In this piece, which relies heavily on Michael F. Holt’s enormous and compelling history, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (Oxford University Press, 2003), I work through the factors that contributed to the Whigs’ demise and examine which of them apply to the predicaments of contemporary Republicans and Democrats. There are a striking number of rhymes. Then, as now, the issues that provided the traditional lines of contestation between the two major parties were losing potency while new divisions were taking their place. The end result then was a shift to a new party system—accompanied by Civil War.
Plenty of factors in our own political landscape make such a dramatic break with the past seem unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Both Democrats and Republicans in 2016 are better insulated from outside competition than the parties of the 1850s. Nevertheless, dramatic change is possible, either with or without the formal demise of a major party, and a look at history clarifies what portents in the years to come would indicate an imminent partisan restructuring.
I. FACTORS LEADING TO THE DEMISE OF THE WHIGS AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF THE 1850S
America’s founding fathers envisioned a legislature without organizing parties, but once in motion, our constitutional system soon generated competition between organized groups. The first party system pitted Hamilton’s Federalists against Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and ended in the so-called “era of good feelings” following the War of 1812, when the animating conflicts of those early years faded away. By the late 1820s, the outlines of a second party system were emerging, with Andrew Jackson’s Democrats facing off against a coalition of the president’s opponents led by Henry Clay, which would ultimately form the Whig Party.
To use Holt’s felicitous metaphor, during the twenty-some years that American politics was structured around the conflict between Democrats and Whigs (roughly 1833-1855), each party contained centrifugal forces pulling its coalition apart that had to be counteracted by centripetal forces holding it together.
The story of Whigs’ downfall, as Holt chronicles it, is complicated and defies a single explanation. Many factors, reinforcing each other over more than a decade, worked to erode the foundations of Whiggery until the party finally underwent a dramatic collapse from 1853 to 1855. Rather than attempting to retell this history chronologically, this paper attempts to isolate factors that can then be looked for in the present with as much parallelism as is possible.
We will turn to the decline of the forces holding the Whigs together first, and then to the growth of forces pulling them apart.