actions.[2] The Whigs saw President Andrew Jackson as a dangerous man on
horseback with a reactionary opposition to the forces of social, economic, and moral modernization. As Jackson purged his
opponents, vetoed internal improvements, and killed the Bank of the United States; alarmed local elites fought back. They argued
that Congress, not the President, reflected the will of the people. Controlling the Senate for a while, Jackson's enemies passed
a censure motion denouncing Jackson's arrogant assumption of executive power in the face of the true will of the people as
represented by Congress. (The censure was later expunged.) The central issue of the early 1830s was the Second Bank of the United States. Backing various regional candidates in
1836 the opposition finally coalesced in 1840 behind a popular general, William Henry Harrison, who proved the national
Whig Party could win.
The Whigs came to unite around economic policy, celebrating Clay's vision of the "American System" which favored government support for a more modern, industrial economy
in which education and commerce would equal physical labor or land ownership as a means of productive wealth. Whigs sought to
promote domestic manufacturing through protective tariffs (as had Alexander Hamilton
40 years prior), a growth-oriented monetary policy with a new Bank of the United States, and a vigorous program of
"internal improvements"—-especially to roads, canal systems, and railroads-—funded by the
proceeds of public land sales. The Whigs also promoted public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural
institutions.
By contrast, the Democrats hearkened to the
Jeffersonian political philosophy ideal of an egalitarian agricultural
society, advising that traditional farm life bred republican simplicity, while modernization threatened to create a politically
powerful caste of rich aristocrats who threatened to subvert democracy. The Democrats wanted
America to expand horizontally, by adding more land through Manifest Destiny. Whigs had
a very different vision: they wanted to deepen the socio-economic system by adding more and more layers of complexity, such as
banks, factories, and railroads. In general, the Democrats were more successful at enacting their policies on the national level,
while the Whigs were more successful in passing modernization projects, such as canals and railroads, at the state level, but not
the federal (which had to wait until Abraham Lincoln's presidency to be fully realized).
Party structure
Rejecting the party loyalty that was the hallmark of tight Democratic Party organization, the Whigs suffered greatly from
factionalism throughout their existence. On the other hand, the Whigs had a superb network of newspapers that provided an
internal information system; their leading editor was Horace Greeley of the powerful
New York Tribune. In their heyday, in the 1840s, the Whigs had strong support in the
manufacturing Northeast and the border states. However, the Democratic Party grew more quickly over time, and the Whigs lost more
and more marginal states and districts. After the closely contested 1844 elections, the Democratic advantage widened, and the
Whigs were only able to win nationally by splitting the opposition. This was partly because of the increased political importance
of the western states, which generally voted for Democrats, and Irish Catholic and German immigrants, who also tended to vote for
Democrats.
The Whigs, also known as the "whiggery," won votes in every socio-economic category, but appealed more to the professional and
business classes: doctors, lawyers, merchants, ministers, bankers, storekeepers, factory owners, commercially-oriented farmers
and large-scale planters. In general, commercial and manufacturing towns and cities voted Whig, save for strongly Democratic
precincts in Irish Catholic and German immigrant communities; the Democrats often sharpened their appeal to the poor by
ridiculing the Whigs' aristocratic pretensions. Protestant religious revivals also injected a moralistic element into the Whig
ranks. Many called for public schools to teach moral values; others proposed prohibition to end the liquor problem.
The early years
In the 1836 elections, the party was not yet sufficiently
organized to run one nationwide candidate; instead William Henry Harrison ran in
the northern and border states, Hugh Lawson White ran in the South, and
Daniel Webster ran in his home state of Massachusetts. It was hoped that the Whig
candidates would amass enough U.S. Electoral College votes among them to
deny a majority to Martin Van Buren, which under the United States Constitution would place the election under control of the House of Representatives, allowing the ascendant Whigs to select
the most popular Whig candidate as President. The Whigs came only a few thousand votes short of victory in Pennsylvania,
vindicating their strategy, but failed nonetheless.
In late 1839, the Whigs held their first national convention and
nominated William Henry Harrison as their presidential candidate. In March 1840,
Harrison pleged to serve only 1 term as President if elected, a pledge which reflected popular support for a Constitutional limit
to Presidential terms among many in the Whig Party. Harrison went on to victory in 1840, defeating Van Buren's re-election bid largely as a result of the
Panic of 1837 and subsequent depression. Harrison served only 31 days and became the first
President to die in office. He was succeeded by John Tyler, a Virginian and states' rights absolutist. Tyler vetoed the Whig economic legislation and
was expelled from the Whig party in 1841. The Whigs' internal disunity and the nation's increasing prosperity made the party's
activist economic program seem less necessary, and led to a disastrous showing in the 1842 Congressional elections.
A brief golden age
By 1844, the Whigs began their recovery by nominating Henry Clay, who lost to Democrat
James K. Polk in a closely contested race, with Polk's policy of western expansion
(particularly the annexation of Texas) and free trade triumphing over Clay's protectionism and
caution over the Texas question. The Whigs, both northern and southern, strongly opposed expansion into Texas, which they
(including Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln) saw as an unprincipled land grab; however,
they were split (as were the Democrats) by the anti-slavery Wilmot Proviso of 1846. In
1848, the Whigs, seeing no hope of success by nominating Clay, nominated General Zachary
Taylor, a Mexican-American War hero. They stopped criticizing the war and adopted no platform at all. Taylor defeated
Democratic candidate Lewis Cass and the anti-slavery Free
Soil Party, who had nominated former President Martin Van Buren. Van Buren's
candidacy split the Democratic vote in New York, throwing that state to the Whigs; at the same time, however, the
Free Soilers probably cost the Whigs several Midwestern states.
Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune — the leading Whig paper — endorsed Clay for
President and Fillmore for Governor, 1844
Compromise of 1850
Taylor was firmly opposed to the Compromise of 1850, committed to the admission of
California as a free state, and had proclaimed that he would take military action to prevent secession. But, in July 1850, Taylor
died; Vice President Millard Fillmore, a long-time Whig, became President and helped
push the Compromise through Congress, in the hopes of ending the controversies over slavery. The Compromise of 1850 was first proposed by Henry Clay.
Death throes, 1852–1856
Millard Fillmore, the last Whig president
1852 was 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 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. 1852's Whig Party convention in New York City saw the historic meeting between Alvan E. Bovay and The New
York Tribune's Horace Greeley, a meeting which led to correspondence between the men as the early Republican Party meetings in
1854 began to take place. 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
Virginia. Whig Representative Lewis Davis Campbell
of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slayed. The
party is dead--dead--dead!" Increasingly politicians realized that the party was a loser. Abraham Lincoln, its Illinois leader, for example, ceased his Whig activities and attended to his law
business.
In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act exploded on the scene. Southern Whigs generally
supported the Act while Northern Whigs strongly opposed it. 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 in 1854 joined the Know-Nothing Party, attracted by its nativist crusades against "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.[3] Historians estimate that, in the South in 1856,
Fillmore retained 86 percent of the 1852 Whig voters. 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. No one
saw any prospects for the shrunken old party, and after 1856 there was virtually no Whig organization left anywhere.[4] Some Whigs and others adopted the mantle of the
"Opposition Party" for several years and had some success.
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. John Bell finished third. During the latter part of the war and Reconstruction, some former Whigs tried to regroup in the South, calling themselves "Conservatives", and
hoping to reconnect with ex-Whigs in the North. They were soon swallowed up by the Democratic Party in the South, but continued
to promote modernization policies such as railroad building and public schools.[5]
In today's discourse, the Whig Party is usually mentioned in the context of a now-forgotten party losing its followers and
reason for being. Parties sometimes accuse other parties of "going the way of the Whig Party."
Presidents from the Whig Party
Presidents of the United States, dates in office
- William Henry Harrison (1841)
- John Tyler (1841-1845) (see note below)
- Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)
- Millard Fillmore (1850-1853)
Note: Although Tyler was elected vice president as a Whig, his
policies soon proved to be opposed to most of the Whig agenda, and he was officially expelled from the party in 1841, a few
months after taking office.
Additionally, John Quincy Adams, elected President as an Democratic-Republican, later became a National Republican and then a Whig after he was elected to the
House of Representatives in 1831.
Candidates
[1]Died in office.
[2]Fillmore and Donelson were also candidates on the American Party
ticket.
[3]Bell and Everett were also candidates on the Constitutional
Union ticket.
See also
Bibliography
- Alexander, Thomas B. "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South, 1860-1877," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 27,
No. 3 (Aug., 1961), pp. 305-329 online at JSTOR
- Atkins, Jonathan M.; "The Whig Party versus the "spoilsmen" of Tennessee," The Historian, Vol. 57, 1994 online version
- Beveridge, Albert J. (1928). Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, vol. 1, ch. 4–8}.
- Brown, Thomas (1985). Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the
American Whig Party.
- Cole, Arthur Charles (1913). The Whig Party in the
South.
online version
- Foner, Eric (1970). Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The
Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.
- Formisano, Ronald P. (Winter 1969). "Political Character, Antipartyism, and the Second Party
System". American Quarterly 21: 683–709.
Online through JSTOR
- Formisano, Ronald P. (June 1974). "Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's
Political Culture, 1789–1840". American Political Science Review 68: 473–87.
Online through JSTOR
- Formisano, Ronald P. (1983). The Transformation
of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s.
- Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1960), Pulitzer prize; the standard
history. Pro-Bank
- Holt, Michael F. (1992). Political Parties and
American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln.
- Holt, Michael F. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the American Whig
Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. Oxford University Press. ISBN
0-19-505544-6.
- Howe, Daniel Walker (1973). The American Whigs: An
Anthology.
- Howe, Daniel Walker (March 1991). "The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture during the
Second Party System". Journal of American History 77: 1216–39.
Online through JSTOR
- Kruman, Marc W. (Winter 1992). "The Second Party System and the Transformation of
Revolutionary Republicanism". Journal of the Early Republic 12: 509–37.
Online through JSTOR
- Marshall, Lynn. (January 1967). "The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party". American
Historical Review 72: 445–68.
Online through JSTOR
- McCormick, Richard P. (1966). The Second
American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era.
- Mueller, Henry R.; The Whig Party in Pennsylvania, (1922) online version
- Nevins, Allan. The Ordeal of the Union (1947) vol 1: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847-1852; vol 2. A House
Dividing, 1852-1857. highly detailed narrative of national politics
- Poage, George Rawlings. Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936)
- Remini, Robert
V. (1991). Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31088-4.
- Remini, Robert V. (1997). Daniel
Webster.
- Riddle, Donald W. (1948). Lincoln Runs for
Congress.
- Schlesinger, Arthur Meier, Jr. ed. History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2000 (various multivolume
editions, latest is 2001). For each election includes good scholarly history and selection of primary documents. Essays on the
most important elections are reprinted in Schlesinger, The Coming to Power: Critical presidential elections in American
history (1972)
- Schurz, Carl (1899). Life of Henry Clay: American
Statesmen, vol. 2.
- Shade, William G. (1983). "The Second Party System",
in Paul Kleppner, et al. (contributors): Evolution of American Electoral Systems.
- Sharp, James Roger. The Jacksonians Versus the Banks: Politics in the States after the Panic of 1837 (1970)
- Silbey, Joel H. (1991). The American Political
Nation, 1838–1893.
- Smith, Craig R. "Daniel Webster's Epideictic Speaking: A Study in Emerging Whig Virtues" online
- Van Deusen, Glyndon G. (1953). Horace Greeley,
Nineteenth-Century Crusader.
- Van Deusen, Glyndon (1973). "The Whig Party", in
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (ed.): History of U.S. Political Parties.
Chelsea House Publications, 1:331–63. ISBN 0-7910-5731-3.
- Van Deusen, Glyndon G. Thurlow Weed, Wizard of the Lobby (1947)
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Notes
External links
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