By Allen Guelzo, Princeton University
The Bank War destroyed all illusion that a single Republican Party, the party of Thomas Jefferson, and the party of the revolution of 1800 still existed. For years, ever since the election of John Quincy Adams in 1824, that pretense had been evaporating. With the Bank War, it was gone entirely. For Jackson’s war on the bank touched the nerve of the National Republicans at their roots.
National Republicanism
National Republicanism—as it had been designed by Henry Clay and John Calhoun after the debacle of the War of 1812—had been erected on the practical need for a national banking agency to fund development and coordinate the growth of a national economy. To attack the bank was to expose the central line of division within the Republican house.
Consequently, by 1832, what had begun as an intra-party disagreement 15 years before, and then which had turned into a separation in 1824, had become an outright divorce.
In the run-up to the 1832 election, the National Republicans organized their own national nominating convention, the first major political party convention in American politics, which met in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to select a presidential nominee to run against Andrew Jackson. They chose Henry Clay, but he lost. The real accomplishment was the convention, though. The National Republicans were now on their own.
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Whigs and Whigism
In 1834, to give the divorce of the old Republican Party its final force, Clay bestowed on the National Republicans their own party name, a name dredged out of the English political past as the badge of the party of resistance to political tyranny, the Whigs.
Although Clay strove to define the Whigs of the present day as simply good Republicans, in fact, Whigism stood for a cluster of political and public values and ideas that sharply differentiated them from the Jacksonians, and that clearly aligned a major section of American political life with the movement of American life onto the world’s capitalist markets.
The first thing that typified the Whig Party was its commitment to economic dynamism. The Whigs became ‘the’ party of small-scale urban business and finance; usually, urban businesses and financiers were parts of transatlantic networks of investment and trade, or of trade that crossed state or regional boundaries.
Support from Farmers
This did not mean that the Whigs were entirely a city-oriented party. In fact, the Whigs drew a large measure of their support from farmers.
Whig farmers tended to be large-scale commercial farmers who produced agricultural products for distant markets; they were also tied into networks of trade that benefited from the regulation of state or even of national controls on trade. It was not, in other words, a party whose members identified themselves strictly with their state or with their locality. That was true either economically or socially.
This is what attracted them to Clay’s American System, and led the Whigs to support high protective tariffs; in other words, to assist American business in competing with European products, subsidies for internal improvements to help break down barriers to further trade, innovative transportation technology such as railroads, and a national bank, because a bank would create a uniform and dependable system of national investment, currency, and finance.
Party of Economic Opportunity
Although this opened the Whigs to the accusation that they were simply a ‘party of the rich’, the Whigs replied that what it really meant was that they were the party of economic opportunity.
“Who are the rich men of our country?” asked a Whig newspaper. “They are the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labors from the dust and turmoil of his workshop to an abode of ease and elegance, the industrious tradesman whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego the duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.”
If this is what it meant to be rich, the Whigs would be the party of the rich. By their definition, though, being rich was a matter of constant fluctuation, of dynamism, or social and economic mobility, that those who were rich one day might not be rich the next, and those who were poor today—by their own stimulus, by their own ingenuity—might become the rich of tomorrow. Ungirding, supporting, and encouraging that kind of dynamism and mobility was what the Whigs saw themselves as being all about.
Social Morality
The second thing that came to typify the Whig Party was its commitment to a kind of social morality. The Whigs described themselves as the sober, industrious, thrifty people. That’s a statement not just about their economic behavior, or their economic values, but about their moral behavior and their moral values as well.
Whig economics depended upon regularity across the national economy. In other words, one region was not going to do something different from another region. One state was not going to make economic war on another state. Above all, one state was not going to declare itself exempt from the requirements that governed everything else in the federal Union. Whig economics took for granted regularity and predictability across the national economy.
Along with that, the Whigs—and this was almost a corollary of this idea of economic regularity—relied upon regularity of moral behavior. This led the Whigs into a close alliance with an ambitious and aggressive protestant moralism. Of course, not every Protestant in America in the early 19th century was a Whig though.
Common Questions about the Whigs
The first thing that typified the Whig Party was its commitment to economic dynamism. The Whigs became ‘the’ party of small-scale urban business and finance.
Whig farmers tended to be large-scale commercial farmers who produced agricultural products for distant markets; they were also tied into networks of trade that benefited from the regulation of state or even of national controls on trade.
Whig economics depended upon regularity across the national economy. In other words, one region was not going to do something different from another region. One state was not going to make economic war on another state. Above all, one state was not going to declare itself exempt from the requirements that governed everything else in the federal Union. Whig economics took for granted regularity and predictability across the national economy.
