Whig Party (United States): Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 18:00, 29 June 2005

The Whig Party was a political party of the United States created in order to oppose the policies of Andrew Jackson, and which named itself by analogy with the British Whigs, who had opposed the power of the King in Restoration England.

Creation

The party was formed in the winter of 1833-1834 at Washington dinner parties by National Republicans such as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, as well as Southern States' Rights supporters such as W. P. Mangum. 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. The Whigs also attracted the support of Southern states' rights supporters, such as John Tyler, offended by Jackson's strong nationalistic stand against South Carolina during the nullification crisis. The Whigs pledged themselves to Congressional supremacy, as opposed to the executive action taken by Jackson in removing deposits from the Bank without the consent of Congress, as well as his veto of the recharter of the Bank. Deriding "King Andrew," the American Whigs took their name from the English Whig Party, which had opposed the power of the monarchy and supported Parliamentary control.

In 1836 the party was not yet sufficiently organised 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 between them they would win enough U.S. Electoral College votes to deny Martin Van Buren a majority and so throw the election into the House of Representatives and there select the most popular Whig candidate as President. This tactic did not succeed, but the various candidates did cut deeply into Martin Van Buren's votes across the country.

Glden Years

In the years that followed, the Whigs began to develop a more comprehensive platform, favoring a protective tariff, the creation of a new Bank of the U.S., and use of the proceeds of public land sales to aid the states in internal improvements. In 1839, the Whigs held their first national convention, giving the nod to Harrison, who was elected president next year, largely as a result of the Panic of 1837 and subsequent depression.

Harrison, after contracting pneumonia as the result of a two-hour inauguration speech, served only 31 days and became the first President to die in office. He was succeeded by John Tyler, a Virginian and states' rights Whig, who vetoed most of his own party's legislation and was expelled from the Whigs in 1841.

However, the Whigs' internal disunity, and the increasing economic prosperity, which made the Whigs' activist economic program seem less necessary, led to a disastrous showing by the Whigs in the 1842 congressional elections, in which they lost control of the House. Shortly thereafter, the Whig Party was dismantled.

History of Whig Party

The Whigs were modernizers who 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. Controlling the Senate for a while, they 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. Backing Henry Clay in 1832 and a medley of candidates in 1836, the opposition finally coalesced in 1840 behind a popular general, William Henry Harrison, and proved the national Whig Party could win.

The Whigs were ready to enact their programs in 1841 when Harrison was succeeded by John Tyler, an old-line Democrat who never believed in Whiggery. Factionalism ruined the party's program, and helped defeat Clay in 1844. In 1848 opportunity beckoned as the Democrats split. By ignoring Clay and nominating a famous war hero, General Zachary Taylor, the Whigs papered over their deepening splits on slavery, and won.

Rejecting the automatic party loyalty that was the hallmark of tight Democratic party organization, the Whigs suffered from factionalism. On the other hand they had a superb network of newspapers that provided an internal information system. In the 1840s Whigs won 49 percent of gubernatorial elections, with strong bases in the manufacturing Northeast and in the border states. The trend over time, however, was for the Democratic vote to grow faster, and for the Whigs to lose more and more marginal states and districts. After the close 1844 contest, the Democratic advantage widened and the Whigs could win the White House only if the Democrats split.

Whig Issues

The Whigs celebrated Clay's vision of the "American System." They demanded government support for a more modern, market-oriented economy, in which skill, expertise and bank credit would count for more than physical strength or land ownership. Whigs sought to promote faster industrialization through high tariffs, a business-oriented money supply based on a national bank, and a vigorous program of government funded "internal improvements," especially expansion of the road and canal systems. To modernize the inner American, the Whigs helped create public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural institutions. The Democrats harkened to the Jeffersonian ideal of an equalitarian 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. In general the Democrats enacted their policies at the national level, while the Whigs succeeded in passing modernization projects in most states.

Whig Supporters

The Whigs won votes in every social-economic class, including the poorest. They appealed more to the upper half of the social-economic scale. The Democrats likewise won support up and down the scale, but they often sharpened their appeals to the lower half by ridiculing the aristocratic pretensions of the Whigs. Most bankers, storekeepers, factory owners, master mechanics, clerks and professionals favored the Whigs. Commercially-oriented farmers in the North voted Whig, as did most large-scale planters in the South. In general, the commercial and manufacturing towns and cities were heavily Whig, save for Democratic wards filled with recent Irish Catholic and German immigrants. The 1830s saw waves of Protestant religious revivals, which injected a moralistic element into the Whig ranks. Non-religious individuals who found themselves targets of moralism, such as calls for prohibition, denounced the Whigs as Puritans and sought refuge in the Democratic party.

Sudden Collapse of the Party

The Whigs were unable to deal with the slavery issue after 1850. Their southern leaders nearly all owned slaves. The northeastern Whigs, led by Daniel Webster, represented businessmen who loved the national flag and a national market, but cared little about slavery one way or another. However many Whig voters in the North felt that slavery was incompatible with a free labor-free market economy. No one discovered a compromise that would keep the party united. Furthermore the burgeoning economy made full-time careers in business or law much more attractive than politics for ambitious young Whigs. Thus the party leader in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, simply abandoned politics after 1849. When new issues of nativism, prohibition and anti-slavery burst on the scene in the mid 1850s, no one looked to the fast- disintegrating Whig party for answers. In the north most ex-Whigs joined the new Republican party, and in the South they flocked to a new short-lived "American" party. During the Lincoln Administration, ex-Whigs enacted much of the "American System;" later their southern cousins dominated the white response to reconstruction. In the long run, America adopted Whiggish economic policies coupled with a Democratic strong presidency.

A house divided

By 1844 the Whigs were beginning to recover from their disaster of two years earlier and nominated 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 the war with Mexico, which many (including Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln) saw as an unprincipled land grab, but they were split, as were the Democrats, by the anti-slavery Wilmot Proviso of 1846. In 1848 the Whigs, seeing no hope of succeeding by nominating Clay and pushing for their traditional economic policies, selected Zachary Taylor, a Mexican-American War hero, and adopted no platform at all. Taylor triumphed over the 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.

Had he lived, Taylor might have triggered the Civil War ten years earlier: He 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 on July 4, 1850, Taylor contracted acute indigestion (probably the result of typhus or cholera) and five days later became the second president to die in office. Vice President Millard Fillmore assumed the Presidency and supported the Compromise.

Dissolution

Millard Fillmore, the last Whig president

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. 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 Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slayed. The party is dead--dead--dead!"

In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the Whigs even further. Northern Whigs ran against the Act, and appealed to widespread Northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The anti-immigration Know-Nothing Party cut deeply into the Whig vote, overwhelming the Whigs in the mid-term elections, and the newly formed Republican Party won support from disaffected Democrats and Whigs.

In 1856 the remaining Whigs threw their support behind Fillmore, who by then had switched to the Know-Nothing Party (and who lost to Democrat James Buchanan), and in 1860 a few Whig diehards regrouped as the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell. Bell finished third to ex-Whig Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party and Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge in a four-way race (with Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas fourth), triggering the American Civil War and bringing an end to the Whigs.

Presidents from the Whig Party

Presidents of the United States, dates in office

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 a Democratic Republican, later became a Whig when he was elected to the House of Representatives.