A MIXED BAG

 

The Whig story, as it was left in the last posting, has Henry Clay depriving John Tyler the nomination for president in 1844.  With that move, Clay steered the Whigs to support a national bank, but the actualization of a newer version of that institution was thwarted by his defeat at the polls in November.  Instead, a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson won; that was James Polk, a “dark horse” candidate not widely known.  Like Jackson, Polk was from Tennessee. 

Polk’s winning campaign emphasized national expansion and one first hears of “Manifest Destiny” being expressed.  That is that the US, as part of God’s plan, should extend from ocean to ocean, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  This entailed acquiring lands from Mexico and Great Britain.  Success in the Mexican-American War secures the acquisition of Texas, California, and other areas and that can be attributed to Polk’s one term in office. 

But while in office, along with expanding the nation, Polk took up the fight against the national bank.  He in effect finished what President Jackson began.  In a previous posting, this blogger mentioned that Jackson did the bank “in,” but that was not entirely true.  What he did do was withdraw all federal government funds from the bank.  He held the populist position that the bank favored the rich from the Northeast and, as a self-made man, saw this as undemocratic.  Like-minded Polk took up Jackson’s “Bank War” against the Second National Bank.

This national bank was established because the First Bank’s charter (the bank established through the leadership of Alexander Hamilton) ran out and, in the interim, without a national bank, the financing of the War of 1812 proved to be challenging.  The Second National Bank was chartered in 1814 and was still in existence through Jackson’s, Harrison’s, and Tyler’s presidencies.  In those years, the bank survived a legal attack which questioned its constitutional standing and a slew of scandals (apparently a bit of corruption was involved). 

In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court ruled it was a legal entity.  Despite that support, both Jackson and Tyler vetoed efforts by Congress, through the leadership of Clay, to re-charter the bank and its charter expired in 1836.  Polk maintained a hostility to any proposal to restart a national bank and he also worked to strengthen the nation’s banking system, reduced tariffs, and negotiated a land settlement with Great Britain that resulted in the acquisition of the Oregon Territory that would become the states of Oregon and Washington.

After that four-year term, Polk, probably because of his promise to serve just one term, but one can speculate health reasons as well, decides to not run for reelection.  He would die in 1849, months after leaving office.  By some accounts, Polk’s efforts have given him, in the eyes of many historians, high marks in terms of accomplishments.

In general, he maintained the Democratic Party’s overall anti-Eastern establishment view that can be traced all the way back to Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party.  This by elimination and attitude made first the Federalist (mostly through the initial leadership of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams) and then mostly the Whigs, the parties of the Eastern wealthy class. 

One cannot so readily classify the Whigs in this fashion given the antagonism Tyler displayed over the Second National Bank.  There were definite divisions among their ranks between its southern and northern contingencies.  As described below, this bifurcation will extend most vibrantly in terms of slavery, but other issues stoked the internal divisions of that party.

And that leaves one with the election of 1848.  In that election, ironically, the Mexican-American War produced, as has been the case in many of the nation’s wars, a war hero that would prove unbeatable in the subsequent presidential election.  The Whigs, in ’48, nominated such a hero in Zachary Taylor for president and a party leader, Millard Fillmore, for vice-president.  The Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, a former secretary of war in Jackson’s Administration. 

While Cass had war experience (War of 1812), he did not have the notoriety Taylor had in that Taylor led US forces to victory in the Battle of Buena Vista.  He also gained national recognition in the Second Seminole War.  The election was close in terms of the popular vote, but Taylor won 163 electoral votes of a possible 290. 

His service as president lasted roughly a year and half and was taken up with the debate of how slavery was going to be expanded, if at all, in the newly acquired western territories.  In July of 1849, Taylor dies of what doctors determined was a bacterial infection.  This elevated Millard Fillmore as chief executive.

During the 1840s and 1850s the Whigs generally acted to constrain slavery’s advancement and promoted a high tariff.  This latter position was seen as protection for burgeoning manufacturing businesses by raising the price of imported goods.  By this time, the incorporation of newly acquired lands to a growing US, was well institutionalized and a federalist model was generally accepted. 

The issue was not whether the new territories were to be federated polities, but who was to be included in those polities.  While the Whig Party did not take a position over slavery’s expansion, many of its leaders were strongly in favor of prohibiting its being allowed in the new territories.

Here a bit of context is helpful.  In 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise.  It set up a plan to handle the expansion of slavery in limiting its expansion to those states that would be established south of Missouri’s southern border with exception of Missouri which was to be admitted as a slave state. 

As the Polk’s term came to an end in 1849 and all the newly acquired lands to the west would eventually be a number of new states, the South wanted to secure that a good number of those states be slave states.  This was not only to secure “moral” support for the “peculiar institution,” but to maintain a balance in the US Senate which, if maintained, would secure slavery’s future in the US.

This newer political landscape, therefore, became a hot area of contention between those who supported slavery and those who wanted to do away with it.  In this latter group, as just mentioned, was a significant number of Whigs.  Among its leaders, President Fillmore, Clay, and Daniel Webster led the Whigs involvement in hammering out the Compromise of 1850.  They, along with the Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, arrived at its provisions that called for:

 

·       California being admitted to the Union as a non-slave state,

·       New Mexico and Utah would be admitted without mandating its prohibition of slavery,

·       the elimination of a Texas’ claim of what will be part of New Mexico from Texas for a payment of ten million dollars,

·       the agreement to an enactment of a new law – what would become the Fugitive Slave Act – authorizing the apprehension of runaway slaves and their return to their owners, and

·       the prohibition of buying and selling of slaves in Washington, D.C.

 

But the party, one should remember, was racked by sectional divisions.

          Nothing brought these divisions more prominently to the fore than the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854).  The newer legislation undid an earlier law, the Missouri Compromise, and introduced the legal element of “popular sovereignty.”  That is, each new territory would hold a plebiscite to decide whether it would, as a state, allow slavery or not. 

By 1854, with the passage of this law, the Whigs as a party no longer held much viability and most of its anti-slavery members drifted over to the newer political party, the Republicans, including a former, one term representative in Congress, Abraham Lincoln.

The next posting will provide a timeline summarizing the major events and developments that characterized the efforts and accomplishments of the Whig Party.  Admittedly, as reality tends to be, the accounts of that party, as portrayed in this blog, can be a bit confusing.  Perhaps the timeline can give one a more understandable rendition of what the party meant to American history.

But here is an overview of its listed aims.  It favored an energetic economic agenda – giving it the name the American System.  Its elements were promoting a protective tariff, subsidies from the federal government for the construction of infrastructure, and a general support for a national bank.  Generally, as part of its ideology, it supported a modernized sense of meritocracy and an active antagonistic approach to privilege.  One can sense natural rights values being represented by such policy positions.

It also gave loud support for the rule of law, qualified majority rule (protecting minority rights), and for a relatively weak executive branch of the federal government – William Henry Harrison wrote a defense of a weak presidency.[1]  And probably doing much to undermine its popularity, it registered its opposition to Manifest Destiny and all the expansion that ideal promoted.

Who supported the party?  That would be businesspeople, professionals, devoted Protestants, and the rising urban middle class.  They lacked the support of small farmers and unskilled labor.  And while the national party attempted to stay neutral on slavery, many of its northern supporters were against it. 

Overall, it supported the ground rules one can describe as federalist, but in terms of supporting localism, it had a mixed record.  Its presidents were against strong executives such Jackson proved to be, but it did support a strong central governmental role in terms of the economy such as in supporting infrastructure programs.  While its history was short, its role in the years leading up to the Civil War should be noted.

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[1] For example, see William Freehling, “William Harrison:  Domestic Affairs,” UVA:  Miller Center (n.d.), accessed July 19, 2021, https://millercenter.org/president/harrison/domestic-affairs .