Remember the Whigs
Its lifespan as a political party — measured by its presidential candidates — was less than 20 years. Only two of its nominees were victorious. It counted some of the greatest statesmen of the antebellum era among its leaders but could only capture the White House with apolitical military mediocrities. Both died shortly after they were inaugurated, succeeded by politicians even less capable than they were. In the end, the party proved unable to withstand the pressures caused by the escalating crisis of slavery and Union and by 1856 gave way to the Republican Party.
Yet the Whig Party left a legacy that endured through much of the nineteenth century.
I have been intrigued for years by the lasting influence of this short-lived party, which emerged as an organized opposition to the Democratic Party in the 1830s – a fascination that has been rekindled as I make my way through the remarkably readable new biography of Whig statesmen Henry Clay by James C. Klotter.
My interest is due in large measure to the fact that the heritage of the Whig Party and its leading figures figure prominently in two subjects close to my heart: the Credit Mobilier scandal and, perhaps surprisingly, the political career of Iowa Populist James B. Weaver.
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The 1848 Whig ticket of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Library of Congress.
As Klotter recounts, Clay ran three times for the presidency and lost (twice, in 1824 and 1832, prior to the emergence of the Whig Party), a record equaled only by William Jennings Bryan. As Clay’s experience suggests, the Whig legacy has much more to do with the ideas and aspirations of its leading figures –Clay in particular – than success at the polls.
Indeed, in a sign foretelling the factionalism that would lead to its doom, no fewer than three Whigs ran for the White House in 1836. One of those candidates, frontier military hero William Henry Harrison, succeeded four years later at the head of a united Whig ticket and defeated President Martin Van Buren. When Harrison died, one month after being sworn in, he was succeeded by Virginian John Tyler, a Whig in name only who was far more sympathetic to Democrats than his fellow party members.
Eight years later the Whigs turned to another military hero, Zachary Taylor, and trounced Democratic nominee Lewis Cass. Taylor died shortly after taking office and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore, a political figure whose very name has become synonymous with political hackery.
Nevertheless, in spite of its factionalism and electoral weakness, in spite of the stumblebums who held the nation’s highest office in its name, the legacy of the Whigs helped shape the politics of the Gilded Age.
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Henry Clay in 1844. Library of Congress.
Many of the party’s leading figures, most particularly Clay, advocated a role for the federal government – particularly regarding finance and infrastructure – that was well ahead of its time and stood in stark opposition to the small government ideology that prevailed among Democrats.
That notion was promulgated by Clay more than a dozen years before the Whigs coalesced. The Kentuckian, well aware of the West’s need for capital, championed a national bank. At the same time, he backed tariffs and was a fervent supporter of federal efforts to build roads and canals to improve the nation’s primitive transportation network. Clay would back away from his vision of a federal role in what were then known as “internal improvements” and today would be called, less elegantly, “infrastructure,” as he chased Southern support for the Whig nomination in 1840, historian Michael F. Holt notes in his masterful history of the Whig Party. Nevertheless, the idea retained powerful support at the grass roots in the Mississippi Valley and Northeast.
That became abundantly clear in July 1847, when delegates from twenty-four states gathered in Chicago to protest President Polk’s veto of an internal improvements bill. Some Democrats numbered among the throng at the “River and Harbor Convention,” but the number of prominent Whigs was notable. They included, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley from New York; Schuyler Colfax of Indiana; and a young Illinois Whig named Abraham Lincoln (described by Greeley in the pages of the New York Tribune as a “tall specimen of an Illinoisan”).
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Lincoln in 1859. Library of Congress.
The gathering closed with a speech by Missouri Whig (and future Lincoln Cabinet member) Edward Bates described by Greeley as “so able, so forceful, so replete with the soul of eloquence” that the famous editor was unable to transcribe it. While the convention declined to debate whether to support construction of a transcontinental railroad during its formal proceedings, the topic was taken up after the formal proceedings were closed. Delegates who stayed endorsed a transcontinental railroad, to be “constructed and owned by the Nation, its directors being chosen by the People of the several states, the Lands along the route withheld from the clutch of the speculator,” according to Greeley.
The national fervor for internal improvements intensified as railroads spread across the country in the 1850s. The dream of a transcontinental railroad preoccupied Democrats and Republicans alike, but it was the party led by Lincoln, the gangly ex-Whig noted by Greeley, that made it a reality in 1862 with passage of the Pacific Railroad Act.
In the years that followed, millions of dollars in government-subsidized bonds and land grants went to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific as they hurried to build the railroad that would connect California with the great cities and agricultural regions to the east. Clay, I can’t help but believe, would have approved.
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Edward Bates in 1855. Library of Congress.
Many Whigs recognized that the federal government played an essential role in promoting interstate commerce through the creation of a national transportation network of roads, canals, harbors and railroads. Many would also have been horrified by the venality that accompanied the government-backed railroad boom of the 1860s and early 1870s.
While many Whigs were dealmakers like Clay or practical politicians like Thurlow Weed, others were more high minded – particularly in the party’s early days. Holt writes that a powerful strain of “anti-partyism” animated by an evangelical Christian belief in freedom of conscience permeated Whig political culture. “Because party discipline required men to sacrifice their own views for the good of the organization, because it encouraged blind obedience rather than independent action, party organization crushed freedom of conscience and made men moral slaves,” Holt writes.
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A young James B. Weaver.
Whatever else could be said of him, James B. Weaver – a Democrat in his youth who turned to the Republican Party before carrying the Greenback-Labor and Populist banners in presidential campaigns and then returning to the Democratic Party – chafed at the notion of party discipline.
In part this was due to his personality. Combative, a devotee of the cut-and-thrust of debate and speechmaking, Weaver reveled in controversy. “He is best seen in action on the stump,” the New York World wrote in 1892. “He is a fighter. He fears nothing, and he plunges forward in discussion confident that his cause is just and certain that he will win his audience to his side.”
But the zigzag course of Weaver’s crusading political career was charted to a large degree by his youthful exposure to Whig ideology. His brother-in-law and law partner, Hosea B. Horn, was an Indiana native and prominent Iowa Whig who ran as the party’s candidate for state treasurer in 1852. Later that decade, Weaver studied law in Cincinnati under Whig lawyer Bellamy Storer, who advocated – as many Whigs did — placing Biblical precepts at the center of political and legal life. “The healthy vigor of no government can be preserved, where the same rule that teaches man to fear his Maker is not equally the controlling motive of the law giver,” Storer asserted.
Raised in the frontier religious culture of camp meetings and Methodist circuit-riders, Weaver fervently embraced that view. He returned from Cincinnati newly committed to fighting the spread of slavery. He left the Democratic Party for the new Republican Party. When he broke with the Republicans in the 1870s over its opposition to paper money as an antidote to the economic suffering caused by the Panic of 1873, he did so citing the example of Jesus. “Don’t pray to get the Lord on your side, but just get on his side, for he is a friend to the poor and the oppressed under all circumstances, and on all occasions,” he told an audience in Newton, Iowa in 1878.
The Whigs arose in opposition to Andrew Jackson. Many – alas, certainly not all – of the party’s leading figures opposed slavery. Their legacy includes the ambitious program of railroad construction championed by Republicans in the 1860s and early 1870s and an emphasis on freedom of conscience in the political sphere that seems remarkably healthy in this day and age.
Today, the Whig Party has been largely forgotten in an era when everything seems to revolve around the partisan poles of the blue or red, Democrat or Republican. It deserves a better fate.
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The shadow of the Whigs looms behind the subjects of my two books: Congress and the King of Frauds: Corruption and the Credit Mobilier Scandal at the Dawn of the Gilded Age and Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver . Both are available at amazon. com .
