SPLIT IDENTITY

 

Relatively recent historical work concerning the Whig Party of early to mid-1800s runs the gamut from fairly inoffensive judgements to more critical treatments.  On the neutral side, Harry Watson attributes to the Whigs the first efforts to promote the interests of the business class and by doing so that party, by its own accounts, furthered the interests of all Americans, i.e., he finds with the Whigs the first utterances of a “trickle-down” rationale. 

At the other end, the critical theorist, John Ashworth, remembers the Whigs as antebellum promoters of elitists.  These elitists made their riches from merchant or capital-based assets.  In this account, the Whigs opposed a party, the Democrats, who promoted the interests of a racist slave-owning class, and its supporters.  Added to the fact that the Whig Party had a short history, the general opinion among historians have not been very positive.[1]

The last posting of this blog shares a more positive account offered by Daniel Walker Howe.  This posting looks at another historian who provides a positive narrative and that is Michael F. Holt.[2]  To begin with, according to Guelzo, Holt saw the rise of the Whigs as a parallel development to the rise of the Jacksonians.  And one politician that stands out as the central figure in that political reaction was Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky. 

The name, Whigs, represented symbolically this sense of opposition to what was being characterized, among their ranks, as a Jackson presidency approaching dictatorial powers.  Foremost, they claimed to be republican antimilitarists and given the popularity of General Jackson, of New Orleans fame, this was a tough message to sell.  But to assist them, the Panic of 1837 provided the political wedge that encouraged citizens to give the Whigs a level of acceptance and consideration.

They, the leadership of the party, took on a probusiness stance and that proved to be their lasting image and helped define their base.  With a pro-development policy bias – one that sided with those businesspeople – they attracted the non-agricultural based interests of the nation.  That included commercial proprietors and those engaged in an initial manufacturing sector. 

The Panic helped Americans to define Democratic policies as failing and through that perspective, the newer party secured the support of more market-oriented Americans.  Bottom line, the Whigs garnered a definite base of support of sufficient size to pose a legitimate challenge to Democratic rule.

That resulted in victory in the 1840 presidential election when William Henry Harrison – another former general – won the White House.  Plus, that election saw significant victories for the Whig Party beyond the presidency.  “Whigs captured three-fifths of the new voters and triumphed, not only across the nation, but across all class, religious, and ethnic divisions.”[3] 

But one should not assume that they became the dominant American political party – that would still be the Democratic Party.  Undermining Whigs’ popularity – along with causing the Democrats, to a lesser degree, similar concerns – were their internal divisions especially between their northern and southern contingencies.  And that division, generally, would lead in the coming years to losses, and some were big losses.

These results especially occurred when their internal discord bubbled up in the press and gave the electorate the sense that the Whigs were armatures.  Other factors affecting them negatively, at least at the polls, were an overreliance on press-friendly, “charming” candidates or their willingness to compromise with the Democrats on major issues as will be described below. 

These factors were so strong in relation to how Whigs were seen, that one is justified to wonder what kept them as a party for over two decades.  At some level, they did seem to agree on a core set of beliefs, but that vision lacked sufficient definition.  In turn, that made defining the party difficult for the electorate and to sustain a rock firm sense of who were these Whigs not only among the voters, but among the politicians that made up their numbers.

Instead, they boasted that they were an assemblage of independent agents and attempted to cast Democrats as a party of lockstep followers.  It was common to find Whigs attacking each other, constantly undermining their image as a party standing for a set of policies or ideals.  They were seen not as a party of statesmen – what they hoped their image to be – but as being undisciplined or unruly bunch of hacks. 

But central to this blog’s concern, the Whigs – and the Democrats, to a lesser degree – exhibited a responsible course of action by compromising for the sake of what they saw was the common good.  In retrospect, one can question what they saw as being the common good, but that is seeing things from a twenty-first century perspective.

And in terms of their disunity, no development demonstrated that problem like the time when their members of Congress passed legislation to recharter a national bank.   They did this despite the antagonism of the sitting president, a member of their party.  This demonstrated their ability to split with President Tyler who proceeded to veto two efforts to pass such legislation.  The net effect was the dismay Whig voters who stayed home in great numbers during the next election and the party experienced heavy losses in the 1842 midterms. 

This level of dishearten-ness plagued the party until 1848, through the tenure of the Democratic president, James Polk.  In that year, the nation next elected a Whig to the presidency, Zachary Taylor.  If the Whigs were wise about anything, it was their ability to bide their time and allow the Democrats to harm themselves in the eyes of American voters and, what also helped in ’48, was a post Mexican American War recession.  The Whigs successfully blamed the Democrats for the economic downturn, and that proved sound, at least until that election. 

Starting with the Congressional elections in 1846 and more so in 1848, the Whigs reestablished themselves and in ’46, the Whigs won control of the US House while the Democrats retained control of the Senate.  In ’48, with Taylor’s noncommittal campaign (instead it relied on his military fame), the Whigs, were able to win the presidency, kept their control of the House, but were unable to gain control of the Senate.  

But success, to the extent they achieved it, was short lived.  Following a nonpartisan approach to patronage – what this blog would claim was a more federalist approach – they handed out government jobs to deserving candidates (instead of to party supporters), but that discouraged a strong Whig turnout (as in 1842) in the next Congressional election.  This led to widespread Whig losses.

The Taylor administration could easily remind people of the previous Whig presidencies of Harrison and Tyler.  To add to the sense of a replay, as with Harrison, Taylor suffered an untimely death in 1850.  This elevated Millard Fillmore to the presidency.  Fillmore, in turn, sided with the Democrats in Congress (as Tyler did regarding the national bank) and supported the Compromise of 1850.

This blog has already reviewed the provisions of that compromise, but in terms of the party, Northern Whigs felt betrayed, and they developed the conclusion that even the Whigs in the southern states had sold out to the slave owning class of that region.  According to Holt, Fillmore was motivated to further the interests of the nation by advancing what he saw would help national unity.  But this rationale was not accepted by those Northern Whigs.

Along with increasing levels of internal division, the party sought another leader as the 1852 election approached.  They dumped Fillmore for Winfield Scott, another war hero.  But Scott’s charm failed and the Democrat, Franklin Pierce, won the presidency and took office in 1853.  Pierce, according to Holt, was not up to the challenge of the office as the nation was drifting into serious levels of polarization.  As this blog has reported, the Whigs were now in free fall and their party was disorganizing itself mostly due to the polarization befalling their ranks and the nation.

Many Whigs, especially in the North, found their way into joining a newly formed Republican Party.  For those who remained and hoping for a replaying of developments that led to the elections of Harrison and Taylor, the 1850s would prove to be a different political landscape then what one found in those earlier years.  And central to that newer landscape was the early signs that the incubating issue of slavery was getting ready to erupt.

The first sign of this newer political stage was the advancement of a group promoting xenophobic messaging, the Know-Nothings.  Initially, an anti-immigration group, it was populated by a more parochial, anti-Catholic collection of people with a heightened sense of Americanism that they defined as an Anglo-based population. 

Among those so lured were a good number of Whigs.  Under the banner of the American Party, the Know-Nothings nominated the former Whig president, Fillmore, in 1856 even though he disowned their anti-immigration rhetoric.  How could that happen?  One need only remember that the Whigs prided themselves for tolerating diversity of beliefs. 

In that, the Whigs offered a good case of what an organization, in this case a political organization, needs to address so as to survive – not in terms of what they should do, but in terms of what they should not do.  And this blog will, in the next posting, look at the events leading up to 1856 and the final formal demise of the Whig Party.

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[1] 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 .

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

[3] 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, 79.