The Historical Significance of the Whig Party: The Political Failure of the Age of Jackson

Abstract

'This paper is an attempt. to reconstruct the historical significance of the Whigs by examining Whig historiography and eventually to illuminate the political failure of the Jacksonian age through the party's early demise, Originating from the moderate Jeffersonian synthesis of democracy and capitalism, the Whig party emerged as the champion of both republican-or aristocratic-conservatism and nationalistic capitalism. Despite their relatively aristocratic ideological predilection, however, the Whigs. through their fierce electoral competition with the Democrats, significantly contributed to the establishment of popular democracy, as revealed by the emergence of various political institutions during the Jacksonian age, including the second party system, Campaign slogans, national nominating conventions, and mass voter turnouts. In addition. the Whigs' ideological adherence to national capitalism or national economic plans served as a major reason for them to win popular allegiance whenever a depression set in. However, the Whigs and the Democrats, the two national parties constituting the second party system, complacently adhered to a status quo founded on the Union's inveterate contradiction-i.e. , liberty based on slavery-in order to maintain their national structure. They accordingly continued to respond to the critical national issue of slavery with evasiveness and compromises. As a result. when evasiveness and compromises on slavery were no longer allowed in federal politics following the Compromise of 1850, in other words, when the intimidating speed of the nation's capitalistic growth resulting from the crucial social changes of the era-i.e., the Market Revolution and territorial expansion-drove the sectional conflicts over slavery beyond any constitutional control, the two national parties failed to come to terms with this national crisis, Consequently. voters switched their allegiance to highly sectional parties: the Whig party subsequently collapsed: the faU of the second party system ensued: and sectionalism finally prevailed in the Union, thus expediting disunion. In this way, through its early demise, the Whig party registered the political limitations of the Jacksonian era: its complacent adherence to an ingrained national inconsistency-i,e" freedom resting on the political and capitalist exploitation of slaves-and its consequent failure to tackle the nation's irrevocable sectionalization caused by the Market Revolution and territorial expansion,