Whig party

 

one of the two major political parties of the United States in the second quarter of the 19th cent.

Origins

As a party it did not exist before 1834, but its nucleus was formed in 1824 when the adherents of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay joined forces against Andrew Jackson. This coalition, which later called itself the National Republican party, increased in strength after the election of Jackson in 1828 and was joined in opposition to the President by other smaller parties, the most notable being the Anti-Masonic party. By 1832, Jackson had also earned the enmity of such diverse groups as states' rights advocates in the South, proponents of internal improvements in the West, and businessmen and friends of the Bank of the United States in the East. This opposition was built up and correlated by Henry Clay in the election of 1832. Two years later, in 1834, all the various groups were combined in a loose alliance.

Party Successes

In the 1836 presidential election the Whigs were not unified or strong enough to join behind a single presidential candidate; instead several Whig candidates ran for office. The most prominent were Daniel Webster in New England, William Henry Harrison in the Northwest, and Hugh Lawson White in the Southwest. The election went to the Democrat, Martin Van Buren, but in opposition the Whigs grew steadily stronger.

The two great leaders of the party were Clay and Webster, but neither was ever to head a victorious national ticket. This failure was partly a result of the sectional variations in the party, which had only one common aim, opposition to the Democrats, and partly a result of the power held by intraparty forces opposed to them, including the political bosses of New York, Thurlow Weed and William Seward. The party went on to victory in 1840 with the rousing “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, which put William H. Harrison in the White House. Harrison died after only one month in office and was succeeded by his Vice President, John Tyler of Virginia.

A definite break now ensued between Tyler and the Whig leaders in Congress—a break that illustrated the Whig philosophy of government. The Whigs had originated in objection to what they considered the excessive power of the executive branch under Andrew Jackson. To them the legislative branch of the government represented the wishes of the people, and the task of the executive was to serve as the enforcing agent of the legislative branch. When Tyler ignored the counsel of his cabinet and vetoed bills that sought to reestablish the Bank of the United States, about 50 Whig members of Congress met in caucus and read Tyler out of the party. At the behest of Clay the entire cabinet resigned; even Webster retired after completing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1843).

Clay became the standard-bearer in 1844 but was defeated by James K. Polk. In 1848, Weed and his associates swung the nomination from Webster and Clay to Zachary Taylor, who had gained wide popularity as a commander in the Mexican War. This move temporarily prevented a division of the party, and although Taylor died while Clay was formulating the Compromise of 1850 in Congress, Millard Fillmore, his Vice President and presidential successor, kept the faith of the Whig party.

Disintegration

By the time Fillmore had succeeded to the presidency, the disintegration of the party was already manifest; in 1848 several important Whigs joined the new Free-Soil party, along with the abolitionists. In New England a bitter struggle developed between antislavery “Conscience Whigs” and proslavery “Cotton Whigs,” in other places between “lower law” Whigs and “higher law” Whigs (the term “higher law” had originated from a famous speech by William H. Seward, who declared that there was a higher law than the Constitution).

In the election of 1852, the party was torn wide open by sectional interests. Both Clay and Webster died during the campaign, and Winfield Scott, the Whig presidential candidate, won only 42 electoral votes. This brought about a quick end to the party, and its remnants gravitated toward other parties. The newly formed (1854) Republican party and the sharply divided Democratic party absorbed the largest segments. Other Whigs, led by Fillmore, drifted into the Know-Nothing movement.

Bibliography

See A. C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (1913, repr. 1962); E. M. Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (1925, repr. 1970); G. R. Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936, repr. 1965); R. J. Morgan, A Whig Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler (1954); M. F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (1999).

Whig Party
Founder(s)	Henry Clay
Founded	1833-34
Disbanded	1856 (though factions of the party existed until 1860)
Political ideology	Modernization, Economic protectionism

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.

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

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

1. William Henry Harrison (1841)
2. John Tyler (1841-1845) (see note below)
3. Zachary Taylor (1849-1850)
4. 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

Election year	Result	Nominees
		President	Vice President
1836	lost	Daniel Webster	Francis Granger
	lost	William Henry Harrison
	lost		John Tyler
	lost	Willie Person Mangum
	lost	Hugh Lawson White
1840	won	William Henry Harrison[1]
1844	lost	Henry Clay	Theodore Frelinghuysen
1848	won	Zachary Taylor [1]	Millard Fillmore
1852	lost	Winfield Scott	William Alexander Graham
1856	lost	Millard Fillmore[2]	Andrew Jackson Donelson[2]
1860	lost	John Bell[3]	Edward Everett[3]

^[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

• History of United States Democratic Party
• History of United States Republican Party
• American election campaigns in the 19th century
• List of Whig National Conventions
• Whig disambiguation page

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)
• Wilentz, Sean (2005). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. 
• Wilson, Major L. Space, Time, and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815-1861 (1974) intellectual history of Whigs and Democrats

Notes

External links

• Great American of the Whig Party, 1832-1856 Biographies of American Whigs.
• The American Presidency Project, contains the text of the national platforms that were adopted by the national conventions (1844-1856)

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