Whig Party History in the United States

History

The following information about Whig Party is based on the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers. It is a continuation of the entry about the american whig party.

The campaign of 1840 was based entirely on Harrison’s popularity and the general desire for a change, and under cover of these the whigs carried on a still hunt for congressmen, the real objects of the campaign. In all points they were successful. Log-cabins and hard cider, supposed to be typical of Harrison’s early life, were made leading political instruments; singing was carried to an extent hitherto unknown; mass meetings were measured by the acre, and processions by the league; and in November Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, received 234 electoral votes to 60 for their opponents, and were elected. The popular vote was nearly evenly balanced. The whigs had carried New England (except New Hampshire), New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, north of the Potomac; and south of it they had carried the White and Troup party states, Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia, the whig states, Kentucky, North Carolina and Louisiana, and had made an exceedingly close contest in Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri and Alabama. Evidently, the conjunction of Harrison and Tyler had kept all the elements of the opposition well in hand. More important still, the new congress, to meet in 1841, had a whig majority in both houses, though the majority was not sufficient to override a veto.

In spite of its diversity of opinion, the party had now developed a number of able leaders, Clay and Webster at their head, who for the next half dozen years were fast giving their party a definite policy, very similar to that of its most valuable element, the former national republicans. Among these were, Evans, Kent and Fessenden, of Maine; Slade, Collamer and George P. Marsh, of Vermont; J. Q. Adams, Winthrop, Choate, Everett, John Davis, Abbolt Lawrence and Briggs, of Massachusetts; Truman Smith, of Connecticut; Granger, Fillmore, Seward, Spencer, N. K. Hall, Tallmadge, Weed and Greeley, of New York; Dayton, of New Jersey; Forward, Meredith and Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania; Bayard, Clayton and Rodney, of Delaware; Kennedy, Cost Johnson and Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland; Archer, Botts, Leigh and W. B. Preston, of Virginia; Graham, Mangum, Rayner, Clingman and Badger, of North Carolina; Legaré, of South Carolina; Berrien, Forsyth, King, Stephens and Toombs, of Georgia; H. W. Hilliard, of Alabama; S. S. Prentiss, of Mississippi; Bell and Jarnagin, of Tennessee; Crittenden, Morehead, Garret Davis, Wickliffe, John White and Underwood, of Kentucky; McLean, Giddings, Vinton, Corwin and Ewing, of Ohio; R. W. Thompson and Caleb B. Smith, of Indiana; and [1105] Woodbridge and Howard, of Michigan. Of the old nullifier element, Rives, Wise, Gilmer and Upshur drifted off to the opposite party under Tyler’s leadership.

Harrison’s sudden death, and the accession of Tyler, were severe blows to the rising party, for they placed it temporarily under the feet of the remnants of its former allies, the nullifiers, just as it had begun to learn that it had a policy of its own which nullifiers could not support. But the whigs themselves, and particularly Clay, made the blow needlessly severe. Seeing here an opportunity to secure for himself an undisputed party dictatorship in a war on Tyler, he declared war and carried it on a l’outrance. Its bank details are elsewhere given. (See BANK CONTROVERSIES, IV.) In 1842, by the act of Aug. 30, the whigs secured a protective tariff, closely following that of 1832, but only after sacrificing a section continuing the distribution of land to the states (see INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS), because of which Tyler had vetoed the whole bill. In the elections of 1842 for the second congress of Tyler’s term, the democrats obtained a two-thirds majority in the house, a result usually regarded as an infallible presage of the succeeding presidential election. And yet the whigs do not seem to have really been weakened. Their convention met at Baltimore, May 1, 1844, the first and last really representative convention of the party. For the presidency Clay was nominated by acclamation; and for the vice-presidency Theodore Frelinghuysen, then of New York city, was nominated on the third ballot.

For the first time the party produced a platform, a model in its way, as follows:

“that these [whig] principles may be summed up as comprising a well-regulated national currency; a tariff for revenue to defray the necessary expenses of the government, and discriminating with special reference to the protection of the domestic labor of the country; the distribution of the proceeds from the sales of the public lands; a single term for the presidency; a reform of executive usurpations; and generally such an administration of the affairs of the country as shall impart to every branch of the public service the greatest practicable efficiency, controlled by a well-regulated and wise economy.”

Even beyond the day of election the whigs were confident of success. But their original ally, Calhoun, had been for some years at work on a project which was, directly and indirectly, to dissolve the fragile bond which as yet united the northern and southern whigs, and made them a national party. It seems wrong to attribute the proposed annexation of Texas (see ANNEXATIONS) entirely to a desire for extension of the slave area: it seems to have been a subsidiary object with southern democratic leaders to throw into politics a question which would cost Clay either his northern or his southern support, and the scheme was more successful even than they had hoped. The popular vote was nearly equal, and the electoral votes were 170 for Polk to 105 for Clay; but in the former were included the thirty-five votes of New York and the six votes of Michigan. In both these states the Polk electors were only successful because the abolitionists (see ABOLITION) persisted in running a candidate of their own.

Had their votes gone to Clay, as they would have done but for Calhoun’s Texas question and Clay’s trimming attitude upon it, Clay would have been president by 146 electoral votes to 129, and a very slight popular majority. What added bitterness to the disappointment was, that the democrats had taken a leaf from the whig book of 1840, by being protectionist in some states, and free trade in others; that Polk’s majority of 699 in Louisiana was the fruit of about 1,000 unblushingly fraudulent votes in Plaquemines parish; that fraudulent voting and naturalization were charged upon the New York city democrats; and that Texas annexation had cost Clay the vote of all the southern states except Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. The consequent bitterness of feeling died away, except in one respect, the foreign vote and its almost solid opposition to the whigs.

Ireland has conquered the country which England lost, wrote one of Clay’s correspondents after the election; and the permanence of this feeling did much to turn the whig party into the native American, or know-nothing party of after years.

Texas Annexation

The question of Texas annexation had not sufficed to destroy the bond between northern and southern whigs, for, while both opposed this and subsequent annexations, the former did so for fear of slavery extension, and the latter nominally on economic grounds, but really for fear of the introduction of the slavery question into politics. But the war with Mexico gave their opponents another opportunity, which they used. The act recognizing the existence of war with Mexico declared the war to have arisen by the act of the republic of Mexico.

The object was to force the whigs to vote against the war, a vote much more dangerous to a southern than to a northern whig, or else array the two elements of the party against one another. The whigs managed to evade it, however, most of them by refusing to vote, some senators by adding formal protests to their affirmative votes; and fourteen in the house and two in the senate (Thomas Clayton and John Davis) found courage to vote against the bill. During the war the whigs voted steadily for supplies to carry it on, on the principle that an American army had been thrust into danger and must be supported; so that the democrats made very little political capital out of it. Indeed, the next congress, which met in 1847, had a slight whig majority in the house, a strong indication of a whig success in the presidential election of 1848.

Wilmot

But the Wilmot proviso (see that title) had been introduced, and it was to find at last the joint in the whig armor. As the effort to restrict slavery from admission to the new territories went on, it became more evident month by month that it would be supported by the mass of the northern whigs, and opposed by the mass of the southern [1106] whigs, and month by month the wedge was driven deeper. Men began to talk freely of a reorganization of parties, but that could only affect the whigs, for their opponents were already running the advocates of the proviso out of their organization. As the presidential election of 1848 drew near, the nomination of Taylor, urged at first by mass meetings of men of all parties, became more essential to the whigs. The democrats, after banishing the proviso men, were sufficiently homogeneous to be able to defy the slavery question; no such step could be taken by the whigs, and they needed a candidate who could conceal their want of homogeneity.

In the north Taylor’s antipathy to the use of the veto power was a guarantee that he would not resist the proviso, if passed by congress; in the south he had the tact which enabled him to answer an inquiring holder of 100 slaves thus briefly and yet suggestively:

“I have the honor to inform you that I, too, have been all my life industrious and frugal, and that the fruits thereof are mainly invested in slaves, of whom I own three hundred. Yours truly. Z. Taylor.”

And his nomination was pressed harder upon the whigs by his declared intention to remain in the field in any event, as a people’s candidate.

Nevertheless, when the whig convention met at Philadelphia, June 7, 1848, though Taylor had 111 votes, Clay had 97, Scott 43, Webster 22, and 6 were scattering. It was not until the next day, on the fourth ballot, that Taylor was nominated by 171 votes to 107 for all others. Fillmore was nominated for the vice-presidency on the second ballot, by 173 to 101 for all others. Clay had thus received his discharge from party service, for he was now over seventy years of age, and evidently this was his last appearance before a whig convention. To Webster, also, though five years younger than Clay, the blow was severe, and he publicly declared Taylor’s nomination one which was eminently unfit to be made; but he and the other northern whigs finally supported the nomination. Taylor carried all the middle and eastern states (except Maine and New Hampshire), and, in the south, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina and Tennessee, and was elected by 163 to 127 electoral votes.

In both the north and the south he had also a plurality of the popular vote, the vote for Van Buren (see FREE-SOIL PARTY) preventing him from having a majority. But the election of Taylor was in itself deceptive. It was the result of democratic division in one state, New York, whose thirty-six votes would have elected Cass by an exact reversal of the electoral votes as above given. The division had really very little basis in principle, but was one of those contests between national and state party machines which have always been common in that state (see NEW YORK); but it sufficed to elect Taylor, and to give the whigs almost as many representatives in congress as their opponents.

New Congress

The meeting of the new congress in 1849 showed the first strong sign of whig dissolution. A half dozen southern whigs, headed by Toombs of Georgia, insisted on a formal condemnation of the proviso by the whig caucus; and when that body refused to consider the resolution, the Toombs faction refused to act further with the party. The loss was not large, but it was the opening which was very soon to be fatal. All through the session, which ended with the compromise of 1850 (see COMPROMISES, V.), the whole body of southern whigs exhibited a growing disposition to act together, even in opposition to the northern whigs, wherever the interests of slavery were brought into question. On the final votes, in August and September, 1850, it is practically impossible to distinguish s

Author: Alexander Johnstor

Historical Background

The Whig Party, in the United States, was for most of its history concerned with promoting internal improvements, such as roads, canals, railroads, deepening of rivers, etc. This was of interest to many Westerners in this period, isolated as they were and in need of markets. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig for most of this period.

The name came into use in the 1680s in England when there was the threat of establishment of a line of Catholic Kings, starting with James II. The Protestant element, who held that Parliament could prevent such a succession, came to be called Whigs after a radical Presbyterian group in Scotland, the Whigamores, while the party tending to the doctrine of the rights of King James II (and naturally containing Catholic as well as simply royalist elements), were called Tories after some bands of Irish Catholics who had been driven to become outlaws due to the crusade of the English against the church they clung to.

The designation of British loyalists during the American Revolution – as Tories – is well known. And many on the revolutionary side must have identified with the English Whigs, which continued to be the party in favor of Parliament’s keeping the king in check.

During Andrew Jackson’s presidency the first really well organized political parties came into existence. The Democratic Party, with Jackson himself as the rallying point, brought about radical changes, including a presidency that for the first time threatened to overshadow Congress.

Jackson changed the perception of the presidential veto. It had been interpreted as something the president could do if he considered a bill unconstitutional, though the Constitution doesn’t really state it that way. Jackson eventually laid down the precedent that the president could veto a bill on basically any grounds.

Jackson also took a free hand in changing the membership of his cabinet in a way that no other President had done. He had his first cabinet resign en masse, which to many at the time looked like the “fall of the government”, but he treated it as something a President had the right to do.

All of this lead the opposition, to speak of King Andrew I, and to picture Jackson that way in political cartoons.

The End of the Party

Henry Clay and others had called themselves National Republicans -based on their vision of the United States as nation while others saw it as a confederation of states – taking strong national measures like building inter-state roads. When a number of southern Democrats like John C. Calhoun, threw their lot in with the National Republicans, they were united only by their opposition to the growing “kinglike” strength of the president. Thus they came to be called Whigs, implying that the Jacksonians were Tories, in favor of “King” Andrew.

The Whig party ran, for some years, mostly in strong second place to the Democrats. They elected William Henry Harrison, in the famous “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” campaign of nonsense, copied from the Jackson Democrats, but Harrison (the hero of Tippecanoe) died just days into his presidency, and was succeded by Tyler, one of the anti-Jackson democrats, who showed himself to be basically a firm Democrat, and was “read out of the Whig party”. They also elected Zachary Taylor (another war hero and no politician) who was died fairly early in the term, making Millard Filmore president.

After the Jackson era, the Whig party drifted towards its strongest elements, the national improvements men. That tendency was strongest by far in the North; the South being in those days almost purely agrarian.

In the 1850s when the nation became increasingly divided over slavery, a new Republican party formed, primarily to keep slavery quarantined off in the South, while Southern sentiment was for their right to move, with their way of life, into any new territory. Their methods of agriculture and their best cash crops tended to deplete the soil, so that Southerners were among the most aggressive Western expansionists.

The Republican Party, while it also attracted many anti-slavery Democrats, drew off so many Whigs that they effectively killed the Whig party. The Whigs were also badly hurt by the short-lived Native American or Know-Nothing party, which was primarily anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. This party was strong in urban areas, which had also been a Whig stronghold. The last year the Whigs had a presidential candidate was in 1856.

(Source: Hal Morris)