While Jacksonian Democrats painted Whigs as the party of the aristocracy, they managed to win support from diverse economic groups and elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor. Their ranks included members of the Anti-Masonic Party and democrats who were disenchanted with the leadership of seventh President Andrew Jackson.
Some Whig leaders used anti-party rhetoric, though they were very much a political party on par with the democrats they opposed. Their diverse base meant the Whigs had to be many things to many voters—a delicate balancing act.
Whigs generally supported higher tariffs, distributing land revenues to states and passing relief legislation in response to the financial panics of and They were not formally an anti- slavery party, but abolitionists had more in common with the Whigs than the pro-slavery Jacksonian Democrats Jackson was a vocal proponent of slavery and personally owned as many as enslaved people. As the country hurtled toward Westward expansion , it was the issue of slavery that would be the ultimate downfall of the Whigs.
While often stereotyped as the party of the rich by their Jacksonian Democrat opponents, Whigs were supported by an economically diverse group of voters, winning presidential elections and state legislative majorities because of this mass support.
William Henry Harrison became the first Whig president when he won the election, but he also became the first president to die in office in , just 31 days into his term. He was succeeded by his vice president John Tyler. Taylor, a southern slaveholder, divided the Whigs into Northern and Southern factions.
As tensions increased over slavery's expansion in the late s and the early s, Northern Whigs could not support a slave-owner. Southern Democrats could not support a Northern candidate. In the end, Taylor won, thanks to numerous Southern Democrats voting for him, but the Whig Party was in decline. The Whigs ran Winfield Scott in Scott lost to Franklin Pierce, and the growing tensions over slavery prevented the party from ever running another candidate for the presidency.
In Ohio, many voters supported the Whigs and their call for internal improvements. Joseph Vance, a Whig, became the first Whig governor of Ohio in The Whig Party also dominated the Ohio legislature at this same time. The Panic of caused Ohio voters to replace Vance with Democrat Wilson Shannon and to replace the Whig majority in the legislature with a Democratic one. As the state's economic conditions improved, Ohioans returned a Whig, Thomas Corwin, to the governor's office.
And most impressive of all, he leaves all but the most truculent reader with a sweet taste of regret at the end, in equal parts for the end of the book and for the death of its subject.
Here is Holt's story of the Whigs, in as compressed a fashion as possible: Rather than being a branch out of the root of Federalism, the Whigs evolved like the Jacksonians from the original Jeffersonian Republicans who triumphed in the "Revolution of They cast themselves first as republican antimilitarists.
They then added a new layer of related identity as issue-oriented nonpartisans and assumed after that the banner of virtuous public moralists. Finally, after the economic crash of , the Whigs took on the identity that stayed them the longest, as the party of probusiness and prodevelopment policy. Within three years, the Whigs had staked out marked differently political territory from the Democrats.
Whigs, in contrast, attracted those who wanted to expand the market sector because they had already enjoyed its benefits or hoped to do so in the future" The economic panic also set in place the two principal mechanisms for Whig electoral success, which were a to concentrate public attention on the failings of Democratic politics and b to scoop up the largest percentage of new voters in every presidential cycle.
It is a significant point in Holt's description of antebellum parties that American voters, once recruited to a party, rarely switched allegiances over time. What was critical in each presidential cycle, then, was to energize the existing Whig voter base by throwing their policy distinctives into sharp contrast to the Democrats' and by organizing new voters.
When the Whigs succeeded in doing this, they scored impressive electoral successes. In the presidential election, the Whigs ran William Henry Harrison on a pro-business platform against the hapless scapegoat of the panic, Martin Van Buren, and won crushing victories in the state, congressional, and presidential contests Harrison carried nineteen of the twenty-six states. Whigs captured three-fifths of the new voters and triumphed, not only across the nation, but across all class, religious, and ethnic divisions.
On the other hand, when the Whigs were unable to keep focused on these strategies, they generally lost, and lost big. The Whigs were always a minority party. Without clear partisan policy distinctions that made clear how awful an opposition victory would be, they discouraged their existing voter base and failed to recruit new voters, something that happened whenever the Whig leadership allowed intraparty quarreling to bubble to the surface, or whenever it made the mistake of relying on charming personalities to head tickets or making generous accommodations with the Democrats on major issues.
But keeping such focus steady was an Page [End Page 79] ideological problem for Whigs. They prided themselves on being a coalition of independent thinkers, unlike in their imagination the disciplined faithful of the Democrats, and they did not hesitate to turn on each other with divisive and disheartening abandon.
Linked to that, the Whigs valorized the image of themselves as statesmen rather than like their opposite numbers party hacks who loved politics only for the power political office conferred.
Sacrificing party for the nation, they would join hands with Democrats to serve the nation's good—and then be punished at the polls afterwards by voters who saw no reason why they should vote Whig rather than Democrat. The most hideous example of this form of self-mutilation occurred immediately after the Whigs' great triumph in In a gesture of independent nonpartisanship, the Whigs nominated former Democrat John Tyler as Harrison's running mate.
When Harrison died prematurely in , Tyler assumed the presidency and promptly split the Whig majority in Congress into violently quarreling factions. As a result, disgusted Whig voters stayed home on election days from to , and the Whigs' majorities in the states and in Congress ebbed; in the by-elections they "suffered one of the most staggering reversals in off-year congressional elections ever witnessed in American history" The Whigs, however, displayed an unusual resiliency.
As a minority party, they were not shocked to find themselves outsiders, and they demonstrated a willingness to wait and let the Democrats dig their own graves. Whig candidates staged a comeback in the congressional elections the year that Abraham Lincoln won election as a Whig congressman in Illinois , and in , they nominated the artfully ambiguous Zachary Taylor, who distracted attention away from Whig intraparty feuding and managed, almost too late, to get public attention concentrated on a post-Mexican War recession that could be conveniently hung around the necks of the Democrats.
By focusing the public on the Democrats' mistakes, Taylor's election might have spelled a second great opportunity to establish Whig dominance in the electoral system. Again, the Whigs stumbled on the threshold of victory. Widespread dissatisfaction with the Taylor administration's well-intentioned effort to rise above partisanship in patronage appointments depressed Whig voter turnout in the congressional elections, and Whig candidates fell in droves.
Taylor's death in office in opened the way to more intramural bloodletting among Whigs, and when his successor, Millard Fillmore, joined with congressional Democrats Page [End Page 80] and endorsed the Compromise of , the seeds were sown for even more lethal quarrels, as Northern Whigs began to suspect that the Whig party had become too beholden to Southern slaveholding interests.
By endorsing the Compromise of , Fillmore believed that he was only playing the appropriate role of disinterested Whig statesman, putting the interests of national unity over the selfish desires of Northern Whig opponents to slavery. What he actually did was to invite Whig voters not to bother voting for Whigs, since the policy results were apparently the same, no matter which candidates they voted for.
Fillmore also failed to keep the Whigs from descending into new rounds of internal dissension, this time between Northern and Southern Whigs, rather than on public discontent with Democrats. Knowing full well that this spelled defeat in , anxious Whigs tried to repeat their triumph by dumping Fillmore and substituting Mexican War hero Winfield Scott, relying on Scott's personality as a vote-getter.
Policies, however, not personalities, were what got Whigs elected. What was worse, Scott was a political malaprop. Accordingly, the Whigs were massacred at the polls, "because they distrusted Scott, expected defeat, or were simply indifferent to the outcome of a personality contest with no clear programmatic differences at issue" Many Whigs in expected that, having learned their lesson twice about what kind of campaign did not work, they would need only to wait on the sidelines for new Democratic catastrophes to provide issues and then rally behind another Harrison or Taylor to win a third victory.
But by the mids, the mechanics of American politics had changed. New issues, like slavery, proved divisive rather than unifying for the Whigs; new, and sometimes flukey, political movements like the Know-Nothings easily carved into Whig constituencies, first because the Whigs prided themselves on the absence of the party discipline that would have kept those constituencies safe, and then because the s had none of the disincentives for third-party movements party registrations, qualifications for federal matching funds that cripple modern third-party efforts.
In future governor Zebulon B. Vance won his first election, as the Whig candidate for a seat in the North Carolina House of Commons. Among its major accomplishments in North Carolina, the Whig Party counted the expansion of railroads, creation of the state public school system , and establishment of the first state school for the deaf and the blind and of the first state mental asylum, then called Dix Hill later Dorothea Dix Hospital.
The Whig years also saw an increase in the number of newspapers and publishers and of private academies and colleges, as well as a decline in illiteracy. The Whigs actually began losing their hold on North Carolina in the late s.
Many of their national policies-fostering strong banks and protective tariffs, promoting industrial development-were of little interest to the citizens of an agrarian state such as North Carolina. Although southern Whigs did not oppose slavery, the Democrats were much more emphatic in actively supporting slavery and resisting abolition.
The Whig Party disintegrated during the s. In the North, its remnants formed much of the foundation of the new Republican Party. The decade and a half of Whig control had permanently changed North Carolina, turning the so-called Rip Van Winkle State into a leading power in the South. As the Whig Party disappeared, its progressive policies were adapted and put into practice by many leaders of the revitalized Democratic Party of the s.
For the election campaign of , the Whig Party was briefly revived in North Carolina as a Unionist alternative to secessionist Democrats and northern Republicans. During the Civil War, North Carolina Whigs evolved into the Conservative Party , which often opposed Jefferson Davis's administration and endorsed stronger individual and state rights. North Carolina Civic Education Consortium.
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