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.
[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 .
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