The United States Of America

The Constitution And Democracy

Whig Party
Whig Party, hwìg pär'te, a Political Party in the United States during the second quarter of the 19th century, formed to oppose president Andrew JACKSON  and the Democratic Party. The term Whig came into common use in 1834, and persisted until the disintegration of the party after the presidential Election of 1856. The anti-Jackson groups drew upon the political history of two revolutions, the American and 17th century English, for their name. In both cases the opposition to the king had called themselves Whigs. Now it was "King Andrew" Jackson who was the alleged tyrant.

The Whigs' direct political antecedents were the National Republicans, the administration party during John Quincy ADAMS ' presidency (1825-1829). They advocated a nationalistic economic policy (the "American System"), but were stymied by the rising power of the Jacksonians, who were thereafter called Democrats. Jackson's inauguration in 1829 began the period of National Republican opposition and prepared the ground for the coalition of political forces which formed the Whig Party. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts became the party's leading figures. Webster was more of a nationalist than Clay, as he demonstrated in his famed Reply to Hayne of South Carolina (Jan. 26-27, 1830). But both men urged a program of tariff protection, federally sponsored communication projects (internal improvements), continuation of the national bank, and a conservative public land sales policy--the "American System," much of which could be traced back to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist economic policy of 1791. This was a program with especially strong appeal to merchants and manufacturers whose business operations went beyond state lines. Clay made the president's veto of a bill to recharter the second Bank of the United States the key issue of the election of 1832, but Jackson easily won reelection.

State sovereignty, not economic nationalism, was the idea which brought a significant addition to the ranks of those opposing Jackson. John C. CALHOUN of South Carolina broke his alliance with Jackson when he realized that he would not be the next Democratic president, and the split widened during South Carolina's attempt of nullification of federal tariff laws. Jackson reacted sternly to this defiance, giving Clay an opportunity to introduce a compromise tariff bill in February 1833. Calhoun approved the compromise and for several years acted in uneasy association with other anti-Jacksonians. Another source of recruits was the Anti-Masonic Party, particularly strong in New York and Pennsylvania. The stated purpose of this strange phenomenon in American history was to combat the supposed threat of Masonic power over judicial and political institutions. It also provided younger politicians with a convenient means for advancement. Among those Anti-Masons who became important Whig leaders were William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed of New York, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. With the addition of two more groups, antinullification states' rights Southerners and the so-called Democratic Conservatives, who opposed their party's financial policies after 1836, the Whig coalition was complete, but hardly united.

Hard times following the panic of 1837 and the popularity of their candidate, Gen. William Henry HARRISON , brought the Whigs victory in 1840 over Jackson's successor, Martin VAN BUREN . The new Whig managers stole a turn from the Democrats by outdoing them in raucous electioneering during the "Log Cabin" campaign--the most tumultuous presidential campaign the nation had yet seen. (This was the formula for the only other Whig victory, that of Gen. Zachary TAYLOR  in 1848). Harrison's death on April 4, 1841 (one month after assuming office), was especially disastrous for the party. John TYLER , a Virginia states' rights former Democrat, replaced him and vetoed a succession of key Whig tariff and banking bills. The frustrated Whigs read their president out of the party, but the last pre-Civil War opportunity for passage of a modified "American System" had slipped by.

When the Whigs next won the presidency in 1848 the nation was deeply involved in the problems of slavery and national expansion. With disunion threatening, the aged Whig leaders Clay and Webster tried, in January and March 1850, to compromise the main points of sectional friction. President Taylor blocked their moves, but his death on July 9, made Millard FILLMORE , a party man from New York, president. While the Compromise of 1850 was not solely a Whig accomplishment, the Whig leadership had been prominent in its passage. Webster, now Fillmore's secretary of state, dreamed of capturing the presidency at the head of a Union movement in 1852. But both major parties accepted the Compromise, and on June 16, 1852, the Whigs reverted to form in nominating another general, Winfield Scott. Two weeks later Clay was dead and Webster died in October. The passing of these two great figures heralded the Whig disaster of 1852. The party never recovered from this defeat. Its call for moderation and Union, by now far more prominent than the national economic policy, became ever more ineffective as the Civil War neared. Southern Whigs, fearful of Northern encroachment on slaveholding rights, thought the Democrats more receptive to their interests; and a key number of Northern Whigs had already moved into the antislavery Free Soil Party, which had been formed on the eve of the 1848 election. 

The rise of the Republican and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing parties completed the Whig downfall. Defections to Republicanism were numerous, while the former Whig president, Fillmore, accepted the Know-Nothing nomination. A Whig national convention met in 1856, but simply endorsed the Fillmore ticket. Thus the party of Unionism came to an end, a victim of sectional controversy. In 1860 a feeble remnant of Whiggery organized a Constitutional Union Party, a last-ditch attempt to prevent disruption of the Union. They fared badly in the election; their constitutional conservatism was politically dead, and with it had perished the Whig Party.
It is difficult to speak of Whig doctrine in a party of such diverse elements. Politically, the opposition to Jackson dictated an attack on excessive presidential energy. Whigs believed Congress should initiate policy, not the president. Whig views of the Constitution ranged from Webster's nationalism to Tyler's states' rights views, with the nationalistic view predominating. But its national economic policy best characterized the Whigs, although not all those calling themselves Whigs accepted it. Politically, this was a premature nationalism, at a time when the effective power of government remained to a large extent with the states. The Democrats, through their generally superior state political organizations and greater identification with popular interests, were usually able to maintain their ascendancy. The absence of true nationalism before the Civil War, meant that the party with a national economic policy had to depend on nonsense and war heroes for its two national victories. With no Southerners in Congress during the Civil War, and with a former Illinois Whig, Abraham Lincoln, in the White House, the Republican Party finally passed much of the economic legislation on tariff and banking which the Whigs had long advocated.

Frank Otto Gatell
University of Maryland
For Further Reading
Barkan, Elliott Robert, Portrait of a Party: The Origins and Development of the Whig Persuasion in New York State (Garland 1988)
Brown, Thomas, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (Columbia Univ. Press 1985)
Carroll, E. Malcolm, Origins of the Whig Party (1925; reprint, Da Capo 1970)
Cole, Arthur C., The Whig Party in the South (1913; reprint, P. Smith 1959)
Ershkowitz, Herbert, The Origin of the Whig and Democratic Parties (Univ. Press of Am. 1983)
Howe, Daniel W., The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1980; reprint, Univ. of Chicago Press 1984)
Poage, George R., Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936; reprint, P. Smith 1965)