In the mid-19th century, the two most powerful political parties in the United States were the Democrats and the Whigs. In two presidential elections, 1840 and 1848, Americans voted a Whig in the White House. And some of the most prominent political voices of the controversial pre-Civil War period were the Whigs, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and an Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln.
But for all their importance and power, the Whigs couldn’t keep it together. The slavery problem that was most devastating was the ultimate loss of the Whigs, pitting the Northern and Southern Whigs against each other, and dispersing the Whig leaders to ward off third parties like the Know Nothings and Republicans.
In just over 20 years, the Whig Party has experienced a meteoric political rise that is matched only by its brutal and total collapse.
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Who were the Whigs?
A caricature of Andrew Jackson as a despotic monarch, c. 1833
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The Whigs were a loose coalition of diverse political interests – anti-Masons, National Republicans, disillusioned Democrats – united by a shared hatred of President Andrew Jackson. To the Whigs, Jackson was “King Andrew the First,” a despot who usurped the power of Congress to serve his own populist ideals.
The Whigs were formed in 1834 in response to Jackson’s refusal to finance the Second National Bank. They took their name from a British anti-monarchist party that was revived in colonial America as the “American Whigs”. Clay, known as “The Great Compromise,” was the most influential and vocal first leader of the Whigs.
Jacksonian Democrats portrayed the Whigs as a party of wealthy northern elites who wanted to bypass the will of the people, but the Whigs actually challenged a singular identity. There were Protestant moral reformers who wanted to pass prohibition laws targeting Catholic immigrants. There were Native American advocates angry with Jackson’s relocation orders that led to the infamous Trail of Tears. And if there was a strong anti-slavery sentiment among some Whigs, it was not an abolitionist party.
Like the Democratic Party before the Civil War, the Whigs were a “bisectional” party that attracted voters from North and South, says Philip Wallach, resident researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.
“So both sides had an interest in excluding slavery as much as possible from the national agenda,” Wallach says. “But in the case of the Whig Party, it just couldn’t find a way to deal with the problem of slavery that would satisfy its north and south wings.”
READ MORE: How Andrew Jackson kicked off a populist wave in the White House
The two Whig presidents die during their tenure
President William Henry Harrison on his deathbed, 1841.
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Even before slavery tore the Whig party apart, the Whigs faced a series of bad luck.
After Whig candidate Henry Clay lost the 1836 election to Jackson’s Democratic successor Martin Van Buren, the Whigs finally won the presidency in 1840 with William Henry Harrison. But Harrison died of pneumonia after just 32 days in office, handing the White House over to its vice president, John Tyler, a former Democrat who was not a loyalist to the Whig party.
“Tyler served almost four full years as president, and for almost all of those years he was a man without a party,” Wallach says. “Tyler’s presidency has proven to be a major handicap to the ability of the Whig Party to take root.
Tyler, known to critics as “His Accidency,” was such a disappointment to the Whigs – he vetoed the Whig-sponsored national bank and tariff bills – that the Whigs took the extraordinary decision to expel him. of the party while Tyler was still in power.
READ MORE: Why John Tyler Was a Vilified President
In the election of 1844, Clay was again nominated as the Whig candidate and lost to James K. Polk. Thus, in 1848, the Whigs chose Zachary Taylor, hero of the American-Mexican war and owner of slaves.
Taylor won the election, but also died two years after starting his presidency, leaving it in the hands of Millard Fillmore, an anti-slavery northerner. Taylor and Fillmore never got along politically, and Fillmore’s new policies did little to solidify the Whig party after Taylor’s sudden demise.
Death continued to haunt the Whig Party until the 1850s. Clay, the vigorous Whig leader who inspired Lincoln and other prominent politicians to join the party, died in 1852, as did Daniel Webster.
“These men are considered two of the most important lawmakers who never became president,” Wallach says. “Their deaths did not contribute to the dynamics of the Whig Party.”
The fallout from the 1850 compromise
Senator Henry Clay speaks about the Compromise of 1850 in the Old Senate Chamber.
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In 1849, California petitioned to join the Union as a free state, which threatened to upset the delicate balance of power between free and slave states. In one of his last major political maneuvers, Henry Clay negotiated the Compromis of 1850, a series of five bills that welcomed California as a free state, but also strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act which legally obliged states of the North to pursue and return the fleeing slaves.
The compromise of 1850, signed by Fillmore, was immediately and wildly unpopular with the Whigs in the north and south, who each had their own grievances.
“Because Fillmore hitched his cart to the unpopular compromise of 1850, he found himself kicked out as the Whig candidate at the party convention of 1852,” Wallach says. It took 53 separate votes before convention delegates finally agreed on a candidate, General Winfield Scott.
As the 1852 election approached, the Whigs still saw themselves as the party to beat, but “Old Fuss and Feathers,” as Scott was derisively dubbed, was bombarded in the general election by the Democrats (he only won than 42 electoral votes), calling the Whigs a deadly blow from which they never recovered.
Kansas-Nebraska Law and the Rise of the Republicans
The issue of divisive slavery came to a head in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska law, which allowed new territories and states to decide for themselves whether they wanted to allow slavery.
The anti-slavery Whigs, deciding that their party was not committed enough to stop the spread of slavery, broke up and formed the Republican Party with anti-slavery Democrats. Among the prominent former Whigs who became Republicans were Thaddeus Stevens, William Seward and Abraham Lincoln.
Meanwhile, other Whigs were drawn into anti-immigrant nativist movements like the Know Nothings, a secret society that became a political force in the 1850s. Fillmore, who had been abandoned by the Whigs in 1852, introduced himself in 1856 as a candidate for the American Party, the political wing of the Know Nothings. Many Conservative Whigs followed him.
1856 was the last election in which the Whigs fielded a candidate, but former Whig William Seward, who was then secretary of state for Lincoln, praised the party in 1855: “Let the Whig party pass.” He made a serious mistake, and he responded cruelly. So let him leave the field with all the honors.
“It’s remarkable how quickly it all fell apart for the Whigs,” Wallach said. “From just before the 1852 elections thinking they were in good shape, to 1854 being clearly obsolete and in 1855 literally bankrupt.
“It’s quite striking.”
