WHIGS’ LASTING LEGACY

 

This blog of late has been sharing the views of the American Whig Party – that were mostly anti-slavery and probusiness in the early 1800s – as reported by Michael F. Holt.[1]  His admiration for that party is not difficult to discern, and he owns up to it toward the end of his book.  That party’s failure to survive, Holt suggests, might be considered as a reason for the tragedy of the Civil War.

            What does he share that suggests this thought-provoking claim?  To begin, with its demise, the nation lacked two major parties.  Given the funneling function a party provides (described two postings ago), legitimate interests were left without an appropriate voice in the national political arena.  This, of course, adds to the disruptive environment that the general state of polarization was imposing on the nation as it marched toward civil war. 

Also, as compared to the Democrats, the Whigs were uncompromisingly pro-union.  As the “anti-slavery” party, anti-slavery Northerners were, without the Whigs, more or less forced to vote Republican.  That was a newer party, which was recruiting many Whigs, including Abraham Lincoln.  But that switch had a price.

The Republicans, while an anti-slavery group, was still, in 1860 more of a regional entity – that of the North – and its candidate winning the presidency added to the insult Southerners felt.  Here, they perceived that the North was going to dictate to them and that intensified their demand to secede.  And secede they did.

There is a question Holt leads his readers to ask:  if the Whig Party had survived, could its rhetoric have convinced the South to stay in the Union?  The Whigs, according to Holt, played that role in 1850.  This blogger questions that.  Slavery was an issue then, but its vibrancy grew during the ’50s.

 How?  As the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 took hold, both sides saw that the addition of each newer state – a number that grew as a result of the Mexican American War – promised a pitched battle between pro and anti-slavery forces.  For example, by 1860 the nation experienced the consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  It led to a great deal of disruption – e.g., the horrors associated with “bleeding Kansas” in which pro and anti-slavery forces engaged in guerrilla warfare against each other.

In addition, while the Whigs did serve to encourage union, its very lack of a more responsible rationale or ideology seemed not to meet the challenge of the time.  That is, as this blog has reported, the party prided itself in neither lacking any national ideology nor engaging in effective disciplinary practices to keep its members in line.  While American political parties are not known for well-thought-out political treatises, given the profound challenge slavery represented, that party, to be a force, needed to be clear so as to convince or even sway a national electorate.

On the other hand, the act of seceding was no small matter and perhaps the addition of any meaningful voice counseling against it might have made a difference.  Either way, one can surmise that if the Whigs did not prevent the Civil War, one can safely judge that the Civil War or its approach provided the last nail in that party’s coffin.  There was no Whig or near Whig candidate in the election of 1864.  Some limit the years of the Whig Party from 1833 to 1856.  This blogger can agree with those dates and would only point out there was no coroner to establish the death of a political party. 

In summary, Allen C. Guelzo offers the following general observations of the party:

 

·      Initially, the party was spurred by a profound hatred of Andrew Jackson.  They saw Jackson as a militarist threat to American republican governance.

·      It sought to represent the interest of commercial enterprises – that of small businesspeople, burgeoning industrialists, cash-crop agricultural interests, and merchants.

·      In representing those interests, they fought for internal improvements and a higher tariff rate.

·      To assist business but also to allow the national government to fund healthy national government projects, they fought for the rechartering of a national bank.

·      And they tended to ally themselves with moral voices one found in collegiate campuses.  Here, the party seemed to adopt a rhetoric echoing that of evangelical Protestants – values such as personal responsibility, thrift, and sobriety could be easily found in the language they employed.  A federalist message of a “harmony of interests” along with a general sense of optimism can also be easily detected in their campaigning.  This contrasted with the language of victimization that the Democrats used.[2]

 

Guelzo writes,

 

As Daniel Walker Howe has put it, the Whigs promoted a society which would be diverse but culturally uniform.  Democrats preferred economic uniformity and equality, especially of an agricultural or agrarian sort, but tolerated the spread of cultural, ethnic and moral diversity.[3]

 

And with that, this blog is ready to move on – although it reserves the right to revisit the Whigs at some future time.  This blogger, fortunately or unfortunately, finds that party particularly relatable to the ongoing themes this blog addresses.

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[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[2] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).

[3] Ibid., 16.

A SOFT FOUNDATION

 

After the last posting’s short lesson on politics – from an old civics teacher – this posting continues Michael F. Holt’s account of the final days of the Whig Party.[1]  Despite a record of bouncing back – albeit within a short history – as the 1850s fell upon the American landscape, the Whig Party was experiencing the consequences of a succession of election loses.  That was a meaningful level of defections which included its national chairman, Truman Smith. 

And then there was the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska proposal that finally led to the party’s final days, but not due to what one might suspect.  Many of the party’s woes had to do with its internal division between its northern and southern contingents.  And given that the Kansas-Nebraska issue had to do with the expansion of slavery, one would suspect it was the issue further dividing the remaining Whigs.  But it turns out that both segments of the party, at least initially, were antagonistic toward the proposed legislation. 

Its most consequential aspect was that it did away with the Missouri Compromise formula as to where slavery would be allowed to expand by introducing its feature of popular sovereignty.  That is, in the two new states that the bill was to create, the people of each were to determine whether slavery would be allowed to exist.

This was judged to be so egregious by anti-slavery advocates that it encouraged Southern Whigs to join with Northern Whigs in their opposition to the bill.  Perhaps due to this newfound unity, the remaining Whigs felt they could survive as a party until the 1856 election.  But interim elections, both at the state and national levels, would prove to be too detrimental.  That’s because newer parties garnered enough popularity or disenchanted Democratic voters took up various Whig positions to prevent the Whigs from gaining ground. 

These other parties included the Know-Nothings, the Free-Soilers, and the newly formed Republicans.  The end was finally obvious when in the next Whig national convention, in Baltimore, only 144 delegates showed up and half of them were from near-by New York.  Given the events that led to this state of affairs, one might question various aspects of the American political scene in those antebellum years.

For example, can a political party be too federalist for its own good?  In answering that question, one needs to be careful about how related terms are used.  Is it too federal to rely on the politics of localities when a party, in order to survive, needs to succeed at a national level when the polity in question is of ample size such as that of the United States? 

Holt writes,

 

State legislatures and state nominating conventions met while congressional Whigs struggled with [the outstanding national concerns and] … what happened in those legislatures and conventions decisively influenced Whigs' behavior in Congress, just as developments in Washington shaped how rival Whig factions opposed each other within the states.[2]

 

While one can see such goings-on as the fate of all political parties – as part of the funneling the last posting highlighted – with the Whigs one took this behavior to a dysfunctional level.  And in that, one learns that federal politics must sufficiently respect the various arenas – the various levels of governance – in which it chooses to participate.  In that, the party should recognize the augmentation of power and consequences – which increases as one advances to the national level – that each arena can entertain.

          What was telling, for example, was the poor showing of the Whigs in getting control of the US Senate.  In those days, state legislatures named the respective senators for each state.  So, localism held inordinate influence over who served in the upper house of the US Congress.  Poor vote getting at the local level, as the Whigs experienced, had its affect up the federalist chain and the Whigs found it more and more difficult to have a voice in that national body. 

The problems that party confronted were many and this concern over Senate representation was only one.  Another already mentioned in this blog was over patronage.  The Abraham Lincoln case is readily cited as an example.  He chose to not seek reelection to his House seat in 1849 in the hopes of securing a bureaucratic job, a Land Office appointment in Zachary Taylor’s administration and someone else was chosen.

Taylor, a Whig, did offer him the governorship of the Oregon Territory, but Lincoln declined it.  However, the case illustrates how the party found it difficult to reward local partisans who needed to be content in order to get out the vote on election day.  Those partisans worked, through a variety of strategies, to get fellow party members to vote.  Analysis of many of the Whig losses reveals that they were caused by a lack of Whig turn out in those elections.

Bottom line, the party did not handle patronage well enough to maintain the support of many around the country. The demise of the party is probably best understood through the review Holt gives his readers of the many varied stories, like that of Lincoln, emanating from more local developments in not only state capitals but town halls and other political centers.  That is, they are told through many stories that Holt tells in the pages of his book. 

But of importance here is to note how federal the system was during those years and how much the institutions of the system worked their way through the challenges that a federal approach offers those who work in its “trenches.”  Of these developments, Allen Guelzo gives his review of Holt’s work a flavor of those stories.  He shares,

 

And Holt clearly revels in the telling of them, in the local cut-and-thrust of politics, of the ill-timed public letter, of the public witticism that gets twisted by skilled opponents around a candidate's neck for life, of desertions, reconciliations, petty vindications, and even pettier vindictiveness.[3]

 

And in this, as polarization rose in the years leading up to the Civil War, one sees a diminishing loyalty to federalist commitments, at least at the national level.  It was still the dominant view of the way Americans saw governance and politics, but the immediate political needs of the time took primary focus among them and the centrifugal forces from local politics to that of Washington took hold.

The issues that incited this sense of animosity among Americans were several, but slavery, what was an incubating problem, began to burst in the consciousness of Americans of the 1850s.  It was demonstrated in the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and it served to give that polarization its shape and form.  With that stage, one is ready to consider the final nail in the coffin of the Whig Party – the banging will be described in the next posting.

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[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[2] Ibid., 460.

[3] 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 (Summer 2004, 71-86)), accessed July, 23, 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 .