Whig Party

WHIG PARTY

WHIG PARTY represented the main national opposition to the Democratic Party from the mid-1830s until the early 1850s. Ostensibly, the party came together and took its name in hostility to the aggrandizement of executive power by President Andrew Jackson during his assault on the Bank of the United States in 1833–1834. In the 1836 presidential election, the northern and southern wings stood apart, offering different sectional candidates, but by 1839 they had come together behind a single candidate and a common set of policies. They elected two presidents, William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, both of whom soon died in office. Each won popular majorities in both the North and the South, while Whig congressmen throughout showed a high level of voting cohesion on most national issues, thus demonstrating that the party represented a nationwide coalition based on agreement on a nonsectional program.

In the North, especially in New England-settled areas, the party attracted Jackson's old antagonists, the National Republicans and the Antimasons. The former were somewhat conservative socially but liberal in religious matters, while the latter expressed the moral-reformist sentiments stemming from the evangelical revival, an influence that became more important as ethnocultural issues intensified in the 1840s. In the South, where the Jacksonians had been predominant, a new opposition appeared in the mid-1830s that drew its earliest support from those who objected to Jackson's assertive response to the nullification crisis and then exploited fears of northern abolitionist interference to arouse popular support. But at least as important for the southern party as for the northern party were widespread objections in more commercialized areas to the Jacksonians' assaults on the banking system and their resistance to state improvement programs. The panic of 1837 and the Democrats' refusal to countenance government help in the subsequent depression gave a common bond to Whigs all over the country, who thereafter acted together to promote positive government policies for economic advancement.

Those policies were not implemented after the 1840 victory, because John Tyler, the states' rights vice president who succeeded Harrison in 1841, obstructed passage of the party program. The Whigs never again enjoyed command of all branches of the federal government. However, they recovered control of the House of Representatives after 1846, when they had to take responsibility for financing a war against Mexico they had voted against. Thereafter, the Whigs were irredeemably divided by the problem of slavery expansion. Believing in positive national government, they needed a solution, whereas the localistic Democrats could evade the central issue. Moreover, some northern Whigs who represented strong antislavery strongholds made speeches in opposition to the Compromise of 1850 that undermined the efforts of southern Whigs to reassure their constituents that the party could still be trusted on slavery. Consequently, Whig support in the South fell decisively by 1852. Meanwhile, the northern Whigs faced large-scale Catholic immigration into seaboard cities, and their leaders' attempts to win immigrant votes condemned the party in some states to collapse amid the mass nativist movements of 1854. By 1856, many northern Whigs had stopped voting or turned to the Democrats as the party of national unity, but many more subsequently turned to the new Republican Party as the expression of northern views on the sectional issues of the day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooper, William J., Jr. The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828– 1856. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Sellers, Charles. "Who Were the Southern Whigs?" American Historical Review 59 (1954): 335–346.

Donald J. Ratcliffe

See also Bank of the United States ; Compromise of 1850 ; Jacksonian Democracy ; National Republican Party ; Sectionalism .