HINTS OF MODERN POLITICS

 

As advertised, this posting presents a timeline of Whig Party accomplishments, developments, and policy proposals.  Roughly the timeline begins in the 1820s but ideologically, the ideas of that party began with the Federalists, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.  This review, though, starts with the general political environment of the 1820s.

1824 

By way of context, the party started as various members of the Democratic-Republican Party, inflated by former Federalists Party members – who drifted to Jefferson’s party as a result of the War of 1812 – felt uncomfortable with this alignment.  A new thrust took place as that discomfort became more acute and an array of minor “parties” took hold in representing their political beliefs.  For example, in 1824, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay were National Republicans.

With that background, one can find the first organized efforts to attain the White House by these displaced politicians began in 1824.  In the election of that year, there were four major candidates:  nationalist Clay, Secretary of State Adams (whose father was the famous founding father and Federalist president), Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford (who while supporting re-chartering the national bank in 1811 was a champion of state sovereignty), and the war hero, Andrew Jackson. 

Clearly against the national bank was Jackson.  The pro national bank candidates were Clay and Adams.  Of the four candidates, Jackson garnered the most votes but failed to get a majority in either the popular vote or the Electorate College vote.  Per the Constitution, the election was forwarded to the House of Representatives where each state had/has one vote and chooses the winner among the three top vote getters of the general election. 

Clay, since he was third and generally agreed with Adams’ major positions, threw his support to Adams and that proved to be sufficient to win the White House.  Jackson claimed that that arrangement was the product of a “corrupt bargain” and almost immediately began his campaign to become president four years hence.

1825-1828

Shortly afterward, those misplaced Democratic-Republicans, under the leadership of Adams, Clay, and Daniel Webster organized themselves initially under the name, Adams’ Party.  In opposition, Jackson, along with Crawford and John C. Calhoun, led in organizing the supporters of Jackson under the label of Jacksonians.  Highly effective in this latter effort was the organizing role that the New Yorker, Martin Van Buren, played. 

1828-1832

So effective was this other group that by 1828 they were able to defeat Adams’ attempt to win reelection by securing 56 percent of the vote.  Shortly after, they organized permanently as the Democratic Party.  But not all was going swimmingly under this new party’s leadership.  During the years of his term, Jackson developed an animosity toward his vice president, Calhoun. 

It seems Calhoun’s wife involved herself in derogatory talk against recently deceased Rachel, Jackson’s wife.  As the next election day approached, Jackson did not choose Calhoun to be his running mate but instead chose Van Buren.  Consequently, those who supported Adams and Clay felt that their fate was in good stead since the Democrats were hit with this split between Calhoun and the President. 

1832-1833

Beyond the “wife” issue, Calhoun and Jackson disagreed over tariff policy and Calhoun’s backing of South Carolina’s nullification position.[1]  He, Calhoun, resigned as vice president and entered the Senate in 1832.  To remind the reader, the nullification issue came to a boil in the years 1832-1833 and is known as the Nullification Crisis in which South Carolina threatened to not abide by federal law.  While a supporter of states’ rights, Jackson vehemently opposed this nullification position.

Clay proceeded to organize the National Republicans but was defeated in the 1832 election and Jackson achieved a second term.  That election saw for the first time that each party held nominating conventions.  But with the results of that election, the National Republicans would quickly thereafter fall apart as its members mostly evolved into the new Whig Party. 

That newer party was the product of smaller Whig groups that opposed South Carolina’s nullification position but could not align themselves with Jackson.  In short order, National Republicans, Anti-Mason adherents, and others formed a national Whig party.  But while one can detect a “party” of sorts, it was not unified enough and decided to use a curious strategy for the next election in 1836.

In 1833, Clay set out to unite those who opposed Jackson and supported Clay’s “American System” policy positions.  Those positions were made up of three foundational elements:  advocacy for a sufficiently high tariff to protect and encourage American industry, support of a national bank to encourage business activities, and promotion of central government infusing money to advance infrastructure projects such as roads and canals throughout the nation. 

These advocacies by Clay and his allies have been credited, by such historians as Michael Holt, with Whigs winning control of the Senate in 1833.[2]  Through their efforts, they were able to shed the elitist image the National Republicans had.  They also were able to make inroads into the South.

1833-1836

These nationally aligned politicians were mostly united in their opposition to Jackson but with not enough harmony to support one candidate.  The challenge in 1836 was not facing the General – he was completing his second term – but instead his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren.  As already alluded to, the Whigs ran various candidates and divided the anti-Jackson vote.  Their plan was to deny Van Buren a majority of Electoral College votes and again win the White House as Adams had done in 1828, but that plan did not succeed, and Van Buren ascended to the presidency.

Adding to the Whig’s diverse base between its northern and southern supporters, there were other factors at play.  There was the lost opportunity when former Jackson’s vice president, Calhoun, withheld his support to any anti-Jackson/Van Buren candidate who refused to adopt his nullification position.  And the Whigs faced an improving economy under the Democrats and Jackson’s leadership.  That proved to be enough to give Jackson the successor he wanted in Van Buren.  Apparently, the Whigs still were not sufficiently united. 

But then the national scene changed a great deal.  And one sees what would become a recurring political storyline:  “what the economy giveth, the economy can taketh away.”  And it did not take long for the economy to face a sudden downturn.  This blog will pick up that part of the story in the next posting by describing how the Panic of 1837 brought to a cessation Democratic rule as a results of the 1840 election. 

1837-1840

But first, their defeat in 1836 convinced the Whigs that for 1840 they needed to be united.  In addition, they had to generate a national policy platform and run a single standard-bearer.  Among their ranks, they were able to elicit, beyond Clay and Webster, the support of many Anti-Masons such as William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens and disenchanted Democrats such as Willie P. Mangum, John Berrien, and John Tyler.[3] 

And before leaving this general topic of uniting people under the Whig banner is the general antagonism to the Masons.  It seems the concern there was that organization’s secrecy.  Whigs were big on ending or highly curtailing secrecy in politics.  Generally, they felt that such “behind the curtain” politicking was feeding a strong executive as exemplified by Jackson.  The “American System” should include transparent governance and this business of secret protocols or hidden beliefs seemed to them as being un-American.

Along with this openness, Whigs got into conducting open rallies.  Parades became common events as Whigs drummed up support around the country leading up to 1840.  This furthered their attempts to give them a common touch and counteract the general impression that they were the party of the wealthy or of business interests. 

The campaign ended, as will be further described in the next posting, with the election of William Henry Harrison and that effort is attributed with being the first presidential campaign to actively appeal to average Americans – a strong federalist move.  A lasting campaign slogan in 1840 to which American school children are still taught from that election is “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” 

It, Tippecanoe, refers to Harrison’s military victory in what would become the state of Indiana during the War of 1812.  It reflects the Whigs’ understanding that for a party that represented the business interests of the country, it could only win a national election by proactively attracting those people’s votes that were not directly the targeted beneficiaries of their policies.  A good bit of salesmanship enters the American political landscape and has been there ever since.

But all that would be incorporated in the election not of 1836 which featured Harrison as one of its leading candidates, but of 1840.  Those moves went a long way in establishing the basic format of how national elections were to be conducted in the ensuing years up until today.  While the Whigs experimented with this openness in 1836, it was a full-throated effort leading up to the 1840 victory.

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[1] Calhoun provided a lot of the theory supporting the nullification argument.

[2] 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).  For a critique of this book, one can look at a review by 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 .  In that review, Guelzo writes,

Howe reintroduced the Whigs, not as Eastern elitists bent upon wickedly obstructing the righteous class-leveling justice of Jackson/Roosevelt, but as the "sober, industrious, thrifty people," as the party of the American bourgeoisie, attracting the economic loyalty of small businesses and small commercial producers, and enlisting the political loyalty of those who aspired to transformation.

[3] Of course, this last politician will become president and prove not to maintain his support for Clay and the pro-national bank position of the Whigs. 

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 .