THE WHIG CONTEXT

 

This posting makes certain assumptions.  Most important, it assumes that the reader has reviewed the timeline this blog offers in a series of postings preceding this one.  It describes the major events associated with the Whig Party in the years roughly from 1830 to 1860.  As the last posting indicates, this blog will proceed to evaluate the federalist nature of that party indicating whether what happened or what the party promoted operationalized or counteracted federalist values.

          Initially, this effort will rely heavily on the work of Daniel Walker Howe,[1] both directly and with the help of a review by Allen C. Guelzo.[2]  To begin, one has to contextualize Howe’s work as a somewhat reaction to a line of thought that attempted to associate the main nemesis of the Whigs, that being Andrew Jackson, to a more popular image.  Previous to Howe’s book, there was an effort to bind the legacy of Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

In simple terms, the picture promoted by such books as Arthur Schlesinger’s, The Age of Jackson,[3] casts Jackson as a champion of the lower classes while the Whigs represented the emerging business upper class.  Howe’s work takes a different slant to describe the Whigs. 

Instead of championing the Eastern elites, bent on obstructing class-leveling plan by Jackson (in the fashion later taken up by Roosevelt’s New Deal), the Whigs are portrayed by Howe as promoting the interests of small businesses and those who advanced them in the role of commercial producers. 

By doing so, Whigs can be seen as transformers, optimistic enablers who seriously went about adopting the messages from religious moralists and thinkers of the dominant (mostly pro Protestant based) denominations.  Of particular preferences were those ideals that bolstered personal transformation and ambitious outlooks of self-advancement (Horatio Alger comes to mind). 

According to Guelzo, Howe began his effort to tell the Whig story not from the perspective of a burgeoning economic class seeking political favor, but found their mental landscape – their assumptions, values, and beliefs – a more fertile subject.  And there he found the story of a group seeking to escape what was for them a dreary life that one found on the farm and instead sought one of commerce on a global stage with the promise of it being more alluring, more dynamic, and more diverse.

And with that, the Whigs introduced a more cosmopolitan perspective of the American discourse.  In that description, Howe expounds on several elements.  The first is “improvement” as portrayed in the Whigs’ admonishment, at an individual level, to transform oneself and, in turn, with the aim of transforming the national ambition. 

That was an ambition resting on a national perspective (as opposed to local, limited views), on a sense of morality replete with duties (as opposed to equality and rights), and on a commitment to the unity of the nation (as opposed to localism or sectionalism).  In hindsight, with the sectional conflict on the rise – especially over slavery and other issues – one can see a limited lifespan for this party.

One should remember, Jacksonian politics, even if the President riled against South Carolina’s nullification claims, favored states maintaining their prerogatives.  Instead, the Whigs argued for an expanded role for the federal government.  Guelzo writes,

[I]t was the Whigs who advocated an expansive federal government – but it was a government that would seek to promote a general liberal, middle-class national welfare, promoting norms of Protestant morality and underwriting the expansion of industrial capitalism by means of government-funded transportation projects (to connect people and markets), high protective tariffs for American manufacturing, and a national banking system to regulate and standardize the American economy.  Howe’s Whigs were the embodiment … of [the] upward striving, of the triumph of reason over passion, [and] of the positive liberal state … [4]

In short, they opposed Jacksonianism’s exaltation of agriculture, equating of land as the measure of wealth, and the parochial interests and perspectives of subsistence farming. 

The opposing, landed people were for the most part unaffected by a fluctuating economy as experienced with the Panic of 1837, especially compared to those who were more dependent on monetized assets.  The landed contingency cared little for notions of economic transformation, had little use for moral transformation, and saw the purveyors of such morals as questionable characters.  Overall, such messaging and promotion were seen as encroaching on these farmers’ independence and the independence of their localities.

In terms of national politics, such localism supported the Democratic Party with its support of states’ rights.  That party also found its messaging ironically appealing to immigrants, since the party was cast as the anti-middle-class lifestyle party.  So, what developed was a good body of opposing views between Whigs and Democrats as to whose interests should be protected and advanced.

Howe encapsulates these diverging interests:

 

To put things very broadly, the Whigs proposed a society that would be economically diverse but culturally uniform; the Democrats preferred the economic uniformity of a society of small farmers and artisans but were more tolerant of cultural and moral diversity.[5] 

           

Howe’s work affords the Whig legacy a bit of rehabilitation after Schlesinger’s book on Jackson did it so much harm.  While one does not need to be a neo-Whig, one can ascribe to them a more positive role in the development of American thought.

And how does Howe’s depiction of the Whigs, to extent it is accurate, allows one to consider the degree to which the party represented federalist values?[6]  The overall thrust of those values promotes social capital and civic humanism.  That is,

 

·      Social capital means a societal quality characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.[7]

·      Civic humanism is defined as a communal bias which holds that citizens are, through the polity, in a partnership.  As such, the individual is disposed to sacrifice personal interest for the common good or, if not, at least arrange for personal interests not to be antagonistic to the common good.[8]

 

 Recently, this blogger has been introduced to a new term, that being “herrenvolk.”  According to a Wikipedia definition, one has a Herrenvolk democracy when only the majority ethnic group takes part in the government.  Minorities are disenfranchised.  Essayist, Thomas Brown, attributes this view to Jacksonians during those antebellum years.[9]  Whigs represented a more inclusive view through their ideological attachment to a civic humanism and their political impartiality as personal views are called upon to form a sufficient level of social capital.

          So, to evaluate the Whigs based on the information offered in this posting, one can attribute to them a strong federalist bias, especially as it is expressed with a national perspective.  Given how the US originated, of bringing together ever-growing polities – more local arrangements coming together to first form regional entities, then state entities, and finally a national entity – one can readily understand how at each stage certain challenges were faced as common folks were asked to broaden their social views.  The Whigs took on the more inclusive disposition.

This expansion had various elements, including from how it was holistically experienced to how such individual policies – the establishment of a national bank or the imposition of tariffs – to how it affected people’s daily lives.  This blog will review these more individual elements in the next posting.

---

[1] Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1979).

[2] Allen C. Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 22, 2 (2001), accessed August 19, 2021, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0022.206/--rise-and-fall-of-the-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics?rgn=main;view=fulltext .

[3] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.  The Age of Jackson (Boston, MA:  Little, Brown, and Company, Bay Back Books, 1988).

[4] Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

[5] Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, 20.

[6] This blogger, in his published book, Toward a Federated Nation, proposes a hierarchy federalist values.  It takes the following form: Trump Value:  societal welfare (through societal survival and societal health); Key Instrumental Values:  constitutional integrity (as federal liberty), equality (as regulated equality), communal democracy, democratic pluralism and diversity, compact-al arrangements, earned trust, loyalty, patriotism, justice; Operational Values (partial listing):  political engagement, due process, legitimate authority, critical and transparent deliberation (or collaboration), inclusive problem-solving, countervailing powers, privacy, universality of human rights, tolerance, non-violence, responsible ambition, teamwork, consideration of others, economic sufficiency, security, localism, expertise.

[7] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

[8] See Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, edited by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.

[9] Guelzo, “The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael Holt,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.

A GRADING AFFAIR

This posting will be dedicated to conduct some housekeeping.  As indicated in the last one, this posting will begin an analysis of the Whig Party’s history.  The main question asked of that history will be how it, as a political entity, supported or undermined federalist values.  Since one cannot look into people’s minds or hearts, one is left predominately to know what the party promoted through its rhetoric and through the policies it proposed and, when in power, instituted.

          But as with most of history, judgements cannot be rendered one way or the other.  They instead fall in degrees, leaning one way or another.  The same here; the various developments of that party’s history can be judged whether the acts of those partisans were very federal, a bit so, or not at all.  Oh, there is one more degree, they could have acted against being federal.  Perhaps, to appreciate this approach of evaluating historical movements or other sets of events, an example of such an analysis would be helpful.

          The historian Allen C. Guelzo provides such an example.  Actually, this example could have been part of this blog’s review of the colonial history it reported in the past.  The aim of that review was to describe how the colonial years steered the American development down a federalist path.  For example, it described how the Puritanical beliefs of those early colonialists set the stage for covenantal/compact-al understanding of how a polity should be established.  That, of course, was judged to be federalist development.  But as already alluded to, this was but one nudge toward a federalist result.

          Here’s another.  Guelzo makes a telling distinction among how the Spanish, the French, and the English went about establishing colonies or overseas possessions.[1]  To begin with, all three saw the efforts as money-making enterprises, but the Spanish and the French had a more direct control over what happened in the new lands.  In those cases, the respective monarchs took ownership of what was claimed under the king’s name.  The monarch held a good bit of control by directly naming the governors and viceroys who, in turn, governed those areas.

          By and large, the king exerted quite of bit of interest since profits were to be had from those far off areas.  But for the British – and also the Dutch – a different story unfolded.  There, the monarch did not have direct control, but a franchise system was established.  And for a variety of reasons – mismanagement, undercapitalization, etc. – in all of the various colonies, those business arrangements proved to be failures.  And that resulted in the Americans being allowed to manage their own affairs.

          In all, the colonies were mostly on their own, and this independence was in place in a relatively short time, that is, within fifty years from the first settlement in Virginia began.  For the British, that is the Imperial Government in London, this was a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it laid claim to the vast land area in North America along the Atlantic seacoast, without spending any money to defend it.  Colonials were expected to provide for their own defense.  But this hands-off policy would have its consequences.

          Before the Virginia Company, the initial chartered entity meant to profit from that colony, came to a formal end, the settlers of that colony already organized themselves to establish the House of Burgesses.  This, not-so-legal legislature provided the necessary “rules of the game” for the colony to function.  That was established in 1624, only seventeen years after the colony was first settled.  It levied taxes and set limits on the colonial governor.  And the London authorities, during these years, let its colonies do what they wished – it was cheaper that way.  After all, there was an ocean in the way.

          But this neglect led to a different sort of legislative body in the American colonies than what one found in the British Parliament.  Parliament basically represented few Britons.  Its House of Lords was set up to protect the nobility or the remnants of the feudal system that used to prevail in Britain.  The House of Commons represented the successful business class.  Estimates have it that 40 percent of the nation’s wealth was owned by the top 1 percent of the population.  And that wealth rested on the fact that these elites owned 70 percent of the land.  Consequently, the politics of that nation did not involve the bulk of its population.

          Not so in America, there, partly due to cheap land, two-thirds of the population owned 60 percent of the land.  Colonial elites – its gentry – owned 30 percent.  So, while the elites were elites, they were tempered by a sufficiently empowered non-elite.  After all, when seeking either positions of power or seeking the passage of some policy proposal, the rich had to cater or convince the lower class of the prudence of what was being proposed. 

And those of the lower class were mostly made up of independent, small farmers with what one can imagine, definite views of good and bad, right or wrong.  And key was this notion of independence from the rich in their own colony or the rich or imperial powers of Britain.  What that meant was those royal governors, though they had significant levels of power (e.g., they appointed judges), they encountered meaningful restraints.  Always conscious of a potential crowd to voice some objection to their officiating, they thought twice before offending them.

How bad could this popularism get?  “In 1736, unhappy Bostonians gathered at midnight and demolished the town marketplace as a protest against the construction of the marketplace by the town selectmen as a means of regulating public food sales.”[2]  That was but one case of such uprisings.  By the time of the Revolutionary War, tar and feathering incidences became common enough.[3]  The common folk were a definite political force in the American scene – sometimes not exemplifying justified reasons for their reactions nor for the modes of reaction they were disposed to employ.

The point was that the British had to deal with a more united people – within the various colonies – in which each population felt it had a stake in what transpired with its “government,” its colony, and its immediate community.  One senses from Guelzo a true sense of “being in it together.”  That is, these early Americans, in part due to these developments, felt the compact-al relationship they had created.

So, the reader can guess how this development ranks in this writer’s judgement about how federated it is.  It definitely supported, quite vigorously, a cultural partnership, although it could exhibit profound animosities among the colonialists more from a sense of disappointment or judging others not meeting their responsibilities to uphold the common good.  Were there incidents of selfishness or other self-centered motivations?  Of course there were.  But the general orientation was one in which all were in this struggle together.

So, in terms of what is coming up in this blog, this blogger will look at the various developments the Whig Party timeline highlighted and apply the above graded judgements as to how federal the developments were.  Again, an event will be judged as to whether it describes a supportive, assumed, irrelevant, or contradictory turn in establishing or maintaining a federalist cultural bias.  The overall hypothesis is that the events in total supported a federalist bent or at least did not counter that construct’s values.

---

[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – transcript books – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).

 [2] Ibid., 75-76.

                [3] Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution:  How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York, NY:  Perennial, 2002).  To be clear, Raphael does not present evidence of a federalist cultural bent.  If anything, his book is a pro-critical view.