It was during this “Panic session” that a new party—the Whig party—emerged. The forces producing it had been in train for a number of years, but the pressures of the Bank War and Jackson’s imperial presidency finally brought it into being during the late winter and early spring of 1834. National Republicans, Bank men, nullifiers, high-tariff advocates, friends of internal improvements, states’ righters, and—most particularly—all those who abominated Jackson or his reforms slowly converged into a new political coalition that quite appropriately assumed the name “Whig.” Derived from British
...more
