Unrestraint Begets Calamity:
The American Whig Review,
1845-1852
Wesley Allen Riddle*
[From HUMANITAS, Volume XI, No. 2, 1998 ©
National Humanities Institute, Washington, DC
USA]
A previous article1 describes
the values and beliefs that informed the political culture of the American
Whigs, as elucidated in the party’s premier literary and political magazine,
the American Whig Review.2
Whigs regarded themselves as strict constitutionalists in the American
"Republican" tradition as defined and handed down by the Founding Fathers.
The party self-consciously stood for classless economic and national interest;3
high moral character among the citizenry and especially those in government
service; patriotism, nationalm honor, and integrity in foreign affairs;
an independent judiciary; and a Chief Executive with vigorous enforcement
responsibilities but little policy voice or proactive legislative role.
Whigs had a high regard for literature and rhetoric, viewing the best examples
of these arts as representing a distillation of universal experience. Though
nationalists, Whigs rejected the expansionist "Manifest Destiny" doctrine
proclaimed by the Democrats, which called, at a minimum, for rapid expansion
of the American nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific.4
While Democratic nationalism was quantitative and spacial or geographic,
Whig nationalism was qualitative and linked to their conception of the
Union as an entity involved in constant improvement of self (morally and
economically) over time. In contrast to the politics of their Democratic
adversaries, whom Whigs viewed as impulsive, irresponsible, even "anarchical,"
the Whigs saw politics as the high art of fostering consensus through compromise,
with compromise understood to be a process of "mutual adjustment and concession
. . . evincing men’s capacity for self-subordination in pursuit of the
general welfare."
Had the spirit of restraint championed by Whig political culture prevailed
over the comparatively impatient and expansionary impulses of its philosophical
and political adversaries, the history of the United States might have
been spared some of its darkest, most divisive, and bloodiest chapters.5
However, consistently to balance a broad range of ends and divergent interests
while steadily resisting the pull of the abstract and the arbitrary is
difficult business. The Whig unionist ethic, as spelled out in the journal’s
pages, presented a high standard: one not easy to live up to in the best
of times and virtually impossible in the difficult circumstances of mid-nineteenth
century America. Whig culture did not prevail politically, and the resulting
ideological fissures—most notably, sectional divisions over slavery—split
not only the nation as a whole but the Whig party itself, contributing
to its precipitous demise. Whiggery’s last hurrah, the Compromise of 1850,
proved to be a pyrrhic victory, indicative of the party’s permanent schisms,
which soon produced the disastrous electoral defeat of 1852.
Crosscurrents of Geographic Sectionalism
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, submitted by Henry Clay, put the question
of slavery extension to rest for thirty years. Missouri was admitted as
a slave state, and Maine was admitted as a free state. The issue of potential
westward expansion of free and slave systems into the Louisiana Territory
also was settled by the agreement, slavery to be confined to the area south
of latitude 36°30'. In 1820 the Union stood evenly split, twelve free
states to twelve slave states. By 1848, there were fifteen free states
to fifteen slave states. But the acquisition of new lands outside the Louisiana
Territory obtained from the Mexican War—a war whose entry the Whigs had
opposed—made necessary another compromise. To the task, Henry Clay and
the Whig party’s official journal committed their energies. The American
Whig Review enthusiastically supported new compromise measures, but
the issues involved proved more divisive in 1850 than in 1820 owing to
critical developments in the intervening years.
Democratic President Andrew Jackson’s heavy-handed executive conduct
helped precipitate more than the Whig "Counterreformation." It precipitated
a smaller, more reactionary reflex from planter-dominated South Carolina,
to wit, the state legislature’s adoption of the Ordinance of Nullification
in 1833. After the resulting Nullification Crisis, controversies over states’
rights came to dominate national politics; moreover, secessionist doctrines
grew more sophisticated and assertive. "Popular" democracy merely fueled
sectional patriotism.
Although Whigs hoped the West would continue to impose political "balance,"6
the tentative Western political sway over the South abated as economics
caused a divergence of interests between the two regions. The expulsion
of Indians from Georgia and the Gulf states opened the fertile Alabama
and Mississippi black belt to cotton. Old "Middle Colonies" melted away
between 1815 and 1835 in terms of their distinct and sectionally mitigating
political interests. Quakers, Methodists, upcountrymen and other anti-slavery
Southerners emigrated away from their region as the cotton crop and the
slave economy became more deeply entrenched and expanded from their base
in the Carolinas and parts of Virginia and Georgia to areas throughout
the South.7 A rift between Van Burenites
and Deep Southerners led by John C. Calhoun after 1836 "institutionalized"
a nascent geographical division within the Democratic party.8
The cotton-slave economy, likewise, exerted influence over Southern Whigs,
who increasingly nursed divided section-party loyalties.9
The broad-based support for "truly national" improvements, which existed
immediately after the War of 1812, dissipated in the South. Southern politicians
in both parties found their support of federal initiatives impinged by
the fear that such precedents could interfere with Southern domestic institutions;
hence, to the extent that Southern politicians supported internal improvements
at all, they preferred that they be state-sponsored.10
The bipolarity of American politics reached critical mass by 1850, partly
as the result of practical concerns but also in response to new values-laden
philosophies in the North and the South that emotionally charged both sides.
During the Missouri Compromise debates of 1820, Senator Nathaniel Macon
of North Carolina stated what was perhaps the first recorded defense of
American slavery, not as an evil without easy remedy, but as a positive
good. Senator William Smith of South Carolina joined by saying the great
lesson of classical history (e.g., Aristotle) and the Scriptures was that
slavery was not only necessary but, indeed, beneficent. Senator Rufus King
of New York led the Northern response, the first pronouncement in Congress
that slavery was innately evil, contrary to God’s own "natural law." Although
the Missouri Compromise established a practical truce between North and
South and provided the framework for political parity, the debates unleashed
the intellectual genesis for future positions that were irreconcilable.
The implication that the federal government could constitutionally interfere
with slavery where it was already established was anathema to Southerners,
who were determined to keep their "peculiar" institution intact. Giving
strength to the Southern position besides the obvious economic incentive
was the belief, fueled by the Vesey conspiracy and reports from Santo Domingo,
that interference with slavery might incite bloody physical recriminations
by blacks against Southern white society.
Abolitionist and Anti-Slavery Reformers
The religious zeal from evangelical Christianity, which had helped propel
Whiggery forward, gave birth and sustenance to a radical abolitionist offshoot
as well.11 Radical abolitionists
who coalesced behind William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s rejected colonization
and other gradualist approaches in favor of immediate abolition of slavery
everywhere. The ironic result of Garrison’s approach was the destruction
not only of moderate abolitionism in the North but of anti-slavery sentiments
that had long existed in the South as well. Radicalism in the North begot
radicalism in the South. "Taunts and reproaches naturally react[ed] on
those to whom they [were] addressed, and thus the breach . . . ever widen[ed]
between them" (V, vi, 620). The first issue of Garrison’s weekly newspaper,
the Liberator, appeared in 1831. Although a link was never established,
Southerners connected the newspaper with the bloody Nat Turner insurrection,
which occurred soon after it began to publish.
Abolitionist propaganda via newspapers and pamphlets began flooding
the mails. Southern slave interests became frightened and intransigent.
Garrison accepted the proposition that the Negro would assimilate into
American society after he was made free rather than be whisked away toAfrica.12
The prospect of miscegenation and "mongrelization" of the white race scandalized
Southern society and excited a rabid Southern white male defensive-aggressive
behavior. Against this backdrop, the American Whig Review argued
that Northern abolitionism served to strengthen slavery by raising Southern
resentment; quite the opposite strategy was needed to produce both national
harmony and the eventual subjugation of slavery as an institution (IX,
ii, 117-19).
By 1840 there were 100,000 Northerners enrolled in some 1,000 local
anti-slavery societies.13 Members
of Garrison’s umbrella group, the American Anti-Slavery Society, usually
abstained from political participation in either party and very often refused
to vote. Their abolitionist efforts were directed towards moral suasion
and not towards achieving a political mandate. Others, favoring direct
political action, formed a third party in 1840 called the Liberty party.
Wealthy New York City businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan supported the
party, while Garrison continued to disdain established politics and to
radicalize the parent organization along philosophical lines.
Political Challenge: A Contextual Crisis
The Liberty party nominated Ohio publisher and abolitionist James Birney
for President in 1840 and again in 1844, but to the rising party’s chagrin,
its 1844 election support resulted in splitting the Whig vote. Support
was diverted from Clay, throwing New York’s electoral vote and the entire
national election to Democrat James K. Polk. The American Whig Review
was irate, clearly assuming that abolitionist votes were taken from the
Whigs and not from both parties equally:
That under a form of government, which reposes all ultimate power
in the people, . . . that under such a form of government the dominancy
should be gained, and held, and swayed by a minority, is an anomaly. That
there should be found in our midst a large body of voters so indifferent
to the great systems of policy which divide the nation, as to throw away
their franchise on an issue desperate in itself and entirely extrinsic
to that on which their country commanded their voices, is matter of grave
astonishment. . . . The pity and disdain of all right-minded men rest upon
them (I, ii, 119).
Meanwhile, Garrison began leading his faction toward the principle of "No
Union with Slaveholders," a Northern religious secessionist doctrine. Garrisonians
continued their strategy of secessionist and religious agitation, while
Liberty people sought ever more practical means to achieve their ends within
the established political system. To the American Whig Review, activities
by political abolitionists were the most disconcerting:
[I]t should be borne in mind, that there are in this country two distinct
kinds of abolitionists. The one class may be styled . . . the Garrison,
or Boston abolitionists, the other the followers of Birney, Smith, and
[Alvan] Stewart, or as they style themselves,—the Liberty Party . . . .
[The] Garrison portion . . . [has been] generally regarded as the most
fanatical, and the most dangerous. We believe, however, that the opposite
of this is the truth. . . . [The Garrison portion] eschew all political
action . . . [and] have several times gone through the ridiculous farce
of dissolving the Union by resolution. . . . The followers of Garrison
and Abby Kelly disclaim all regard for the Union, and by so doing have
rendered themselves harmless. They declare that the house is infected,
and therefore, like consistent lunatics, profess to have left the premises.
The adherents of Birney, Smith, and Stewart remain in the building, but
only for the purpose of setting it on fire (II, i, 4-5).
The Whigs saw their own party as more vulnerable than the Democrats’ to
political competition from anti-slavery groups like the Liberty party,
because, "of the two great political parties," the Whig party was "the
most northern in its influence and its measures" (II, i, 5).
The Liberty party merged in 1848 into the Free Soil party, a broadly
based, moderately anti-slavery coalition that opposed slavery primarily
for the racist (and very popular) reason of wanting to keep land for exclusive
white settlement. The Free Soil party nominated Martin Van Buren for President
and polled 300,000 votes in the 1848 election. This confirmed Whig speculations
that anti-slavery sentiments by that time had spread well beyond the ranks
of abolitionists.14 The Free Soil
party dwindled with the effects of the political compromise reached in
Congress in 1850, but most of its members remained ready to join an even
larger third-party coalition in 1852 if circumstances allowed it. Again,
the Whigs felt inordinately exposed to the political challenge of the Free-Soilers.
"They are mostly from the Whig Party, certainly in the proportion of two
Whigs to one Democrat. . ." (XVI, iv, 371; and see VIII, ii, 193). Political
and cultural crosscurrents had changed the political landscape.
Regarding prospects for North-South accommodation, the situation in
1850 was a far cry from that in 1820. The Review, which had repeatedly
predicted that sectional conflict would be exacerbated by the annexation
of Texas (I, i, 78), was well aware that the nation and the Whig party
were not in ordinary times and that acquisition of the new territories
had made the crucial difference (IX, iv, 331). Whigs, including Webster,
also understood that the nature of anti-slavery sentiment had become crucially
different from the time of the Missouri Compromise:
Twenty years since, the subject of slavery was regarded at the North
as a political question solely; it has now come to be looked upon as a
question of religion and humanity (Webster in XII, i, 102).
The situation was actually worse than the Whigs realized. Despite apparent
political consensus, Clay’s conservative vision would be overtaken by sectional
visions averse to compromise through mutual concession.15
Political Solution: A Compromise That Couldn’t
The election of 1848 produced a Whig victory and hence a Whig opportunity.
President Zachary Taylor presided over the nation at precisely the moment
compromise was required to avert a momentous sectional crisis. When the
new Congress assembled in December of 1849, the Union was already near
the breaking point, as sectional antagonisms were at an all-time high.16
Not only had the United States obtained huge tracts of land from war-winnings,
but the gold rush in California had spurred a population rush, qualifying
the territory almost overnight for admission to the Union as a state. Settlers
there had framed a constitution in September and were requesting admission
as a free state. Taylor urged immediate congressional approval, complicating
subsequent compromise measures that involved much more than just California.
At any rate, the rapid formation of California effectively prevented extension
of the 36°30' line to the Pacific, something some Southerners still
wanted to do. Even Clay considered the issues needing compromise in 1850
to require a totally different formula from the one he had used in the
Missouri Compromise of 1820. The latter had applied to the Louisiana Territory.
The new territories of Texas, New Mexico, California and Deseret (roughly
the area of present-day Arizona, Nevada and Utah) were quite different
geographically, each already having historical or otherwise discernible
boundaries.
Clay was the "foremost articulator of sectional compromise." His solution
to the conflict over slavery was faithful to the vision of the Founders
and followed the Madisonian tradition, in which compromise and perpetuation
of the Union were prime objectives in all national politicaldisputes.17
Indeed, this form of constitutional unionism was inherent in the theoretical
aspects of Whig political culture. After consulting with Daniel Webster,
Clay presented to the Senate in late January the initial resolutions for
a comprehensive settlement. Together, they were designed to resolve all
the substantive issues between sections regarding slavery, thus assuring
national harmony for the foreseeable future as the Missouri Compromise
had done thirty years earlier. Debates continued throughout the spring
and summer of 1850.
In September, the last item of the Compromise of 1850 was approved and
hailed in North and South for averting almost certain national division.
The resolutions as enacted provided for admission of California as a free
state, while Congress would allow New Mexico and Utah18
to decide the slavery issue locally via "popular sovereignty." Slavery
in the District of Columbia, which abolitionists had been seeking to outlaw,
would continue; but slave auctions henceforth would be banned in the capital.
The federal fugitive slave law would be strengthened. And Texas, which
would give up some of its territorial ambitions in exchange for federal
assumption of its large state debt, would nevertheless keep most of its
extensive territory for slavery.
The resolutions seemed to provide something for everyone, yet they failed
to satisfy Clay’s hopes for long-term national harmony. The Compromise
presumed certain conditions for successful implementation which simply
did not exist. At that particular time, nothing was perhaps so idealistic
and impractical as "practical" political compromise per usual. The Compromise
of 1850 compromised only on paper; it did not actually accommodate the
prevailing and competing beliefs and dogmas of sections involved in the
political conflict. The "static" task of harmonization was at variance
with the required "dynamic" task of forging a national consensus concerning
the direction and purpose of ongoing change.19
Because the compromise did not address issues relating to the inertial
divergence of the sections, its passage was akin to placing a band-aid
across tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. Meanwhile, in the
Whig party, leadership was passing from older men to younger ones whose
orthodox Whiggery was weakened by sectionalism. Aware of the slippage,
Clay hoped to use the Compromise of 1850 to reinstill harmony within the
Whig party itself and to fasten "moderate" control over the party’smachinery.20
In 1850, however, most Whigs did not yet capture the awful vision of which
Calhoun spoke in his 4 March "equilibrium" speech. Calhoun spoke baldly
of political reality and observed that the continued efficacy of the Union
as it was would require the reversal of Northern political trends. Moreover,
Calhoun insightfully linked sectional divergence to the gradual change
of character in the central government, which had moved from the decentralized
federal republic of the framers towards a consolidated national democracy.21
When one examines the nature of the compromise measures as they emerged
from Congress, one is also struck by the hollow quality of the political
settlement. Not only did the Compromise of 1850 fail to extend past the
paper to actual practice, but Congress had barely been able to produce
even the paper. Only through the most mechanistic contrivances and utter
obfuscation did the compromise measures pass. In fact, there was little
commitment to compromise in spirit, except from the older Whigs and Western
and Northern Democrats leading the compromise effort.
The divisive spirit that was thick in the air can be seen in the sound
defeat the compromise sustained when its five sections, meticulously crafted
by a "Committee of Thirteen" chaired by Clay, were presented to Congress
in the form of a single omnibus bill. The Compromise—when presented in
its entirety as a compromise—lost. Only after the package was redrafted
by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas into five separate bills did it
pass, piecemeal, from July through September 1850. Ominously, the votes
on each measure showed distinct sectional orientations. Legislators voted
for the "pieces" they liked and absented themselves from the other votes,
in order to avoid the shows of compromise that would be unpopular in their districts.22
Ironically, when the separate votes are all tallied together, the "compromise"
was primarily supported by Democratic and Northern elements. When viewed
separately, however, each measure passed by overwhelming Northern or Southern
support, not by cross-sectional coalitions.23
A significant difference between the compromise measures as they emerged
separately and Clay’s original "package" was that the latter had not included
the explicit formula of "popular sovereignty" to decide the slavery issue
within territories. Aware that sometimes the best decision is to do nothing,
Clay’s "nonintervention" ended where it began, i.e., no laws would be passed
respecting slavery.24 Clay and
Webster meant to leave the issue for nature to decide, believing that,
while isolated individuals or groups might bring slaves into New Mexico
or Deseret, the geography was such as to make slavery in those potential
states practically extinct. Nonintervention of this kind would have diffused
the issue or made it a veritable nonissue, instead of putting the slavery
question at the center of territorial, then national, political attention
and debate.
Clay’s intent was in accord with true Whiggery. Popular sovereignty,
on the other hand, was a thoroughly Jacksonian idea. Unfortunately, Douglas
mistakenly thought he could apply the new and alien "compromise" precedent
of 1850 to the Kansas and Nebraska territories when in 1854 he proposed
the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But by then sectional dynamics had outmoded pure
Jacksonian solutions, as well as pure Whig ones. The problem was that Kansas
and Nebraska were cut out of the original Louisiana Territory, hence passage
of Douglas’s measure entailed "repeal" of the Missouri Compromise together
with a host of other unsettling implications. Opposition to the bill’s
passage ignited Northern sentiment, gave credence to the theory of a Slave
Power conspiracy, and provided the impetus for the formation of the Republican
party that same year.25 The ensuing
Border War (1854-59) in Kansas pitted pro-slavery forces, including Missouri
border-ruffians seeking to impose slavery by terror and election interference,
against eastern Free-Soilers and violent abolitionists bent on coercing
freedom by similar tactics. "Bleeding Kansas" was the physical manifestation
of an important philosophical distinction: that between the adopted Jacksonian
course of compromise and the classic Whig formula Clay had originally conceived
and proposed. The deceased Clay—who had perceived the connection between
abolitionism, southern radicalism, and Jacksonianism—would not have repealed
his previous compromise work of 1820 by emulating the 1850 precedent.26
Even before the Compromise debates, the American Whig Review had
identified a connection between Northern abolitionism and Jacksonian radicalism
(X, ii, 190 and XII, iii, 226), as well as between Jacksonian-style democracy
and the rise of "sectional doctrines entirely discordant" (I,
i, 18).27 Martin Van Buren, the journal declared, was
the quintessential example of this league of interest (X, ii, 192). The
Whigs similarly blamed the Democrats’ use of patronage narrowly targeted
on Catholic immigrants for the emergence, in reaction, of political nativism
(I, vi, 552-3). By 1854 Clay was in his grave and the Whig party in Congress
in no shape to work the practical art of keeping peace in the Union.
In retrospect, it can be seen that Clay and Webster conceived the Compromise
of 1850 in grandiose terms of Whig political theory, but most people didnot.28
Even many Whigs, impassioned by the slavery issue, were making exceptions
to their established conservative political culture. For instance, William
H. Seward, who would later become a leading radical Republican, denounced
legislative compromise out of hand. Moreover, the American Whig Review
accused anti-slavery Whigs of Free Soil persuasion of being "Jacksonian"
in their willingness to use a strong executive to resist the spread of
slavery, despite constitutional limitations on the president’s role in
shaping, as distinguished from enforcing, policy:
A disposition prevails in certain sections of the Whig party, to sink
all other considerations in order to support the one great measure of opposing
the extension of domestic slavery to the territories newly acquired to
our nation. Whatever may be the justice or policy of the ultimate measures
proposed, . . . [if] the extension of domestic slavery to the territories
is to be successfully opposed, it must constitutionally be done through
some other authority than [that of the executive. We say constitutionally
opposed]—for we have seen in the examples afforded by President Jackson
and his dwindling successors, . . . the misuse of the executive functions"
(VIII, ii, 193 and see 194-5).
Democrats like Douglas and Martin Van Buren would attempt other bargains
to keep the peace, but their compromit, or commitment to compromise, had
nothing philosophically to do with the conception of compromise based on
theoretical aspects of Whig political culture.29
Clay, the Whig, and Douglas, the Democrat, were in "different political
worlds." While Democratic attempts fell broadly into the constitutional
unionist tradition, they were colored by the Jacksonian glorification of
mass democracy. This was fatal, since mass politics was largely responsible
for the stimulation of sectional agitation in the first place. Although
the pure Whig solution may have succumbed in time to the onset of sectional
cultures opposed to the virtues of moderation, it would not have precipitated
the same drastic reaction as did popular sovereignty.30
Moreover, the delay may have saved the day for the Whig party to rebuild.
The Compromise of 1850 was "the compromise that couldn’t."
American Republican Dialectic and Rupture
Dialectic is defined as "the association or interaction of ideas, forces,
arguments, etc., that conflict and compete."31
The term describes well the American political environment and two-partysystem.32
The Whigs and Democrats in their time held ideological positions clearly
representing the continuing dialectic of American republicanism.33
The American republican dialectic corresponds in large degree to the alternating
conception of the republic as positive or negative liberal state. The dialectic
consists of a free-ranging dialogue between ideas such as conservatism
and liberalism, "country" and "court," consolidation and confederation,
rationalism and piety, idealism and pragmatism, change and order, which
take shape in broad party coalitions representing combinations of opposing
ideological positions. Some elements of the dialectic evolve, drop out,
or even trade places between parties. For instance, the "rugged" sense
of individualism espoused by Jacksonian Democrats entered later conservative
thought, while twentieth-century liberals began promulgating the quintessential
Whig doctrine, albeit in a different sense, that the good of all should
take precedence over the interests of the individual.34
Jefferson’s motto, emblazoned on the cover of every issue of the Democratic
Review, that "the best government is that which governs least," became
the credo of a later variety of American conservatism. The written Constitution,
with its related history, normally provides readily identifiable parameters
and recognized bounds for contention, as it had in both Whig and Democratic
political cultures before Southern radicalism and political abolitionism
produced a hiatus in dialectical dialogue.
The Compromise of 1850, while in the making, aggravated party factions
the way fierce debates often will. Union parties emerged, especially in
the South, to accommodate those in both parties who were tired of fighting
with anti-compromise party members, whether anti-slavery or secessionist.
Indeed, old party lines were permanently ruptured in Georgia, Alabama,
and Mississippi by both Union and Southern Rights parties. Even Clay and
Webster during the compromise debates toyed with the prospect of forging
a national bipartisan Union party. The "successful" outcome of the compromise
package and the official commitment by both parties to its terms insured,
however, that sectionalist forces would finally split the parties along
straight geographic lines. Whig defeat in the election of 1852 insured
that it would be the Whig party to break first. Thus the Compromise of
1850 actually precipitated the breakdown of the party system by producing
an artificial consensus; this consensus, in turn, killed the parties. The
most one can say about the Compromise of 1850 is that it delayed secession
and the Civil War by nearly a dozen years.35
To the extent that delay almost certainly aided the North in terms of
manpower, industry and political resolve, the Compromise of 1850 materially
contributed to Union victory. This might be seen as a delayed victory for
Whig national organicism. Nevertheless, anti-slavery forces used the artificial
consensus between the Whig and Democratic parties to exploit sectional
antagonisms and to reorganize distraught or alienated anti-slavery elements
out of both parties.36 The fanning
of opposition to fugitive slave laws was used most effectively in this
regard. Among the original endorsers of the American Whig Review
was Hamilton Fish of New York, who later refused to endorse the Fugitive
Slave Act.37 Although massive
reorganization of anti-slavery elements did not occur until after the 1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850 laid the groundwork for the
political realignment that, beginning with the election of 1852, sounded
organized political Whiggery’s death knell.38
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was the coup de grâce.
Political Mechanics of Rupture: A Losing Election
The election of 1852 might have been business as usual for the Whig
party. The national controversy over slavery was temporarily in remission,
since the Compromise of 1850 had been approved (XI, vi, 555). The American
Whig Review took advantage of the lull of controversy and attempted
to patch party divisions from June 1850, by publishing more widely disparate
views on slavery representing all Whig factions. The idea was to re-establish
the Whig "party lines which [had] been in some degree obscured by sectional
agitations" (XII, i, 1). This was the first and only major political policy
shift in the life of the journal, but it was short-lived. The journal attempted
to impress a kind of unity on all factions under the rubric of a "Whig
interpretation of Constitutional Republicanism" (XV, i, 90; and see XIV,
iii, 179 and esp. XIII, v, 393-94). After all, the motto on every issue
of the American Whig Review, printed in all capital letters, was
"to stand by the Constitution."
The approach of the 1852 election revealed, however, that various factions
still held positions at odds with the political Compromise settlement of
1850. In January 1852, therefore, the Review resumed its normal
approach of avoiding sectionally antagonizing arguments and of establishing
with its articles a "singleness of principle in the Whig party" (VII, i,
1-2). One would have anticipated that the Whig party would benefit politically
by successful passage of the Compromise. Nevertheless, while slavery was
not an overt issue in the election campaign, the issue continued to plague
the party. Slavery split the Whig party into factions at its national convention,
where individual reputations seemed fixed by the positions displayed two
years earlier in the Compromise debates.39
Pro-Compromisers constituted the moderate-to-conservative element in the
party, still in the majority; whereas a large minority of anti-Compromisers
constituted the liberal anti-slavery wing of the party, including many
who later became radical Republicans. In terms of the slavery issue, the
Democratic party had a different spectrum of trouble to deal with: liberal-to-moderate
pro-Compromisers and pro-slavery anti-Compromisers, including many who
advocated secession or who would later become secessionists. The Compromise
of 1850 mollified the conservatives in the Democratic party, for the time
being at least, better than it did the liberals in the Whig party.
The Whig choice of candidate in 1852 was both politically anomalous
and maladroit, due mostly to the way in which Whigs were split at convention.
The Baltimore convention in June took four days and fifty-four ballots
to nominate Winfield Scott, an aging military hero. President Fillmore
and Daniel Webster repeatedly failed to unite enough of their delegate
votes to prevent the anti-slavery faction from pushing Scott’s nomination
through by a narrow margin. Although the convention platform was firmly
pro-Compromise, Scott only acquiesced in it blandly, having well-known
anti-slavery sentiments, as well as a personal affinity for Seward. Worse,
Scott’s support was almost entirely sectional.40
Henry Clay had preferred Fillmore over both Webster and Scott, but his
main desire was for that candidate to win the nomination who had greatest
devotion to the Union (as well as support by all sections). Part of the
difficulty in uniting delegate votes for someone other than Scott was that
Clay held his sway over certain delegates too long. Clay actually agreed
with Webster that if Scott were nominated, they might just as well vote
for the Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce instead.41
Scott’s nomination was a blow to most Whigs. Many Whigs simply withheld
their support from either candidate. Others shifted their support to independent
bids. Clay’s life expired just eight days after the Baltimore convention,
as if to signal a bad omen for the election at hand, and even the passing
of Whiggery itself. Moreover, Daniel Webster died in late October, having
run for the presidency as an independent rather than to endorse the divisive
and unelectable Whig nominee.42
Under these adverse circumstances, the American Whig Review became
morose and reflected in every way the diffusive and halting support Scott
garnered from Whigs throughout the entire campaign,43
though it had previously indicated that it could support any of the three
leading contenders for the 1852 nomination—Fillmore, Webster, or Scott:
[w]hichever of the three [was] nominated [would] be . . . entitled
to the cordial support of the Whig party. With this support, with a generous
unity of action, there [would be] a cheering prospect of success. Without
it, defeat [was] sure (XV, v, 389).
Futilely, as it turned out, the journal pleaded for Whigs to put aside
men in this particular contest and to remember that "[t]he great contest
lies between the Whig and Democratic part[ies]" (XV, v, 381). It did, however,
recommend that the most important criterion for the nomination should be
unification of Whig party support through unequivocal commitment to the
Compromise (XV, vi, 475-84).
After Scott’s nomination, the journal admitted that its preference had
been for Webster (XVI, ii, 100):
. . . not because [Scott] had ever shown himself hostile to the Union
or the measures of 1850, but simply because, in a crisis like the present
campaign, it was better to adopt a candidate whose soundness could not
be by any possibility assailed, than to select one against whom the arrows
of the enemy could be more easily directed (XVI, ii, 99).
Although the insinuation is taken to mean the ability of Democrats to attack
Scott, the journal also looked around and concluded something more; namely
that the biggest obstacle to electoral success in 1852 were Whigs themselves.
"[H]armony . . . of the party" was "the sole barrier to a triumph on
which depend[ed] the most vital interests of the country" (XV, vi, 475
and 481). "A year of political disorder [had] led nine tenths of politicians
to despair of unity" (XV, iii, 265). "It [was] no longer time for divisions
in the great party of principle" (XV, i, 10):
[N]on-concurrence in the final nomination could be nothing else but
wanton, inexcusable factiousness, infinitely more becoming to Democratic
spoil-hunters than to Whig patriots. . . . [T]he whole history and character
of the Whig party forbid even the very supposition (XV, iv, 297).
The journal was heartened by the Democrats’ nomination of Franklin Pierce,
a little-known dark horse. His nomination seemed foolish to the Review,
although the choice obviously threw it temporarily off balance (XVI, i,
10). Pierce was so unknown to Whigs or to the American people that the
journal made what turned out to be a cruel joke, i.e., that the Democratic
standard-bearer was actually a pall-bearer of the party (XVI, i, 1).
Since slavery was not a campaign issue and the Democrats offered no
"positive" measures, Whigs had all the "elements of success" if they would
"use them wisely" (XVI, ii, 106); that is, the Whigs would win if they
could remember that "Success is the First Duty; Defeat . . . the First
Danger" (XVI, iv, 374). If popular passions were kept at bay, the people
should discern Scott the "Most Worthy" over Pierce (XVI, v, 471) and Whig
principles superior to Democratic ones (XVI, i, 79; and see XVI, v, 441).
Never had the Democratic party presented such a "spectacle of contradiction
and absurdity" (XVI, ii, 137). Whigs even attributed part of pre-election
calm during the campaign to the people’s tacit approval of the incumbent
Whig administration (XV, iv, 285). To the extent that Whigs managed to
wage an effective campaign, the result of the election would reflect a
properly harsh or beneficent judgment on the people themselves (XV, ii,
134; XVI, ii, 176; XVI, v, 395 and 446). In language reminiscent of the
Jacksonian Era, the American Whig Review envisioned "the worst passions
of the mob . . . arrayed against" Whigs; it remained to be seen if "the
justice and . . . sense of candid men" could overcome them (XV, iii, 270).
For its part, the magazine remained cautious in outlook and continued to
exhort and scold Whigs who, during the campaign, refused to provide the
unity so crucial to "rightful" victory.
Among the original endorsers of the Review, Alexander Stephens
was also one of the most ardent devotees of Webster’s independent campaign.44
The nativist element in the Whig party also bolted or stayed home, when
Scott chose to broaden his appeal by attempting to capture part of the
immigrant Catholic vote. Unfortunately for Scott, the gamble backfired,
losing him support in absolute terms and undermining Whig party loyalty.
Whigs lost some traditional Protestant supporters, including many Presbyterians
and Methodists, as well as the nativist voters in or outside their ranks.
There had been that potential for some time, as there was a certain amount
of tension between Whig party policy and the "proverbially fanatical Protestant
sects" (I, vi, 554 and see 561). Moreover, traditional Protestant unity
was undermined by sectional antagonisms, which disproportionately hurt
the Whig party in the election. Several evangelical religions had either
divided between Northern and Southern denominations (e.g., Methodists in
1844) or were suffering from significant religious disunity over the issue
of slavery (e.g., Lutherans, Episcopalians, New School Presbyterians and
most national interdenominational societies).45
The problem was due in large measure to the influence of Garrisonian radicalism,
and it "covered the entire party with the odium of . . . furious and demoralizing
doctrines" (XVI, vi, 571). Catholics and immigrants, on the other hand,
were not in the least budged from their staunchly Democratic orientation.46
By the end of the 1852 campaign, the blurring of everything that had distinguished
Whigs, from an ideological to an ethnic standpoint, caused many Whigs to
lose interest and to feel that the party resembled a watered-down version
of the Democracy, as the Democratic party was then called.47
Political Mechanics of Rupture: The Numbers Racket
German and Irish immigrants were mostly Democratic by virtue of religious
outlook (nonevangelical Protestant or Catholic), as well as by personal
and cultural preference in favor of non-temperance. Whiggery was sustained
nationally by groups with opposite interests. Between 1846 and 1855, for
instance, thirteen states passed prohibition laws, either with explicit
Whig political support or in implicit accord with professed Whig reform
and morality ideals. Scott proved a better military strategist than politician.
By seeking immigrant votes, he mistook the very roots of Whig political
culture, deserting his party base. Granted, some of the party base had
deserted him, and it can be argued that he had nothing much to lose. Moreover,
Whig political culture already was threatened in absolute terms by the
numbers of immigrants arriving in America, and by their indirect impact
on the rest of the American electorate. Scott actually lost the election
in 1852 while garnering more votes than Taylor had amassed in his successful
campaign of 1848. Indeed, immigration accounts for the absolute increase
of nearly 400,000 Democratic votes between the two elections.48
The American Whig Review covered the phenomenon of immigration
in some detail [in (VI, v) and (VI, vi)], describing demographic causes
and immigrant motivations. The journal did not take a nativist tone, but
it objectively pointed out the demands and strains one might expect on
the nation’s resources and on local charities (VII, iv, 419-31). The magazine
hoped that naturalization procedures would be well regulated to prevent
fraudulent voting and insure appropriate assimilation of immigrants into
the American way of life:
The effect of the mighty stream of immigration which Europe is now
pouring upon our shores is yet to be determined by the events of the future.
But our former experience as a nation in receiving the people of various
races who have sought this favored land as an asylum, and the ready adoption
by the various masses of the Anglo-Saxon language, laws, manners and customs,
induces us to believe that our national character will not be materially
changed by the effects of immigration. It should be the duty of all true
Americans to discourage the separate action and trans-atlantic attachments
and associations of the foreigners who come to reside among us; and to
impress upon them the truth, that as all meet here on equal ground, so
all distinctions of race should here be lost sight of, and all denizens,
from whatever land or clime, should be anxious to be known in this republic
only by the common name of AMERICANS (XIV, iii, 193).
While Whig views thus expressed seemed to foreshadow the coercive spirit
of "100 per cent Americanism" in the early twentieth century, this was
not the Whig intent. Whigs never advocated restricting numbers of immigrants
or actually forcing cultural homogeneity, though such measures certainly
would have been in their interest. Between 1845 and 1854, the infusion
of some three million immigrants represented a 14.5 per cent increase in
the population over that period.49
The burgeoning immigrant population hurt the Whigs disproportionately in
cities, where Whiggery had always been strong. In addition, the influx
of immigrants tended to exacerbate sectional antagonisms, adding population
disproportionately to the North and stressing the North-South cleavage
developing within the Democratic party. Whig defections to declared nativist
ranks increased in reaction to the huge number of immigrants arriving in
the country, with many Whigs using the election defeat of 1852 as a perfect
opportunity to make that switch.50
Indeed, demographic trends alone may have portended the eclipse of Whiggery.51
The volume of immigrants arriving in the four years after 1852, by the
1856 election, exceeded Scott’s total popular vote of nearly 1.4
million.52 Whigs were wont to blame the "foreign vote"
for their failure in the aftermath of 1852, but they had created for themselves
political contradictions impossible for almost any party to overcome: a
candidate pro-Compromisers detested, running on a platform that the candidate
and anti-slavery supporters hated; an ethnocentric and conservative constituency
whose political philosophy had consistently opposed "foreign" influence,
expecting to woo the alien newcomers.
Mental Mechanics of Rupture: A Question of Morale
The party also grieved the loss of their stalwart leaders, Clay and
Webster, and suffered a discernible loss of identity and cohesiveness which
they had helped to provide. The party labored under considerable demoralization;
that, to a party based so much on morals, morale and men, proved decisively
onerous. Whigs believed
[t]he truly great men of a country are the best property it possesses,
or can possess. Their renown constitutes its renown; their fame is its
fame. In the names of its great men the country lives, and becomes known
and honored in the world. . . . Without its great names no country is great,
or even respectable (VII, vi, 554).
The effect of losing "great men" was the inverse of Whig hero worship.
If great men were necessary to bring out the best in a country (or party),
their absence meant the inevitable dearth of all good things:
No greater calamity can befal[l] a nation than the death of those men
who represent in their persons the dignity and virtue of the people. In
Republics especially, the decease of great and worthy citizens, able to
sustain the responsibilities of high office, is to be esteemed among the
greatest of calamities (XII, ii, 114).
Apathy infected Whig ranks before and after the election. "We are left
leaderless" (XVI, vi, 572), the journal lamented. To anyone reading straight
through the pages of the American Whig Review, it is difficult not
to catch the change in tone and utter loss of excited anger and optimism
so evident between those of any previous year and that most fateful year
for Whigs—1852. Statistics cannot capture the sense of malaise which overtook
Whigs after that election.53 The
journal seemed to say the party had lost more than an election: it had
lost its will.
The Compromise of 1850 had literally stressed the nation and the Whig
party to the breaking point:
We have fallen upon times of profound and startling interest. . . .
It is useless to disguise that the existence of our Union has been by recent
events greatly endangered. It is folly to deny that a few more sessions
of Congress like the last, and the Republic, freighted with earth’s most
glorious hopes, is for ever lost. The arena of public events has disclosed
this state of danger. We have seen those bodies composed of the representatives
of the Church, wherein discord and fear, we should think, could find no
room, torn asunder by the operation of this cause. We have seen the two
great parties, cemented by strong bonds, riven into fragments by the detonation
of this bomb (XII, vi, 555).
"Whigs [had] sustained the Union with the loss of their all" (XV, ii,
133), but had seen their aspirations blocked by the sectional dispute:
The Whig party . . . [a]fter a contest of twenty years against the
assumptions of the arrogant and self-styled Democracy, . . . have succeeded
in the vanquishment of their opponents, and have given to the country an
administration distinguished for talent, for political wisdom, and undisputed
integrity. Yet an administration qualified to accomplish so much for the
prosperity of the country has been circumvented and trammelled, its energies
crippled and prostrated, and its action rendered inefficient, by . . .
sectional jealousies (XIV, v, 434).
Whigs had already endured one loss to a dark horse Democrat, James K. Polk
in 1844, and disaster resulted: war followed by near break-up of the Union.
The nation should have learned its lesson from that experience. Whigs bemoaned
the elements tending towards disunion, among them the rapid enlargement
of territorial limits, slavery, and universal suffrage (IX, ii, 111-20).
Still another source of disunion: a "false and ignorant Democracy," referring
both to the political party and to "unenlightened" political participation,
including that of the abolitionists. Such were "the political motives of
1850" and the harbingers of "disunion and civil war" (XIII, i, 10). As
Whigs were most responsible for the Compromise of 1850 and hence the preservation
of the Union, election of any but the Whig candidate equated to conceptual
abandonment of the Union (XV, ii, 131-2; and XV, iv, 294-95).
Normal Whig optimism was fraught with second thoughts and misgivings.
"A long succession of physical storms [had] caus[ed] men to despair of
[the] fair weather" (XV, iii, 265). Regarding prospects for 1852, the American
Whig Review "dare[d] not hope for so much" as victory, because so many
of the people, North and South, seemed "hopelessly corrupted" and devoid
of the proper national sentiments (XIII, i, 10-11). When the election was
over, the American Whig Review freely admitted, "the basis of our
hopes during this momentous campaign was of constantly shifting proportions,
and oftener diminishing than expanding" (XVI, vi, 569). Even before the
election, the journal intimated the efficacy of changing the name of the
party, lest it become one of reproach instead of honor (XV, v, 381). The
most important reason seemed to be that immigrants, unfamiliar with English
or American history, so completely identified with the term "Democracy"
and so universally disdained the title of "Whig," regardless of reason
or experience (XVI, iii, 195).
Mental Mechanics of Rupture: A Question of Philosophy
Before 1852, the Whig party had never lost the states of New Jersey,
Delaware, Maryland, or Florida.54
All four were lost that year, and not because of the immigrant vote. They
were lost because Whigs wasted time and energy spinning their wheels on
alternative Presidential candidates after their convention was already
over, or because Whigs failed to vote, or else voted for the opposition
or third-party candidate. Scott carried only four states in the election
(Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Vermont), losing the electoral
vote by landslide, 254 to 42. For some perspective, however, it must be
added that Scott carried forty-four per cent of the popular vote. Pierce’s
popular vote margin was just over 200,000 out of more than three million
ballots cast.55 Scott’s worst
showing was in the South, where he lost because of his Northern sectional
ties and his lukewarm support of the Compromise of 1850. Scott lost the
South by being less "Whiggish," so to speak, than Pierce.56
The Whig party at large had begun its own departure from conceptualized
national compromise and unconditional devotion to the Union during the
debates on the Compromise of 1850 itself. Obviously, Clay had perceived
this intraparty challenge and had attempted with the Compromise to reassert
orthodoxy. By 1852, however, the liberal faction’s challenger had gained
the party’s nomination, though not control of its machinery, much less
electoral success. The internal logic of Whig political culture facilitated
party rupture without actually causing it. There had always been potential
instability or conflict within Whig political culture because of an apparent,
if not necessary, contradiction between its twin values of social harmony
and social morality. Slavery, more than else, exposed that instability.57
For Clay and other orthodox Whigs, social morality itself required the
nation’s statesmen to strive for social harmony; hence there was no inherent
contradiction between the two goals. So-called "Conscience" Whigs, on the
other hand, separated the two goals and saw their version of morality as
outweighing social harmony on the political scale.
Sectionalism produced a "weight shift" within the Whig party that resulted
in more "Conscience" Whiggery of the sort represented by Seward’s faction.58
Fueling the growing reform influence in the party was the view that, apart
from the injustice of slavery to the Negro, slavery as an institution tended
to corrupt society as a whole.59
Whig didacticism implied strongly that slavery institutionalized the same
or worse excesses as Jacksonian democracy. Slavery represented gross excess
of power, and power in Whig political culture was the worst possible corrupter
of moral virtue. Common examples of cruelty and frequent sexual liaison
between masters and slaves provided compelling empirical evidence. Here
Whig organicism turned on itself, because the corrupt part, so-called,
was seen to corrupt the larger whole. God’s terrible penalty for slavery
would surely apply to all white men and to the entire Union, which was,
after all, one government and one society.
Northern sectionalism reinforced Whig self-righteousness. The North’s
economic vitality was progress as Whigs defined it; moreover, such progress
was merited to the Whig way of thinking, literally God’s reward for rightliving.60
Slavery made men lazy and self-indulgent, but free labor dignified men
and improved their moral, as well as material, status. Slavery was "a permanent
chronic . . . to the South" (IX, ii, 118), "the very essence of despotism"
(IX, iii, 232), the elimination of which would undoubtedly improve material
and spiritual conditions in the region (see X, ii, 192 and 196; and XII,
ii, 117-9). Exposed to the influence of sectionalism, Whig culture (hence
the Whig party also) spiraled towards its demise.
In the evangelical version of Whig political culture, compromise was
not possible when the issue was sin. Slavery posed no such contradiction
to old-school Whigs, for whom morality meant striving for ethically required
change prudently and within the established constitutional framework. Slavery
might engender sin or pose affronts to individual personal virtue, but
it did not negate the entire body politic:
One may hold that there are political evils involved in our form of
government, and yet may honestly swear to execute the whole and every part;
and may honestly fulfil his oath, on the ground, that in a system which
has an immense balance of good, the strict performance even of those parts
which are inexpedient and imperfect, involves no breach of moral obligation,
until they are remedied by amendments in the only constitutional way. On
this principle, a sincere opponent of slavery, who would use all lawful
means for its eradication from our form of government, may, if elected
to office, not only swear to maintain, but actually execute, according
to their true intention, all laws which at present provide for the arrest
of fugitive slaves, and the security of the slaveholding States against
servile insurrections (II, i, 10).
There were many things wrong in society; still, Union within the originally
conceived political structure gave society the best possible and only legitimate
opportunity for perfecting itself. Whigs conceived of society as being
properly engaged in a process of becoming, through the free choice and
voluntary actions of the citizenry.
It was standard in the Madisonian constitutional model that only time
and experience would perfect the social system and settle conflicts. Whigs
admitted that the system had imperfections (VIII, v, 443); slavery was
such an imperfection, which would heal itself in time, because it was God’s
own will that it would be healed in time (IX, ii, 119). The system of government,
however, was already as perfect as necessary. After all, the system did
provide a procedure for constitutional amendment, by which "the State .
. . should gradually shape itself" (VII, i, 2), and the substantial burden
required to effect change was considered altogether appropriate. Moreover,
the moderation of passions was the way by which to facilitate those fundamental
Constitutionalprocesses.61 Not only
did this mean that Northern popular outcry against slavery was improper
(II, vi, 549), but neither could a President properly influence national
policy on the issue (VIII, v, 444). Only legislators, according to Whig
tradition, were qualified to confront the issue, since it affected the
vital interaction between national and state sovereignties:
Though . . . we regard the extinction of slavery . . . as one of the
great and desirable ends of statesmanship in this age, as it has been in
all past ages, we admit no violent methods, no unconstitutional interference,
no ferocious denunciations; the work must be done by those whom nature
and the laws appoint to do it, and they must be allowed their own time:
liberty in this particular is so absolutely theirs, any attempt to infringe
upon it is a declaration of war against our institutions (VIII, ii, 115).
To disregard even iniquitous clauses of the Constitution and take "conscience"
as the only guide was not only illogical, it amounted to a thoroughly "transcendentalist
code of ethics" (II, i, 10-1).
The American Whig Review considered the division of sovereignty
between States and the Union inherent in the Constitution "the highest
reach of political wisdom" and "the grand discovery of political science"
(XIV, ii, 176). Its maintenance was the work of statesmen qualified for
the job, not merely the product of an agreed legal framework; constitutional
government required perpetual exercise of good judgment, perpetual compromise.
In this way, a measure such as the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 (which would
have banned slavery in any territory gained from the Mexican War) might
be completely legal and just, but "impolitic" and "fatal in [its] consequences"
(XI, iii, 220). Whigs drew a careful distinction between constitutional
authority or power, on the one hand, and the way it should be exercised
on the other (see X, vi, esp. 557, 563, 566-67). The abstract and imprudent
way in which reformers made the leap from the confines of constitutional
unionism and legal organicism to a negation of harmony in the body politic
represented their ultimate departure from compromise and true Whiggery.
Radical Reformers Stand Whig Historicism on Its Head
By what today would be called a kind of revisionism, the reformers sought
to preserve the appearance of fidelity to traditional Whig historicism
while actually transforming it and melding it to an emerging Northern political
culture. Reformers started with the all-men-are-created-equal assertion
in the Declaration of Independence and the fact that the Founding Fathers
never once used the word "slave" in the Constitution (even the three-fifths
clause refers only to other "persons"). From these premises, they argued
that the Founders opposed slavery and that the Founders’ intent therefore
conferred a presumption in favor of freedom in any national jurisdiction.
As a creature of local law only, slavery could not exist outside the jurisdiction
which created it. It was this shift in historical presumption which correlated
the righteousness of the abolitionist cause with the "wrongness" of political compromise.62
Some moralists in the Whig party began to view the Constitution as merely
a social compact of expediency and not the defined organic law and sacred
oath to which every lawgiver was party. To the American Whig Review,
this was a marked and frightful distinction. It opened the Constitution
up to all sorts of "ought to be’s," as opposed to preservation of the original
constitutional framework.
[O]ur Constitution, grounded as it is, in the very nature and character
of the nation, is not, as some imagine, an experiment of polity, of doubtful
issue, but must remain while our race lasts (I, vi, 648).
Truly this may be called by way of distinction the conscientious age.
Here is a deadly blow at the very roots of all moral obligation, an utter
contempt of all the sanctions of an oath, and yet this is all on the score
of conscience. . . . We may regard slavery to be as great an evil as we
can well imagine, still even in the most frightful picture of the most
exaggerating abolitionist, it is not to be placed in the scale with the
demoralizing effects of such a sentiment as this. Cruelty and oppression
carry with them their own moral antidotes, but who ever assails or trifles
with the sanctions of the oath, attacks the foundations of all truth and
all morality (II, i, 4).
Whigs believed that the framers reasoned from the same basis, preparing
the Constitution as "organic law," that they never "dreamed of the impurities,
or of the fruits of ‘progressive democracy,’" including pure compact theory
(IV, iv, 326; see also VI, iv, 372). The Constitution was both "sacred
and inviolable" (IV, v, 438, and see 438-41), "a firm whose confirmation
rest[ed] in eternal laws" (VI, iv, 375). It embodied "the final conclusions
of philosophy concerning human freedom . . . [and constituted] immutable
foundations," unchangeable except by its own amendment procedure (VI, iv,
370).
The reformers’ shift of presumption about the past, however, was a powerful
incentive towards constitutional change outside the normal amendment process.
It led Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, a Free Soil senator who vigorously opposed
the Compromise of 1850, to quit the Whig party as early as 1841. Abraham
Lincoln too embraced the "new" historicism, which slowly weaned him from
Whiggery. A moderate in Republican ranks, Lincoln remained a self-proclaimed
anti-slavery Whig until 1856.63
One of the more serious implications of the historical reinterpretation
was that Negroes escaping to the North were considered free, not by virtue
of freedom conferred upon them by free-state law, but by their remaining
men and leaving behind the state law of force and convention which had
enslaved them. The interpretation turned the presumed protection of chattel
property in the Fifth Amendment into its very opposite. Indeed, it made
fugitive slave laws illegal, as well as immoral. It also turned the Garrisonian
notion of a pro-slavery Constitution on its head, making political opposition
to slavery far more palatable to Northern patriotic, pro-Constitution Americans.64
The irony was that pro-Constitution, as thus reinterpreted, came to mean
no-Compromise to an ever-increasing number of Northern Whigs.
To the republican dialectic embodied in the Second American Party System
(i.e., Democrats versus Whigs) was added an ultimatum concerning slavery
in newly acquired territories, as well as other associated and sectionally
polarizing controversies. Sectional interests, mainly originating in the
North, pressed for ultimate resolution of the dichotomies between slavery
and freedom, Union and States’ sovereignty, which theretofore had been
part of the ongoing dialectical dialogue. Calhoun rightly observed that
peaceful democracy breaks down over issues involving the nature of society
or the structure of government when compromise is rejected.65
An ultimate resolution of dichotomies may not be achievable, except by
war. To borrow a term from international relations, the peaceful resolution
of dichotomies is not possible when perceived vital interests are at stake.
The American Whig Review in several articles from 1850 through
1852 identified British government and manufacturing interests as behind
at least part of the design to encourage sectionalism in the United States,
especially through free trade rhetoric aimed at the South. Downing Street
was the "head of the serpent" in terms of luring Southern Whigs from the
party (XII, iii, 226), but it also forged a secret league with "enemies
of native industry and the disunionists of the North and West" in order
to monopolize world trade (XIII, ii, 116). It should be borne in mind,
however, that Northern political interests helped draw the lines which
eventually defined Southern interests and made resort to rebellion seem
necessary. Reasoning from the premise that the Constitution was a compact,
competing sectional cultures imposed mutually exclusive constitutional
and moral imperatives, which disregarded traditional restraints of compromise
that had always prevented or at least moderated the imposition of one sectional
doctrine over another.66
The Whig party had presupposed acceptance of the basic character of
the country as it was. They sought redemption only through peaceful means
and through the established constitutional edifice. Nothing new could contradict
anything old.67 Concerning the
Union, all Whigs were supposed to be avowed constitutional conservatives
(I, i, 81; VI, iii, 243; and VI, iv, 371); that is, they were bound by
preceding generations in affirming the Union, freedom, and slavery to be
"compatible through compromise in a system based on divided sovereignty."68
While responsibility was withdrawn from each particular State to a certain
extent, and jealousy among the States would be confined to generous emulation,
if applied to objects belonging to them as such, the general government
would assume the power and prerogatives of universal sovereignty without
conflict with coexisting sovereignties equally supreme. Most of the objects
of Federal supremacy are compatible with the domestic supremacy of each
individual commonwealth. Each may exercise its allotted powers in harmony
with the other (II, iii, 236).
For in a perfect government, every condition of society must be represented[,
and] . . . no member of the state should fear to impeach another[, thus
making]. . . rebellion their only and justifiable cure (I, vi, 644-5).
The American Whig Review celebrated the party and the nation’s
ability to accommodate opposing views on slavery, while simultaneously
deploring the institution of slavery itself. For the journal, like Clay,
terms of debate were about union or disunion, not about the morality ofslavery.69
Indeed, moral opposition to slavery extended "only so far as the Constitution
[would] permit it" (X, ii, 195), because the Constitution was itself "the
result of the entire moral power [emphasis added] and wisdom of the nation,"
a veritable secular version of "holy writ" (X, ii, 193). Moreover, since
"[t]here [could] be no divorce [of States from the Union]—there must be
conciliation and forbearance" (XI, iii, 229).
Contrarily, Free Soilers concluded that "the old free states" had to
speak for the whole Union. Altering the Framers’ assumptions, "Conscience"
Whigs committed themselves to the proposition that the numerical majority
must properly decide the character of the nation.70
They chose a "higher law" of morality outside the Constitution, over national
harmony and stability. Yet this choice was a departure from the more conservative
or "orthodox" Whiggery of the party’s national organ, the American Whig
Review. It was a departure which ended publication of the journal and,
indeed, brought about the demise of the Whig party. A similar process would
later split the Democratic party. "Conscience" and "Cotton" Whigs became
Northerners and Southerners, unable to dwell longer, peaceably, in the
same political entity.71
What Went Wrong
The publication of the American Whig Review ceased not long after
the Whig election defeat of 1852. The end of the journal indicated the
"profound sense of hopelessness" infecting party ranks. Moreover, it represented
an overt strategy of drastically decentralizing party organization and
ridding the party of national direction, in order to see if Whigs could
rebuild the party first at the state level.72
The strategy was very strongly implied in the last issue of the American
Whig Review (XVI, vi, 508), even though the journal apparently planned
a January 1853 issue, which never materialized, to report the election
results in detail by locality (XVI, vi, 575). As early as January 1852,
the journal indicated the necessity of major reorganization, should voters
not be aroused from their "present lethargy" and the Whig candidate lose
(XV, i, 10). The last issue of the American Whig Review reveals
a harsh judgment on both the American people and fellow Whigs for "that
fatal day" (XVI, vi, 570) when Scott lost the election:
An American who is not a sovereign in his own thoughts is nothing.
. . . The people have forgotten that they are the legitimate defenders
of [the American System]. . . . [T]he party [too] betrayed an unmistakable
disposition to defeat itself long before the coming on of the election.
There seemed to be no reason why the Whigs should not be continued in power;
and yet the majority of them seemed to have no expectation of any thing
half so fortunate (XVI, vi, 507 and 509).
The end of the party and the end of its official journal seemed to mark
the nation’s entry onto the fast track towards disunion and civil war.
The end came more suddenly than ignominiously. To those Whigs reared and
nurtured on the pages of the American Whig Review, the people of
the nation had made an awful and fateful choice. Just as they had essentially
voted for war with Mexico in the election of 1844, they had essentially
voted for national cataclysm in the election of 1852. There was no longer
enough of "the CATO" left in Whigs "to abide by a beaten cause" (I, ii,
120) again. The depths of disappointment were abnormal. The Whigs’ Weltschmerz
was reminiscent of that which infected the ranks of Federalists after 1800
and which proved so self-destructive.73
The Whig party was the party of the Compromise of 1850 and perpetual,
harmonious Union; the people of the nation had resoundingly rejected that
party and, by inference, those ideals and policies. Many Whigs were shocked
with disbelief and intensely disillusioned.74
The disappointment was guilt-ridden and reached inward to the quick, because
Whigs had contributed as much to their own demise as anyone. Despite poor
political strategy and the loss of key senior party leaders, Scott was
hurt worst on the national level by his association with Seward and his
failure to get decisively behind the Compromise of 1850. In addition, the
party continued to suffer nativist defections as the number of immigrants
rose. It seemed to orthodox Whigs that the party had lost both its self-control
and presumed moral high ground. "Whigs . . . [had] unlearned the moderation
of ’44" (XVI, vi, 571), and "a camp without discipline" was bound to fail
(XIII, iv, 290). Moreover, it seemed to them that most voters lacked discernment,
hence there was no strength of goodness left in the nation on which to
draw. "American honor [had] grown gray" (XIII, i, 12). The party was wrenched
between nativists and abolitionists, representing the Whig notions of "Bigotry"
on the one side and "Radicalism" on the other; few seemed on course with
Conservatism, "the middle term of Politics" and only true path to progress
(VI, iii, 244).
The hopelessness of their situation, which Whigs largely drew for themselves,
made them peculiarly quiescent towards a noble death. "Existence and progress
are correlatives: the one is nothing without the other" (XIII, iv, 301).
Instead of resisting (and perhaps floundering) at the national organizational
level, they simply let go and resigned themselves to accepting the dire
consequences, as if it were the righteous, however frightful, judgment
of the Almighty: "[L]et us ascertain the extent of our punishment . . .
[for] [w]e have fallen very far short of that serpentine wisdom which Holy
Writ commands us to exercise" (XVI, vi, 569 and 572). This reaction, too,
was conditioned by their political culture. In their estimate, their greatest
hopes were demonstrably unrealizable. "Antagonists" of the comprehensive
American System espoused by the Whig party were politically ascendant beyond
potential reach of Whig political power (see XVI, vi, 507). "The Whigs
in the end, were the victims of their own aspirations."75
In state elections of 1853, Whigs did well in New York and Massachusetts
but almost nowhere else. Apathy and divisiveness were universal in their
ranks, however, and the party continued to "decompose."
76
Recovery may still have been possible, except that a Democratic debacle
followed on the heels of the Whig debacle, when massive defections resulted
as a consequence of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Democrats lost
sixty-six congressmen from Northern districts alone in 1854, in addition
to losing control of various state legislatures and executive mansions.77
Then the Know-Nothing party split along sectional lines in 1855, itself
failing to contain the slavery issue. Disaffected elements of both parties
were able to create a powerful third party alternative and to forestall
any Whig resurgence nationally, as most Northern anti-Democratic votes
gathered together in the rising Republican party.78
The Democrats’ problems were compounded, as many Southern congressmen
viewed with relish the apparent opportunity for them to capture the party
apparatus. Indeed, as early as 1847, Calhoun had expressed the desire to
send all anti-slavery Democrats packing to the Whig party. It appears that
many worked towards that goal, even calculating that the Kansas-Nebraska
Act would help them finish the job. Unfortunately for the Southerners’
overall intent, there was no viable Whig party to absorb the Democratic
defections when they finally occurred, nor could the Whigs hope to compete
against the ideological momentum of the Republican party at that time.79
Every election has at least one political "failure." One need not assign
too much weight to Whig defeat in 1852, by blaming it for precipitating
the collapse of the Second American Party System, etc. Sectionalism broke
all existing party vehicles.80
Moreover, the Compromise of 1850 "failed" less for lacking in the substance
of compromise, than for lacking in the spirit of compromise. To its credit,
the American Whig Review maintained that spirit to the end. The
Whig party has often been criticized, however, for failing to grasp the
morally absolute nature of the slavery issue. Many Whigs actually did,
which explains some of the sudden disbanding of the Whig party as many
assimilated elsewhere, especially with the Republican party. To become
Republican, however, was to excommunicate oneself from Whiggery, in which
the only political absolute was Union. Ironically, the one great Whig absolute
also energized Republicans and dictated the North’s actions upon secession
and the firing on Fort Sumter. The Union became the indisputable standard
of the new party.81
Epilogue: Where Did Whigs Go?
The specific Whig political culture expressed by the American Whig
Review became marginalized in the North as that section turned more
reformist, more "conscience" driven. If the Republican party inherited
most remnants of organized political (read "Conscience") Whiggery and elements
of Whig organic theory besides on which to base its nationalism, the South
inherited the bulk of old-fashioned Whig ideas, including constitutional
republicanism, unionism based on Madisonian federalism and enumerated federal
powers (altered specifically by the War), much of the Whig party’s evangelical
dimension, and the Whigs’ explicit brand of historicism. Northerners might
have preferred that the defeated South repudiate its past and pick up the
"Conscience"-striped banner of Radical Republican Reconstruction. The South’s
natural inclination, however, was to reach back to a prior, antebellum
notion of what it means to be American. Southerners embraced a worldview
that largely predates sectional hostilities and the Southern Democratic
attempt to graft onto it a pro-slavery ideology, but one which accommodates
the past, the South’s sacrifice, and even proto-Confederate nationalism.
After all, the North’s break with the unionist spirit of compromise not
only made rebellion attractive to Southern fire-eaters, but made resort
to it seem necessary according to tenets of antebellum, mainstream Whiggery.
Voters in the South preferred former Whigs overwhelmingly as the civil
war dragged on and during the subsequent period of Northern occupation.
Old Whigs even started to call themselves "Conservatives" to distinguish
themselves from Democrats.82 It
was, in fact, the perceived Radical Republican affront to constitutional
processes—to the legitimate exercise of power, to the Founders’ intent
and vision—that once again melded Whigs with Democrats into a so-called,
politically Solid South. Some historians have blamed Whigs for the reactionary
impulse that ended Reconstruction in the South, but postbellum Redemption
and attendant violence against freedmen do not wash with the Whig political
culture at the heart of the Whig party’s national journal. Indeed, it is
the way in which Whiggery would inform Southern Democracy over time that
most clearly illumines the fascinating and unlikely process by which Southerners
came widely to embrace the Party of Lincoln at the end of the twentieth
century.
*Wesley Allen Riddle is history columnist
for The Social Critic and a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute.
[Back]
1 Wesley Allen Riddle, "Culture and Politics:
The
American Whig Review, 1845-1852," in Humanitas, VIII:1 (1995),
44-73. [Back]
2 Over the course of eight years, the American
Whig Review published sixteen volumes dated January 1845 through December
1852. Volume numbers changed semi-annually, and each volume contained six
monthly issues. Hence odd-numbered volumes began in January of each succeeding
year, while even-numbered volumes began in July. Pagination began anew
with each volume, continuing consecutively through each issue until the
next volume number. Volume numbers correspond to years as follows: I-II(1845);
III-IV(1846); V-VI(1847); VII-VIII(1848); IX-X(1849); XI-XII(1850); XIII-XIV(1851);
and XV-XVI(1852). [Back]
3 Specifically, Whig economic policies included paper
money with lowered species ratios to enhance credit availability, sale
of public lands for revenue, protective tariffs to raise revenue and to
shield developing American manufactures, a national bank, and a broad-based
program of internal improvements. While the Whigs regarded these policies
as being in the general interest and according with the Constitution, their
political rivals frequently disagreed on both counts. [Back]
4 Describing Manifest Destiny, Thomas A. Bailey has
written: "Countless Americans in the 1840’s and 1850’s, feeling a sense
of mission, believed that Almighty God had ‘manifestly’ destined our people
for a hemispheric career. We would irresistibly spread our uplifting and
ennobling democratic institutions over at least the entire North American
continent, and possibly over South America as well." Bailey, The American
Pageant: A History of the Republic, Second Edition (Boston: Heath and
Company, 1961), 289. [Back]
5 A plausible case can be made, for example, that
the middle way toward resolving the slavery issue which was characteristic
of mainstream Whig opinion would have brought about the gradual elimination
of slavery while circumventing the calamity of the civil war. Not only
would this way have avoided the costs in blood and treasure directly associated
with that war, but also the racial and sectional animosities that continue
to plague the nation to this day. The radical abolitionists, whom the Whigs
opposed, "no doubt hastened the freeing of the slave by a number of years,"
Bailey writes. "But emancipation came at the price of a civil conflict
which tore apart the social and economic fabric of the South. About a million
whites were to be killed or disabled before some four million slaves could
be freed, under conditions that took the lives of tens of thousands of
Negro soldiers and ex-slaves. The war itself cost nearly $20,000,000,000,
including interest and pensions. Compensated emancipation at full value
[which the abolitionists opposed]—about $2,000,000,000—would have been
far cheaper in dollars and cents.
"The bewildered Negro was caught in the middle. The sudden, over-night
liberation of the slaves was in many ways a calamity for them. And freedom
by no means solved the race problem." See Bailey, The American Pageant,
372.
Of the conflagration’s steep costs Donald W. Livingston writes: "The
war shocked Europeans. It was the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century,
leaving a million and a half killed, missing, and wounded. Larger armies
were raised per capita than during the Napoleonic Wars. . . . Lincoln suspended
the writ of habeas corpus in the North for the duration of the war, closed
down some 300 newspapers, and rounded up tens of thousands of political
prisoners, including political candidates. The Union demanded unconditional
surrender and eventually directed war against the civilian population of
the South. In resisting invasion, one of every four Southern males died;
and two-thirds of the South's wealth, excluding slaves, was destroyed.
The magnitude of this destruction can be glimpsed by considering that only
around ten percent of Southerners owned slaves." All of this occurred,
moreover, at a time when Northern states tried to prevent free blacks even
from entering their jurisdictions. The constitutions of Indiana and Oregon,
for example, prohibited the entrance of any free blacks or mullatos, while
Lincoln's own state, Illinois, required a bond of $1,000 for the entrance
of any free black and severely limited their movements. See Livingston,
"The Very Idea of Secession," in Society, 35:5 (July-August 1998),
38-48. [Back]
6 The American Whig Review, volume V, number
3 (September 1847), 236-39, and see volume V, number 6 (December 1847),
622. All subsequent references to this source will be noted parenthetically
by volume, issue number (using lower case Roman numerals) and page
number (using Arabic numerals) within the text. [Back]
7 George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings
(New York: Harcourt, 1963), 204-09. [Back]
8 Robert V. Remini, The Jacksonian Era (Arlington
Heights: Davidson, 1989), 65, 105-08. [Back]
9 Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of
the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), chapter
10. [Back]
10 See Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and
Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in
Cumberland County North Carolina (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981), 49-52,
295-96, 318-19. [Back]
11 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical
War Against Slavery (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University,
1969), 81. [Back]
12 Leonard Richards, ‘Gentlemen of Property and
Standing’: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford,
1970), 31. [Back]
13 Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, A House Divided:
America in the Age of Lincoln (New York: Norton, 1990), 44, 49.
[Back]
14 Ibid., 51. [Back]
15 Peter B. Knupfer, The Union As It Is: Constitutional
Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press,
1991), 5, 168, 185; and William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican
Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford, 1986), 227. [Back]
16 Avery Craven, "The Crisis," in Edwin C. Rozwenc
(ed.), Problems of American Civilization: The Compromise of 1850
(Boston: D. C. Heath, 1957), 3-4. [Back]
17 Knupfer, x-xi, 3, 21-22, 63-64, 157, 159, quote
21. [Back]
18 The area previously called Deseret was renamed
and territory redefined by legislation signed 9 September 1850 (XII, iv,
430). [Back]
19 William R. Brock, Conflict and Transformation:
The United States, 1844-77 (Baltimore: Penguin: 1976), 20. [Back]
20 Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for
the Union (New York : W. W. Norton, 1991), 730. [Back]
21 Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The
Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 72.
[Back]
22 Hamilton, 66, 124-32, 141; Foner and Mahoney,
53; and see Knupfer, 193-95. [Back]
23 Hamilton, 142-43, 164; and Michael F. Holt, The
Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978), 82. [Back]
24 Holt, Political Crisis, 83, 85; and Knupfer,
182. [Back]
25 Foner and Mahoney, 53-54; see also Hamilton, 182-83;
and Holt, Political Crisis, 149. [Back]
26 Knupfer, 150, 161, 202, 206; Holt, Political
Crisis, 145-46, 148. [Back]
27 Hardly Whig in sympathy, historian W. E. Burghardt
Du Bois explicitly links abolitionism with democracy, calling it "abolition-democracy"
and giving it powerful motive force from the 1830s through Radical Reconstruction;
see Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which
Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1956), esp. 184-85. [Back]
28 See Major L. Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom:
The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815-1861
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), 150-52. [Back]
29 See Wesley Allen Riddle, "Culture and Politics:
The
American Whig Review, 1845-1852," esp. 61-65. [Back]
30 Knupfer, 7, 18-22, 165, 186-87, quote 187; and
Holt, Political Crisis, 48. [Back]
31 Tom McArthur (ed.), The Oxford Companion to
the English Language (1992), 291. [Back]
32 Wesley Allen Riddle, The American Political
Tradition (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education,
1996), 2, 21-25 and 30. [Back]
33 James E. Mulqueen, "Conservatism and Criticism:
The Literary Standards of American Whigs, 1845-1852," American Literature,
41 (November 1969), 372; see also Holt, Political Crisis, 135-6;
James H. Hutson, "Country, Court and the Constitution: Antifederalism and
the Historians," William and Mary Quarterly, 38 (July 1981), 337-68;
and John Zvesper, Political Philosophy and Rhetoric: A Study of the
Origins of American Party Politics (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), 6-9, 13-16 and 184-85. [Back]
34 Mulqueen, 358. [Back]
35 Remini, Henry Clay, 762; and see Thomas
Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party
(New York: Columbia, 1985), 220-21; and Knupfer, 196. [Back]
36 Holt, Political Crisis, 91-95, 98, 151-52.
[Back]
37 Remini, Henry Clay, 769. [Back]
38 See Glyndon G. Van Deusen, "The Whig Party," in
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (ed.), History of U.S. Political Parties,
v.1 (1980), 360-61; and Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, 224-25.
[Back]
39 See Gienapp, 16. [Back]
40 Ibid., 16-17. [Back]
41 Remini, Henry Clay, 779; and Robert F.
Dalzell, Jr., Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism,
1843-1852 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 284. [Back]
42 Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Daniel Webster and
the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843-1852 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1973), 282-84. [Back]
43 See Gienapp, 20-21. [Back]
44 Van Deusen, "The Whig Party," 360; and Brown,
Politics and Statesmanship, 223-24. [Back]
45 Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Abingdon Press, 1957),
190-92. [Back]
46 Gienapp, 21-22, 25-26, 30-31. [Back]
47 Holt, Political Crisis, 123-26; and Gienapp,
35. [Back]
48 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (ed.) et al., History
of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, v.2 (New York: Chelsea
House, 1971), 918, 1003. [Back]
49 Holt, Political Crisis, 120; David M. Potter,
The
Impending Crisis, 1848-61 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 241;
and Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration, first ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), 94. [Back]
50 Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, 221;
and Knupfer, 204. [Back]
51 See Gienapp, 13. [Back]
52 Potter, 245, 266. [Back]
53 Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, 224.
[Back]
54 Van Deusen, "The Whig Party," 360; Holt, 128-30.
[Back]
55 Gienapp, 28. [Back]
56 See Knupfer, 205; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
The
Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 480; and Brown, Politics
and Statesmanship, 224. [Back]
57 Howe, 275; and Brown, Politics and Statesmanship,
219. [Back]
58 Howe, 276; and Potter, 237-38. [Back]
59 Brock, 96-97, 102; and Peter J. Parish, The
American Civil War (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 31. [Back]
60 Kenneth M. Stampp (ed.), The Causes of the
Civil War (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 101, 152. [Back]
61 Knupfer, 57-58, 197. [Back]
62 James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists
and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 27, 98-99, see
also 102-03, 115-17, 153-54, 175-76; and Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude
to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1962), 76-77, 94-95. [Back]
63 Howe, chapter 11, esp. 290-91; and Fehrenbacher,
25-26. See discussion of how the new historicism is also embodied in Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address, in Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic
Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Washington, D.C.: Catholic
University of America Press, 1995 edition), new preface and chapter V.
[Back]
64 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men:
The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York:
Oxford, 1970), 76-77, 83. [Back]
65 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in Stampp, The
Causes of the Civil War, 125, 140; and Brock, 19. [Back]
66 Knupfer, 164. [Back]
67 See Wilson, 166-73. [Back]
68 Knupfer, 165, 169, 175. [Back]
69 Knupfer, 174-75, 185. [Back]
70 Brock, 31, 79, 82. [Back]
71 Parish, 27, 32; and Howe, 276-77. [Back]
72 Gienapp, 34-35, 40, quote 34. [Back]
73 For a description of the Federalist experience
see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early
American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York: Oxford, 1993), ch. 15, esp.
732-33 and 750-51, quote 750. [Back]
74 Gienapp, 27-28, 32. [Back]
75 Gienapp, 34; quote Brown, Politics and Statesmanship,
229. [Back]
76 Gienapp, 40-44, 69; and Holt, Political Crisis,
140, 150. [Back]
77 Holt, Political Crisis, 150; see Michael
F. Holt, "The Democratic Party, 1828-60," in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
(ed.), History of U.S. Political Parties, v.1 (1980), 497-536; and
Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, 224-25. [Back]
78 See Gienapp, esp. ch. 2. [Back]
79 Foner, 153-56. [Back]
80 Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, 229-30.
[Back]
81 But in a very different sense. "Union," for Whigs,
meant a confederation of states cooperating voluntarily for common ends.
It was very much this sense of the word that Irving Babbitt had in mind
when he referred to America’s "unionist tradition based on a sane moral
realism." See Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1979 [1924]), esp. ch. 7 ("Democracy and Standards"). For the Republicans
led by Lincoln, "Union" came to denote a unitary state, "one and indivisible,"
ruled from the center and held together by force. Whereas the unionist
tradition of the Whigs had its origins in the American Revolution, that
of Lincoln owed its inspiration to the French Revolution. See Livingston,
"The Very Idea of Secession," esp. 39-45. [Back]
82 Thomas B. Alexander, "Persistent Whiggery in the
Confederate South," in The Journal of Southern History, 27 (August
1961), 305-13, 320, and see 314-27. [Back]
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