Whig Party (United States)

The Whig Party was a political party active in the middle of the 19th century in the United States of America. Four Presidents of the United States were members of the Whig Party.^[1] Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s,^[2] the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism. This name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence, and because "Whig" was then a widely recognized label of choice for people who identified as opposing tyranny.^[3]

The Whig Party nominated for president such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. The Whig Party also nominated for president war hero generals William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott in 1840, 1848 and 1852 respectively.

In its two decades of existence, the Whig Party had two of its candidates, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, elected President. Both died in office. John Tyler succeeded to the Presidency after Harrison's death, but was expelled from the party. 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, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination for a full-term of its own incumbent, President Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott. Most Whig party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter base mostly joined the new Republican Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the party was defunct. In the South, the party vanished, but Whig ideology as a policy orientation persisted for decades and played a major role in shaping the modernizing policies of the state governments during Reconstruction.^[4]

Handbill for Clay-Frelinghuysen, 1844

Origins

The name Whig was derived from a common term that Patriots used to refer to themselves during the American Revolution. It indicated hostility to the British Sovereign, and despite the identical name, it was not directly derived from the British Whig party.^[5]

The American 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. Most of the founders of the Whig party had supported Jeffersonian democracy and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Democratic-Republicans who formed the Whig party, led by Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, drew on a Jeffersonian tradition of compromise and balance in government, national unity, territorial expansion, and support for a national transportation network and domestic manufacturing. Casting their enemy as "King Andrew", they sought to identify themselves as modern-day opponents of governmental overreaching.

Despite the apparent unity of Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans from 1800 to 1824, the American people ultimately preferred partisan opposition to popular political agreement.^[6] As Jackson purged his opponents, vetoed internal improvements, and killed the Second Bank of the United States, alarmed local elites fought back. In 1831, Henry Clay re-entered the Senate and started planning a new party. He defended national rather than sectional interests. Clay's plan for distributing the proceeds from the sale of lands among the states in the public domain was intended to serve the nation by providing the states with funds for building roads and canals, which would stimulate growth and knit the sections together. His Jacksonian opponents, however, distrusted the federal government and opposed all federal aid for internal improvements and they again frustrated Clay's plan. Jacksonians promoted opposition to the National Bank and internal improvements and support of egalitarian democracy, state power, and hard money.

The "Tariff of Abominations" of 1828 had outraged Southern feelings; the South's leaders held that the high duties on foreign imports gave an advantage to the North (where the factories were located). Clay's own high tariff schedule of 1832 further disturbed them, as did his stubborn defense of high duties as necessary to his "American System". Clay however moved to pass the Compromise of 1833, which met Southern complaints by a gradual reduction of the rates on imports to a maximum of twenty percent. Controlling the Senate for a while, Whigs 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.

Clay ran as a Whig against Jackson in 1832, but carried only 49 electoral votes against Jackson's 219. Clay and his Whig allies failed in repeated attempts to continue the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson denounced as a monopoly and from which he abruptly removed all government deposits. Clay was the unquestioned leader of the Whig party nationwide and in Washington, but he was vulnerable to Jacksonian allegations that he associated with the upper class at a time when white males without property had the right to vote and wanted someone more like themselves. The Whigs nominated a war hero in 1840—and emphasized that William Henry Harrison had given up the high life to live in a log cabin on the frontier. Harrison won.

Party structure

The Whigs suffered greatly from factionalism throughout their existence, as well as weak party loyalty that stood in contrast to the strong party discipline that was the hallmark of a tight Democratic Party organization.^[7] One strength of the Whigs, however, was a superb network of newspapers; their leading editor was Horace Greeley of the powerful New York Tribune.

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. 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 voted heavily for the Democrats.

The Whigs appealed to voters in every socio-economic category but proved especially attractive 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.^[8]

Whig issues

The Whigs celebrated Clay's vision of the "American System" that promoted rapid economic and industrial growth in the United States. Whigs 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" (what we now call infrastructure projects), especially expansion of the road and canal systems. To modernize the inner America, the Whigs helped create public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural institutions. Many were pietistic Protestant reformers who called for public schools to teach moral values and proposed prohibition to end the liquor problem.

The Democrats harkened to the Jeffersonian 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. In general the Democrats enacted their policies at the national level, while the Whigs succeeded in passing modernization projects in most states.

Education

Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Horace Mann (1796–1859) won widespread approval from modernizers, especially among fellow Whigs, for building public schools. Indeed, most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers.^[9]

1836–1840

In the 1836 elections, the party was not yet sufficiently organized to run one nationwide candidate; instead William Henry Harrison was its candidate in the northern and border states, Hugh Lawson White ran in the South, and Daniel Webster ran in his home state of Massachusetts. Whigs hoped that their three candidates would amass enough Electoral College votes among them to deny a majority to Martin Van Buren. That would move the election to the House of Representatives, allowing the ascendant Whigs to select their most popular man 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 pledged to serve only one 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 September 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 election.

A brief golden age

"An Available Candidate: The One Qualification for a Whig President". Political cartoon about the 1848 presidential election which refers to Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott, the two leading contenders for the Whig Party nomination in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Published by Nathaniel Currier in 1848, digitally restored.

Horace Greeley's New York Tribune—the leading Whig paper—endorsed Clay for President and Fillmore for Governor, 1844

The central issue in the 1840s was expansion, with proponents of "Manifest Destiny" arguing in favor of aggressive westward expansion even at the risk of war with Mexico (over the annexation of Texas) and Britain (over control of Oregon). Howe argues that, "Nevertheless American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it provoked bitter dissent within the national polity."^[10] That is, most Democrats strongly supported Manifest Destiny and most Whigs strongly opposed it.

Faragher's analysis of the political polarization between the parties is that:

"Most Democrats were wholehearted supporters of expansion, whereas many Whigs (especially in the North) were opposed. Whigs welcomed most of the changes wrought by industrialization but advocated strong government policies that would guide growth and development within the country's existing boundaries; they feared (correctly) that expansion raised a contentious issue the extension of slavery to the territories. On the other hand, many Democrats feared industrialization the Whigs welcomed. ... For many Democrats, the answer to the nation's social ills was to continue to follow Thomas Jefferson's vision of establishing agriculture in the new territories in order to counterbalance industrialization."^[11]

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. 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 only a very vague platform. 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 and committed to the admission of California as a free state and had proclaimed that he would take military action to prevent secession. In July 1850, Taylor died; Vice President Millard Fillmore, a long-time Whig, became President, and he helped push the Compromise through Congress in the hopes of ending the controversies over slavery. The Compromise of 1850 had been first proposed by the Whig Henry Clay of Kentucky.

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 national unity and a national market but cared little about slavery one way or another. However many Whig voters in the North thought that slavery was incompatible with a free-labor, free-market economy and supported the Wilmot Proviso, which did not pass Congress but would have stopped the expansion of slavery. 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 Whig Party leader in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, simply abandoned politics after 1849.

Death throes, 1852–1856

When new issues of nativism, prohibition and anti-slavery burst on the scene in the mid-1850s, few looked to the quickly 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.

The election of 1852 marked 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. The Whig Party's 1852 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 New Jersey. Whig Representative Lewis D. Campbell of Ohio was particularly distraught by the defeat, exclaiming, "We are slain. The party is dead—dead—dead!" Increasingly politicians realized that the party was a loser. Abraham Lincoln, one of its leaders in Illinois, for example, ceased his Whig activities and attended to his law business.

In 1854, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which opened the new territories to slavery, was passed. Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs remained strongly opposed. 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 joined the Know-Nothing Party, attracted by its nativist crusades against so-called "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.^[4] Historians estimate that, in the South in 1856, former Whig Fillmore retained 86 percent of the 1852 Whig voters when he ran as the American Party candidate. 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. Scant prospects for the shrunken old party seemed extant, and after 1856 virtually no Whig organization remained at the regional level.^[12] Some Whigs and others adopted the mantle of the "Opposition Party" for several years and enjoyed some individual electoral successes.

Legacy

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 in the electoral college.

During the Lincoln Administration (1861–65), ex-Whigs dominated the Republican Party and enacted much of their so-called "American System". Later their Southern colleagues dominated the White response to Reconstruction. In the long run, America adopted Whiggish economic policies coupled with a Democratic strong presidency.

In the South during the latter part of the American Civil War and during the Reconstruction Era, many former Whigs tried to regroup in the South, calling themselves "Conservatives" and hoping to reconnect with the ex-Whigs in the North. These were merged into the Democratic Party in the South, but they continued to promote modernization policies such as large-scale railroad construction and the founding of public schools.^[4]

In today's discourse in American politics, the Whig Party is often cited as an example of a political party that lost its followers and its reason for being, as by the expression "going the way of the Whigs."^[13] However, the Whig program for "internal improvements" or infrastructure spending is now enshrined as an important role of government by nearly all political leaders, especially during economic downturns.

The True Whig Party—named in direct emulation of the American Whig party—was the dominant force in the politics of Liberia for more than a century.

Namesakes

Occasionally small groups form parties that take the Whig name. They seldom last long or elect anyone. In 2006, the Florida Whig Party was formed and fielded one candidate for congress in state elections of 2010. It disbanded in 2012.^[14]

In 2008, a group of veterans formed the Modern Whig Party.^[15] It presently has two members elected to a school board and a local position.

The Quincy Herald-Whig, a daily newspaper published as of 2014 in western Illinois, is a direct descendant of a 19th-century Whig party news sheet, the Quincy Whig.

See also :Stephen Simpson, editor of the Philadelphia Whig, a 19th-century newspaper devoted to the Whig cause.

Presidents from the Whig Party

Presidents of the United States, dates in office

1. William Henry Harrison (1841)
2. John Tyler^a (1841–1845)
3. Zachary Taylor (1849–1850)
4. Millard Fillmore (1850–1853)

Additionally, John Quincy Adams, elected President as a Democratic-Republican, later became a National Republican and then a Whig after he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1831.

Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison were Whigs before switching to the Republican Party, from which they were elected to office.

Candidates

• ^ a: Although Mangum himself was a Whig, his electoral votes came from Nullificationists in South Carolina.
  
• ^ b: Died in office.
  
• ^ c: Fillmore and Donelson were also candidates on the American Party ticket.
  
• ^ d: Bell and Everett were also candidates on the Constitutional Union ticket.
  

See also

• American election campaigns in the 19th century
• American School economics and the Whigs
• Constitutional Union Party
• Florida Whig Party
• History of the United States Democratic Party
• History of the United States Republican Party
• List of political parties in the United States
• List of Whig National Conventions
• Modern Whig Party
• True Whig Party, a party named for the Whigs in the Republic of Liberia
• Whig (British political faction)

Notes

• ^a 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 September 1841, five months after taking office as president.

References

Bibliography

Further reading

• Cole, Arthur Charles (1914). The Whig party in the South, American Historical Association, 392 pages; e'Book
• Mueller, Henry Richard (1922). The Whig Party in Pennsylvania, Columbia university, 267 pages; e'Book
• Ormsby, Robert McKinley (1859). A History of the Whig Party, Crosby, Nichols & Company, Boston, 377 pages; e'Book
• Palmerston, Viscount Henry John Temple;  Crocker, John Wilson,  Peel, Robert (1819). The new Whig guide, Wright, London; e'Book
• Pegg, Herbert Dale (1932). The Whig Party in North Carolina, Colonial Press, 223 pages; Book
• Smith, Ernest Anthony (1975). Whig Principles and Party Politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig Party, 1748-1833, Manchester University Press, 1975, 411 pages; ISBN 978-0-7190-0598-5; Book
• Watson, William Robinson (1844). The Whig Party: Its Objects--its Principles--its Candidates--its Duties--and Its Prospects, Knowles and Vose, Printers, 44 pages; e'Book

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Whig Party (United States).

• Whig Party in Virginia in Encyclopedia Virginia
• The American Presidency Project, contains the text of the national platforms that were adopted by the national conventions (1844–1856)
•  "Whig Party". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 
•  "Whig Party". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. 
• Grand Valley State University digital collections – Papers of Whig political appointee Nathan Sargent, 1832–1874
• Modern Whig Party - http://www.modernwhig.org