When people warn of an epic political collapse, they often say a political party might “go the way of the Whigs.” It's supposed to sound dramatic because the collapse of the Whig Party in 1852 was astonishing. Over a stunningly short period, one of America's two major parties just disintegrated. At the same time, it's also meant to sound a little overwrought because most people presume whatever blunders the ancient Whigs fell into must have nothing to do with modern politics. In fact, the Whigs—just like the Jacksonian Democrats they opposed—were just as stable and well-organized a party in their day as our modern Republicans and Democrats. That this political colossus collapsed suddenly into irrelevance, taking down the entire Jacksonian party system and plunging America into nearly a decade of national chaos, violence, and danger, is a chilling warning about how America's leaders can turn a realignment into a disaster.
America's First Party System was a debate about what sort of republic America was going to be. Its Second Party System was a debate over the future of that young America as it moved into the frontier. As a new generation of Americans, raised in a growing nation built around the American Revolution's ideals came of age, they had a different perspective about what America might become. Andrew Jackson and his Democrats offered an explosive vision of a popular democracy, demanding America directly empower ordinary people while sweeping away corrupt elites. Henry Clay and his Whigs proposed a counter-vision, one advancing a national vision of modernization, growth, and reform. Over the decades that these issues captured America's attention, these two parties built to debate them flourished. Then, as years passed, America slowly changed. Old issues faded. New issues rose. America's leaders failed to innovate or act. Eventually, America's parties decayed, the Whigs imploded, and the Second Party System came tumbling down, plunging America into years of chaotic turmoil before another stable party system rose to replace it. What happened to the Whigs will never repeat itself exactly—but if we're not careful, something very much like it could easily happen again. The story of the America's Second Party System is the story of how realignments can go wrong.
ANDREW JACKSON'S RISE
As it moved into the middle of the 1820s, America was no longer a scrappy patchwork of thirteen colonies at the far end of the world. It was a nation of twenty-four states spanning both banks of the Mississippi and claiming vast territories beyond. For decades, as the American government struggled to create the institutions of a new republic, hardy pioneers had packed their belongings into Conestoga wagons and set off into the wilderness to carve out new futures for themselves, their families, and their nation. Some were poor laborers with no prospects or property, some were immigrants looking for chances they could never have got at home, and some were young ambitious Americans looking for fresh starts in growing cities with seemingly unlimited opportunities to advance. As they settled in remote places like Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri, they built new homesteads, new towns, and then new cities. Those places boomed, eventually joining the Union as full states. Before long, a new generation of Americans had grown up, one whose worldview wasn't framed around colonies or Europe. They were the first generation of genuine Americans. Their nation was the America of the frontier.
American politics in 1824, however, was still stuck in the now-fading Founding era. President John Quincy Adams, the brilliant Harvard-educated son of President John Adams, was the last of the Founding generation's presidents. With a youth spent assisting his father on diplomatic missions in Europe, Adams had personally worked alongside the giants of the American Revolution. At only twenty-six, President Washington had appointed him an ambassador. Now president after a long career in the republic's service, Adams intended to extend Monroe's nonpartisan spirit of Good Feelings and usher in a good-government agenda of national improvement. Adams openly celebrated the end of partisan division in his inaugural address, and he appointed officials with varied ideologies and loyalties.1 He proposed an agenda that would respect the interests of every American region—the commercial and industrializing East, the growing West, and the plantation South—through a united plan for national flourishing and growth.2 To drive economic and intellectual progress, Adams proposed an ambitious and costly program of national improvement that included a national university, a naval academy, an astronomical observatory, and a new national road linking Washington with New Orleans.3 He adopted Henry Clay's longstanding project, the American System, linking a high tariff to protect New England manufacturing to significant federal spending on public infrastructure and the credit of a national bank. Income from the protective tariffs would fund roads and bridges into the wilderness of new western states, while the bank regulated currency and provided the necessary credit to spur modernization and growth. Unfortunately for Adams, Andrew Jackson and his followers had little interest in allowing Adams to govern this way above the fray.
As soon as Adams settled into office, Jackson's supporters began marshalling forces to dislodge him.4 Jackson and his partisans were still stewing over his loss in the four-way election of 1824. They insisted that Adams, Clay, and the establishment—by choosing Adams over Jackson, the top vote winner—hadn't merely cheated Jackson in what they denounced as a “corrupt bargain.” They claimed this corrupt cabal had cheated the American people.5 Jackson's partisans seethed that Adams's administration was corrupt and Federalist.6 They accused Adams and his supporters of protecting unfair privilege and diverting national resources to enrich themselves and other elites. They denounced Adams's national improvement plans as waste and corruption. Resolved to disrupt what they believed to be an illegitimate Adams presidency, the Jacksonians labored diligently to attack, disrupt, and block anything Adams sought to achieve—hobbling his administration in what turned into a four-year-long election campaign.
Andrew Jackson was unlike the American aristocrats who mainly led America through its Founding era. Jackson's parents were poor Irish immigrants who settled in a remote part of the Carolinas. Although Jackson fought in the American Revolution, it wasn't as an officer. Only thirteen at the time, he served as a courier running messages for the militia. Jackson's father died before he was even born. His mother perished of an illness she caught nursing wounded soldiers during the revolution, making Jackson an orphan. With raw determination and ambition, the spottily educated Jackson managed to study law and then moved west to Tennessee, where he launched a successful career as a lawyer and politician. He became a wealthy planter and briefly served as a United States senator. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, Jackson was now the elected major general of the Tennessee militia, so he marched off to war. Jackson turned out to be a talented solider—his men called him Old Hickory due to his resolve—leading his men to the victory at New Orleans that made him a national hero. The tough, rowdy, commanding, uncontrollable, self-made Jackson was about as far from men like Jefferson, Madison, and Adams as you can imagine.7
What truly marked Jackson as different, however, wasn't his background—Hamilton after all was also a self-made orphan born in poverty. It was Jackson's perspective. The Founding generation never expected that ordinary people, without the public spiritedness and nobility they believed only an elite education and background afforded, would or should hold high public office.8 Even Democratic-Republicans, who believed republican virtue rested with common farmers, saw themselves as a “natural aristocracy” forged by superior educations and merit and with a duty to represent the people.9 As a self-made man from a frontier state with only a basic education, who rose by the force of his own will and ambition, Jackson believed everything that mattered could be handled with the common sense that common people possessed. He distrusted banks and commerce and people with fancy pedigrees. After years stewing at officials and elites milking the state in petty scandals during the corrupt Era of Good Feelings, Jackson had grown suspicious of complex plans for growth and reform and concluded the people needed protection from corrupt elites.10 He suspected most great plans for national improvement were in reality convenient vehicles for self-dealing from the elites he despised. Jackson didn't believe in natural aristocracies. A product of the rough-and-tumble American frontier, Jackson was the people and the people loved him for it.11
When 1828 arrived, Jackson got his rematch against Adams, and it was beyond ugly. The public enthusiastically took part in an election that became a national spectacle. Each side reveled in untruths and personal attacks meant to portray their rival as morally corrupt and a threat to republican government. Jackson's supporters, taking the name Democrats, claimed Adams was squandering national treasure on gambling—he had installed a billiards table at the White House.12 Adams's supporters, taking the name National Republicans, accused Jackson and his wife, Rachel, of engaging in adultery because she had divorced before marrying Jackson.13 When Jackson won, and handily, thousands of ordinary working people crowded into Washington to celebrate. They paraded through town for his inauguration and then crushed into the White House, where they stomped with muddy boots across the grand floors, broke fancy china, and stood on the expensive furniture. The staff supplied pails of liquor on the lawn to draw them out, where the people drank and made merry.14 The establishment was horrified.
As Jackson entered the presidency, he brought a new vision for America—a “Jacksonian Democracy” meant to take common people into the center of politics. Rejecting Founding-era notions of a natural elite governing for the people, Jackson wanted to overthrow corrupting elites so the people could rule themselves with himself as their sword. Jackson supported extending voting rights to all non-enslaved men, completing the elimination under way of property requirements that elites believed necessary to ensure voters were invested in the nation's success.15 He opposed as wasteful corruption the national infrastructure spending Adams and Clay championed. He disliked and distrusted credit, banking, and banks. Believing there was nothing in any government job so difficult any ordinary person couldn't do it, Jackson made appointments not by qualification or merit but loyalty.16 He developed a vast patronage network called the “spoils system” in which plum federal jobs went not to the pedigreed or connected, but as rewards to the common people who supported him. Jackson and his partisans considered this rotation in office not a corruption but a reform, breaking the elite hold on power, bringing the people into government, and stopping officials from becoming entrenched in office.17 Jackson also supported aggressively expanding the nation west to provide cheap land for working people willing to build a fresh start in the wilderness—including “de-indianification” to clear more land for settlers. Jackson championed an Indian Removal Act to force Native Americans off their lands, which led to the infamous “Trail of Tears,” to provide opportunity and social mobility to his supporters, but at the expense of the Native American pushed off ancestral lands.
Andrew Jackson's presidency alarmed a lot people. Jackson's headstrong temperament and quick anger struck the establishment as unpresidential and dangerous.18 To them, Jackson's assaults on national elites sounded like ignorance that would sabotage their efforts to drive modernization and growth. Many feared Jackson was a demagogue or maybe even a would-be tyrant. With the now-unpopular Adams clearly outmatched, the anti-Jackson coalition turned to a new leader not so unlike Jackson himself—Adams's secretary of state, Henry Clay. On one hand, as a brilliant orator and strategist, Clay was long considered one of the greatest talents of American politics. First elected to the Senate before he turned thirty, Clay's colleagues, recognizing his ability, didn't even object he was too young to constitutionally serve. After two short Senate terms, Clay ran for the House of Representatives and his colleagues elected him Speaker as a freshman. Clay was a driving force in launching Madison's War of 1812 and was a powerful figure under Monroe. Clay was also, however, just like Jackson, a new American raised from the frontier. He too was self-made, growing up modestly in Virginia and then moving west to Kentucky to make his fortune. He was gregarious, a storyteller, a hard drinker, and a famous gambler.19 Just like Jackson, he was a dueler (although unlike Jackson he hadn't actually killed anyone in a duel).20 Clay was also a well-known charmer—when he spoke in Congress, Washington's women reportedly crowded into the gallery just to hear him.21 Clay and Jackson were each frontier types, Jackson the bombastic brawler and Clay the silver-tongued rake.
As Clay organized opposition to Jackson, Jackson made two important decisions that would come to establish the Second Party System's battle lines. First, he launched a personal crusade to abolish the Second Bank of the United States. National banking was no longer a major political issue when Jackson's presidency began. After allowing the First Bank of the United States to expire, Madison created a Second Bank of the United States to stabilize the currency and economy after the War of 1812 and, since it proved useful, it had grown generally accepted. However, this Second Bank of the United States had grown wealthy and powerful, standing mostly outside government yet essentially regulating the entire American financial system because of its power over state banks.22 Its leadership, moreover, had grown arrogant in the belief that, despite its incredible power as a national institution, the Bank, as an independent corporation, wasn't accountable in any way to the American people or the government beyond the narrowest limits of its charter.23 The Bank was also becoming less popular as many Americans—not irrationally—blamed its inept handling of the Panic of 1819 for driving the country into a severe economic recession. Jackson, who thought banks and credit were inherently corrupt tools through which elites stole power and wealth from ordinary people, was determined to both wipe out the national debt and crack the power of banking.24 He decided the Bank was his political enemy and he resolved to do everything in his considerable power to destroy what he viewed as an unaccountable bastion of inequality and privilege.
The Bank's charter was set to expire in 1836, during what would potentially be Jackson's second term. Seeing the political risk in Jackson's hostility, and taking the advice of Clay, who was looking for an election issue, the Bank asked Congress to reauthorize it early, sure Jackson wouldn't dare risk a veto before his 1932 reelection.25 The Bank was wrong. Jackson issued a blistering veto message framing the issue as a great battle between plainspoken republican government and corrupt elites, stating, “Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.”26
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.27
More alarming, Jackson explicitly rejected the right of Congress or the judiciary to control the president's power at all. According to Jackson:
The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.28
Jackson's attack on the Bank was completely different from the old Democratic-Republican opposition to the First Bank of the United States, which turned on the role of federal versus state power. The Jacksonians weren't enraged over abstract issues like the balance of constitutional power but over perceived slights by national elites against ordinary Americans.
Many across the American establishment naturally found Jackson's bank crusade worrying. Speaking as the voice of an angry common people, Jackson had launched what many saw as a bizarre and personal vendetta against a seemingly necessary national institution, simply because it was valuable to the elites he loathed. He further claimed no other institution or constitutional branch had any right to challenge anything he did. To many, Jackson sounded dangerously close to a would-be-dictator or populist demagogue. He would continue to carry this “Bank War” into his second term, eventually choking the institution off to its total annihilation.
In a second controversial decision, Jackson supported the “Tariff of Abominations,” a high tax on imported foreign goods that alienated the South. Northern states in the nineteenth century pushed for high tariffs to protect their infant manufacturing economy from cheaper and superior European goods, causing higher prices across the agricultural South with no corresponding local benefit. Leading up to the 1828 election, Southern states in a high-stakes political move proposed a painfully high tariff rate that would also greatly raise the cost of industrial raw materials, believing the Adams faction would have no choice but to vote against it to protect New England manufacturing. They hoped to thereby avoid a higher tariff while pinning its failure on Adams, shielding Jackson from backlash in the North. To the South's horror, this “Tariff of Abominations” passed and President Adams signed it. After the election, most people naturally expected Jackson to support the tariff's repeal. He decided instead to keep it to help pay off his hated national debt. The tariff fight boiled throughout Jackson's presidency. Eventually, after Jackson's reelection in 1832, anti-tariff forces in South Carolina even managed to declare the federal tariff unconstitutional, null, and void in South Carolina. Jackson, hostile to the challenge to his authority, had Congress pass a Force Bill giving him the power to enforce the tariff by military force if necessary.29 With the nation on the brink of war, cooler heads ultimately devised a compromise tariff at the last minute, defusing the crisis, but the controversy made Jackson powerful enemies among the plantation barons of the South.
As leader of the anti-Jackson National Republicans, Henry Clay worked to unite all these factions who feared or hated Jackson. His chief issue would be Jackson's crusade against the Bank, an institution Clay argued was not just economically necessary to drive economic growth and modernization. He denounced “King Andrew's”30 war against the Bank as the act of a tyrant usurping the power of America's truly democratic branch, Congress. The issue would thereby unite business and political elites, who hated Jackson for his war on the Bank, and professionals and the middle classes, who feared his populist insurgency was dangerous demagoguery from an ignorant and violent rube. To this, Clay added Southern planters who believed in state's rights and chafed at Jackson's militant resistance to their idea of nullification in the tariff fight. Clay thus united a seemingly impossible alliance of merchants, professionals, old elites, and Southern plantation barons around the unlikely agenda of protecting a bank, a wonky economic program of tariffs and infrastructure, and the ideological principle of congressional supremacy.31 Clay's new opposition party, which solidified after the Nullification Crisis during Jackson's second term, hardly even made sense except as an anti-Jackson party.
Clay ran against Jackson in 1832, but Jackson won reelection—it helped that a short-lived Anti-Masonic Party, organized around opposing Freemasons in government (Jackson and Clay were both Freemasons), siphoned off a fair share of the anti-Jackson vote.32 Yet the arguments and alliances Clay assembled against Jackson would endure for decades. Unlike the Founding generation that hated political parties, this new generation of political leaders eagerly adopted them as useful and necessary means to protect liberty, organize people, and drive beneficial change.33 Through the strategy of Jackson's close adviser Martin Van Buren, Jackson's Democrats built a ruthlessly effective party united around his rowdy populist Jacksonian Democracy that could organize, energize voters, and win. Clay's supporters, united around stopping Jackson in the name of modernization, growth, and opposition to a strong executive, soon embraced similar methods. Echoing the theme of fighting against a tyrannous King Andrew, Clay's opposition soon adopted a new name, one colonial-era patriots once used when fighting against the tyranny of King George—the Whigs.34
THE DEMOCRATS AND THE WHIGS
For decades, the Second Party System thrived. Politics during the early republic had been mainly an elite affair of dueling pamphlets. In the Second Party System, the American people threw themselves into democracy with enthusiasm.35 The end of property requirements to vote, the Jacksonian celebration of popular democracy, and the promise of spoils, all combined to bring ordinary Americans directly into politics. Voting skyrocketed. Campaigns embraced the banners, rallies, parades, red-white-and-blue streamers, and brass bands we now associate with popular politics. Both parties eventually embraced Jackson's idea of the spoils systems, so ordinary citizens gleefully volunteered to campaign and argue for their party in hope of winning a plum patronage job in government.36 Elections turned into a rowdy form of popular entertainment or sport.37 Both parties were well-supported and well-organized, building local organizations, rallying their respective bases for elections, and employing partisan newspapers that wrote hyperbolic articles about how the other party threated the republic.38 They were also pretty evenly balanced, essentially trading the White House back and forth every four years, although the Democrats usually controlled Congress. This great debate between the Whigs and Democrats over the future of young vibrant America turned the republic into more of a democracy.
Unlike the First Party System debate over national greatness and simple Republican yeoman farmers, the Whigs and the Democrats were parties clashing over this new America of covered wagons, homesteading settlers, and pioneers. As America pushed steadily west, Democrats saw a nation of unrivaled opportunity in which anyone from any background could remake themselves and rise. A rough laborer or immigrant with little education and no connections could pack up and move west, build a farm up from nothing, and become a landowner and businessperson. Democrats feared cities and banks and modernizing plans, which they believed had already choked off opportunity in the East. Whigs, on the other hand, saw a nation with unrivaled potential. They wanted civilization to spread across the wilderness, bringing education, growth, prosperity, and modernity.39 Whigs feared Jackson's populism was in fact ignorance that would hold back economic and moral progress.40 Democrats thought in terms of personal liberty and wanted a popular republic in which ordinary people could grow and thrive. Whigs thought more in terms of moral duty and believed in an active and meritocratic state that promoted the general welfare so the nation could grow and thrive.41
The policy fights between Whigs and Democrats reflected these clashing ideals. Both the Democrats and the Whigs commanded immense popular support nationally, both in the North and the South. The Democrats, celebrating the common man standing against the corrupt influence of the wealthy and the elite, championed a federal government with limited power but a stronger presidency. Whigs, promoting modernization, national progress, and American strength as “the champion of liberty, morals, and prosperity,” believed in a strong federal government driving progress and growth, but a weak executive.42 Democrats tended to do best with working people, farmers, and Catholic immigrants.43 The more moralistic and modernizing Whigs tended to do best with professionals, the middle class, commercial elites, and Protestant reformers.44 Democrats argued the nation needed to grow out into the West, where every man could, through his own hard work, make a fresh start on his own plot of land—despite the Native Americans who were pushed off their lands by that policy. Whigs were less enthusiastic about aggressively pushing west, fearing it would slow the nation's progress. Whigs preferred the nation to grow up rather than out, with denser cities, manufacturing, commerce, and citizens who developed skills rather than the manual labor of agriculture. Democrats supported a laissez-faire economy without the tariffs, banks, and what they considered wasted money going to the infrastructure boondoggles of Clay's American System.45 Whigs supported high tariffs, investment in “internal improvements” like roads and canals, and more schools, education, and cultural institutions in order to build a wiser and more skilled citizenry. The Democrats boasted figures like Jackson, John Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Stephen Douglas. The Whigs had Clay, Daniel Webster, and a young Abraham Lincoln. Where free African Americans could participate in politics, they tended to be Whigs.46
This debate between Democrats and Whigs played out over decades. Jackson had two terms, followed by the administration of his protégé, Martin Van Buren. In 1840, the Whigs presented the wealthy Virginia-born former Ohio senator and popular general William Henry Harrison in the model of Jackson, a hard-cider-drinking general from a log cabin in the frontier.47 Harrison, the hero of the battle of Tippecanoe, won the election but, in a bizarre turn of fortune, caught an illness after delivering a long inauguration address in the rain and died barely a month into his term. Harrison's vice president, the party-switching former Democrat John Tyler, assumed the presidency and then spent his term feuding with the Whig leadership and vetoing important parts of his new party's agenda.48 Tyler became a man without a party, despised by both the Democrats he abandoned and the Whigs he betrayed.
As these parties fought, America slowly changed. A religious revival broke out and roared through the little homesteads and small towns dotting the American wilderness. As Americans came back into the church, the mostly practical nation of the early nineteenth century began thinking a lot more about morality and reform.49 Itinerant preachers traveled from community to community, holding lively multiday tent revivals and spreading the idea that Americans could bring about Christ's return if they reformed America into God's Kingdom on Earth.50 This revival flooded across America, bringing a nation that had lost interest in religion after the American Revolution into the grips of a religious enthusiasm that converted about 90 percent of American Protestants into evangelicals.51 The preachers of this revival taught that the American republic had a holy mission to morally redeem the earth, but that it would suffer wrath if it failed in its special vocation.52 Newly committed Christians threw themselves into charity and new crusades for reform, such as temperance from alcohol—a movement driven by a desire to morally reform working class men, particularly Catholic immigrants, while incidentally breaking up their political organizing in saloons.53
The greatest cause of these moral reformers and revivalists, however, was abolishing slavery. Powerful preachers like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher built a passionate movement around the cause of abolition, while activists like William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglas, and many more, energized followers through writings and abolition societies. For most of America's young life, the country sought to avoid the issue of slavery for fear it might tear the republic apart. Seeing no obvious way to politically resolve the matter, many hoped the wicked institution would gradually die out on its own. This new generation of passionate believers—many religious, others mainly secular but devoted to abolition—believed the destruction of slavery was an urgent necessity.54 The abolition movement flourished everywhere, but it particularly bloomed within a Whig Party already more Protestant and moralistic than the Democrats.55
The issues that defined the Second Party System also gradually melted away. The polarizing Andrew Jackson retired, and then died in 1845. The Bank issue was settled and then disappeared from the national spotlight. As private enterprises began to build necessary internal improvements like canals and railroads, and state governments came to support such projects on a bipartisan basis, the American System economic platform was increasingly obsolete.56 As American manufacturing grew, the need for tariffs faded. As the British started to invest heavily in America, high tariffs were also less necessary to stop American gold and silver flowing to Europe in an era of hard money—a trend that intensified near the decade's end when the California gold rush made gold more plentiful.57 Most important, the old frontier was now blooming with cities like Cincinnati, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, and America was soon to reach the Pacific.
As the country moved into the middle of the 1840s, the Second Party System appeared, on the surface, as solid and stable as it ever had. Underneath that surface, change was undercutting its foundation. Then in 1844, America elected President James Polk, who promised to expand America to the Pacific and then conquered vast new territories from Mexico—setting into motion forces that made the Second Party System's disintegration inevitable.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE WHIGS
There was nothing in the election of 1844 that indicated the Second Party System was about to unravel. Heading into 1844, the Democrats and Whigs both looked like perfectly solid parties engaged in the same enduring debates over the issues of Jacksonian Democracy that they had fought for years. The Whigs were in particularly high spirits, since they expected Henry Clay, the Whig Party leader who had lusted after the presidency for decades, to face and defeat former president Martin Van Buren, the chief architect of Jackson's Democratic Party agenda—thereby vindicating the Whig agenda after the fiasco of Tyler's presidency.58 In the run up to the election, however, Tyler topped his partisan treachery with a final parting gift. To secure an achievement as president and perhaps win favor from Democrats in a hopeless effort to win reelection, President Tyler agreed to annex the Republic of Texas.59
Texas had won its independence from Mexico in 1836 after a flood of American settlers changed the composition of its population, and it had sought to join the United States ever since. The American government, however, was wary of admitting Texas to the Union because adding what everyone presumed would be several new slave states would unbalance the issue in the Senate, not to mention potentially start a war with Mexico over the location of the new border. Tyler's unexpected political bomb disrupted the race. Van Buren, fearing splitting his party over slavery, opposed the annexation—committing political suicide and leading even his mentor Jackson to break with him.60 The Democrats nominated instead former House Speaker James K. Polk, a man few people in America knew. At first, Whigs taunted the Democrats with the mocking battle cry “Who is James K. Polk?”61 Polk, however, upset the race by aggressively campaigning on annexing Texas. In fact, he suggested it was America's destiny to occupy the continent all the way to the Pacific—what later became known as Manifest Destiny—proposing to secure a favorable border in the Pacific Northwest from Great Britain as well. Voters liked Polk's proposal so, when Clay couldn't walk back his now unpopular opposition to the Texas annexation, it turned out the answer to the Whigs' taunt was that James K. Polk was the next president of the United States.62
President Polk was good to his word, negotiating a treaty with Great Britain for what would become the states of Washington and Oregon, annexing Texas, and then asserting the Texas border extended into territory Mexico continued to claim. When Polk moved troops into the disputed territory under General Zachary Taylor, it meant war—exactly what Polk and the Democrats wanted. Outraged Whigs accused the Democrats of instigating a bloody war based on lies to make an immoral land grab against a weaker nation.63 Although they took pains to express their support for soldiers in the field, and sometimes attempted to claim credit for military victories, the Whigs devoted Polk's presidency to opposing an unethical war.64 Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln in fact made his name denouncing Polk's immoral warmongering from the House floor.65 When America won a crushing victory against Mexico, Polk's administration negotiated a treaty annexing all the land between Texas and the Pacific Ocean: what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California, along with parts of Wyoming. Having achieved everything he sought to do in one presidential term, President Polk retired. With another election now looming, the Whigs decided, despite their previous opposition to the war, to support the popular peace deal in Congress. Over the next four years, the aftermath ripped America apart.
Adding so much new territory to the Union at once opened Pandora's Box. All the vast new territories Polk seized from Mexico would someday join the Union as new states. Southern slave states were obsessed with maintaining an equal balance of slave and free states in order to keep the issue deadlocked in the Senate. Newly energized abolitionists were unwilling to allow a moral evil to spread any farther than it already had. Each time a new state carved out of the new territory joined the Union, Congress would now have to decide whether to admit it as slave or free. Already during the war with Mexico, Democratic congressman David Wilmot had offered a rider to the war-funding bill to ban slavery in any territory America won in the peace. Wilmot's proviso failed, but antislavery politicians in the years that followed continued attempting to slip it into other bills again and again—it actually twice passed the House but was blocked both times in the Senate.66 For antislavery forces, this “Wilmot Proviso” became a symbol representing not just whether the country ought to permit slavery, but of America's moral virtue. For slave states, it represented an existential threat. America would have to repeat this debate again and again every time a new state created from former-Mexican territory sought admission. Polk's war placed the spread of slavery at the very top of America's political agenda for years to come.
The Whigs in 1848, desperate for a win, nominated the hero of the war they just opposed, General Taylor. Taylor, a Louisiana slave owner, had no prior political experience or record as a Whig, and in fact both parties had courted him as a candidate.67 As the Whig nominee, Taylor hedged on the slavery question, distanced himself from regular Whig politics, and promised to govern just as he had in the military—an independent man guided by pragmatism and his own judgment above any party.68 The Democratic Party candidate, Michigan's Lewis Cass, who was friendly toward slavery, promoted the idea of allowing the people who settled in the new territories to decide slavery's status for themselves, named “popular sovereignty.”69 A group of antislavery Democrats led by former president Van Buren, upset at their party's refusal to oppose slavery's spread, walked out of the Democratic National Convention and joined with a group of antislavery Whigs to form a new antislavery party calling itself the Free Soil Party. Taylor won, although with less than fifty percent of the popular vote—the Free Soilers did surprisingly well.70 American politics had begun tearing apart.
Spooked by the sudden divisiveness of the slavery question, old hands from both parties dedicated the next Congress to working out a great compromise to settle the issue. Whig titans Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, along with prominent Democrats like Stephen Douglas, brokered a package of related deals called the “Compromise of 1850” hoping to stuff the troublesome slavery issue back into Pandora's Box. America would admit all of California as one large free state, denying the spread of slavery to the Pacific, while also admitting Texas as one large slave state to balance it in the Senate. The southwestern territory, which would later become New Mexico and Arizona, would determine its position on slavery upon statehood through local popular vote. Perhaps most important to what was to follow, slave-state politicians—frustrated that Northern states had rendered the existing fugitive slave laws practically unenforceable—insisted on tougher laws to force Northern cooperation in recapturing the flood of slaves now reaching the North through networks like the Underground Railroad. A new Fugitive Slave Act obligated Northern law enforcement to help capture and return any accused slave upon nothing more than an affidavit from a slave owner. The accused couldn't obtain a jury trial, which many Northern states previously required, nor offer evidence that he or she wasn't property. Any Northerner sheltering or helping the accused slave faced punishment. President Taylor, who opposed the compromise, died while it was under negotiation.71 The new president, Taylor's vice president Millard Fillmore, a doctrinaire Whig, was happy to sign it.
Upon passage of the Compromise of 1850, America let out a great sigh of relief at having skillfully avoided a terrible crisis. America's political establishment congratulated itself on putting the slavery controversy to bed so America could go back to arguing over the normal issues dividing Whigs and Democrats. It was soon apparent, however, that far from a final settlement, the Compromise was a disaster. Debate over the Compromise had bitterly divided the nation across sectional lines North and South, with each side believing parts of the settlement had either been too favorable to slavery or too conciliatory to abolition. The Fugitive Slave Act particularly outraged the North, which considered it an insulting and unjust concession to the Slave Power.72 As America headed into the 1852 election, anger over the Compromise—particularly from Northerners deeply uncomfortable with slavery's spread—was now tearing politics apart. Major political figures even explored whether they needed to form a new Union Party centered around backing the Compromise to head off the growth of an antislavery party that might rip the nation in half.73
Since Fillmore was now toxic among Northern Whigs for his role in the Compromise, the Whigs in 1852 nominated General Winfield Scott, one of the most celebrated military officers in American history, a known opponent of slavery, and a terrible politician.74 The Democrats backed Franklin Pierce, a proslavery Northerner with his own pedigree of military service in the Mexican-American War, nullifying Scott's military credentials. With no real policy disputes left between the parties, the campaign was mostly without substance, while the real issues—slavery and the Compromise—rumbled in the background.75 Instead of Scott's distinguished military record gaining him support in the South as the Whigs had hoped, proslavery Whigs were now furious their party nominated such an outspokenly antislavery candidate. Northern Whigs, on the other hand, were still furious at their party for the Fugitive Slave Act. Abandoned by both groups, Scott won only four states. The Whig Party was reduced to only about one-third of the House and remained a weak minority in the Senate. It was an electoral disaster, one far worse than anyone anticipated.76 Some feared the Whig Party might not even survive it.77 As Whig congressman Lewis Campbell famously declared in the election's aftermath, “The party is dead—dead—dead!”78
At first, however, most Americans didn't fully appreciate what had just happened. Most Whig leaders believed the Democrats would eventually blunder, and when they did voters would have no choice but to go back to the Whigs.79 The Democrats, on the other hand, believed the victory meant their party was now set to flourish.80 Both Whigs and Democrats therefore continued to fumble forward as if nothing important had changed. In the next Congress, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas—wanting to make way for railroads connecting the rail hub of Chicago with the Pacific while also strengthening the Western bloc in Congress—carelessly pushed forward a bill to open Kansas and Nebraska for settlement and statehood.81 His problem was the 1820 Missouri Compromise had already promised that territory would join the Union as free states, but Southern legislators weren't willing to vote for four more senators opposed to slavery. To pass his bill, Douglas and the Democrats therefore decided the citizens of these territories would choose for themselves whether to allow slavery in their new states under popular sovereignty.82 Americans were outraged, particularly Northerners who saw the proposal as an aggressive attack perpetrated by the South. In passing this Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Democrats had just torn back open the very mess the Compromise was supposed to have closed. Worse, they had violated the trust upon which every compromise between free states and slave states relied. The national backlash against the Democrats was intense as an outraged North rallied against any further compromise with a ruthless Slave Power they felt they could no longer trust.83
In the midterm elections of 1854, disgusted voters reduced the Democrats to about a third of the seats in the House and imposed substantial losses in the Senate.84 Yet voters didn't turn back to the Whigs. A shocking number of voters, now fed up with both the Democrats and the Whigs, looked for an alternative party to support, and many chose the political vehicle of an angry movement dedicated to fighting the mass immigration of German and Irish Catholics, the Know-Nothings.85 The Know-Nothing movement began in the 1840s as a loose collection of conspiratorial secret societies, such as the Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner, that concocted complicated rituals and codes requiring members when questioned by outsiders to claim they “knew nothing.”86 Know-Nothings believed a great Catholic conspiracy or papal plot was afoot to use mass immigration of Catholics to steal control of America from its “native” Protestants, and that the existing major parties were complicit in their thirst to capture Catholic voters.87 The movement saw itself as the defender of American liberty against national elites all too happy to sell out the republic, and it promoted a platform that was openly patriotic, stridently nationalistic, celebratory toward the Constitution, and hostile to immigrants and Catholicism.88 It capitalized on a growing and rampant national hostility toward Catholic immigrants, particularly the Irish, based in religious bigotry and cultural complaints about their supposed abuse of alcohol, rowdyism, lack of social decorum, and proclivity toward crime.89 The Know-Nothings had long dabbled in politics, but they were never major players before 1854. Now, frustrated voters flooded into their ranks under the banner of a “Native American Party” (meaning Anglo-Saxon and Protestant Americans), later shortened to just the American Party.90
The Congress elected in 1854 thus became perhaps the oddest in American history. The decimated Democrats were now in the minority, while the House fell into the control of a loose coalition of Know-Nothings, smaller parties, independents, and what remained of the Whigs. Many of these political newcomers, members of small antislavery parties formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska outrage, quickly formed a second bloc. The most important of these Kansas-Nebraska parties proved to be one formed around Kansas-Nebraska activism in Wisconsin with only thirteen seats, calling itself the Republican Party. This strange alliance now controlling the House called itself the “Opposition,” and it elected as speaker a Know-Nothing with Kansas-Nebraska loyalties.91 Classifying the various cooperating blocs in this congressional alliance was messy, with members elected as Whigs or Know-Nothings or something else, often changing factions or even holding multiple affiliations at once.92 Over time, the members of the Kansas-Nebraska bloc, including members from the more established Free Soil Party, gradually coalesced into one national movement using one convenient party banner—the Republican Party.93
American politics was now in chaos. With the old party coalitions broken, a vacuum had opened at the center of American political life—one that every faction, interest, and ambitious personality hoped to fill. Politicians and political activists, identifying as Democrats, Whigs, Know-Nothings, or Republicans, struggled to redefine America's agenda around their conflicting priorities and beliefs. At the same time, America's political situation just got worse. With the introduction of popular sovereignty in Kansas, passionate activists naturally flooded into the territory to influence the impending statehood vote. Freedom activists, many organized by abolitionist preachers in New England, poured in to ensure Kansas remained free. Militarized “Border Ruffians” crossed over from Missouri to defend the vote for the slavery side.94 Each settled into fortified camps. Activists fought dirty to stack the new legislature, while President Pierce used his authority to put a thumb on the scale for slavery.95 Open violence erupted. Rifles funded by abolitionists arrived, named “Beecher's Bibles” after abolitionist Preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who took up a collection in his New York church for two dozen rifles he sent to Kansas in boxes marked “Bibles.”96 Border Ruffians from Missouri attacked free state advocates in Lawrence, Kansas, setting fire to newspapers and a hotel.97 Abolitionist John Brown and his followers retaliated, hunting down proslavery activists at home to hack them to death with broadswords.98 After several antislavery attacks on proslavery settlements, a pitched battle was fought in Osawatomie in which proslavery forces employed a cannon.99 The nation was horrified. This “Bleeding Kansas” tragedy dragged on for years as proslavery and antislavery activists attacked and murdered each other in an undeclared civil war.
Nor did the violence stay in Kansas. In 1856, a day after the Sack of Lawrence, Senator Charles Sumner gave an inflammatory speech denouncing the “Crime against Kansas.” Sumner attacked the slave-state position using the sexual imagery of the rape of a slave girl, specifically calling out elderly South Carolina senator Andrew Butler as such a rapist of the “harlot, slavery.” To avenge this insult, Butler's distant relative, South Carolina congressman and Democrat Preston Brooks, entered the Senate and beat Sumner just short of death with a heavy wooden cane, while a friend, Congressman Laurence Keitt, brandished a pistol to ensure no one intervened. Brooks struck Sumner on the head with a flurry of blows until the bloody senator fell into unconsciousness.100 It was several years before Sumner recovered sufficiently to resume his Senate duties. Activists and editorialists in the North celebrated Sumner and attacked the proslavery forces as violent and intolerant of even basic freedom of speech. In the South, they celebrated Brooks as a chivalrous knight defending his honor against a scoundrel.101 A few years later, abolitionist John Brown led a well-organized raid on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to steal weapons with which he hoped to arm a slave revolt. Brown's capture and hanging seized the attention of the nation, with many in the North celebrating him as a martyr while the South responded in fury at Northern violence.102
In 1856, it was the American Party's turn to implode. The Democrats in 1856 abandoned Pierce, now tainted by the disaster of Bleeding Kansas. They nominated instead James Buchanan, a man whose chief appeal was that he was abroad as ambassador to Great Britain during the Kansas mess.103 Given the solid support Democratic leaders had consistently offered slavery, the party now had a lock on the South. The important battle in 1856 would therefore be about which new party won over the North, emerging as America's other major party. The Know-Nothings nominated former Whig president Milliard Fillmore, hoping to win over former Whigs. The remains of the shattered Whig Party, seeing no better choice, endorsed him, finally extinguishing it as a political force. The Republicans nominated famed explorer and general John Fremont on a platform opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery into the territories—“Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Fremont!”104 Freemont came in a strong second and his Republicans became the second-strongest party in Congress. The humbled American Party, humiliated by the loss, quickly collapsed into irrelevance.105 American politics was once again coalescing into two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans.
Over the next four years, the Republicans and Democrats clashed over slavery's expansion, particularly over which of two proposed constitutions for the new state of Kansas was legitimate, the one permitting slavery and the other free.106 In 1858, the Republicans seized control of the House. In 1860, after a messy race in which the Democratic Party split in two and a new Constitutional Union party emerged on the platform of simply keeping the nation together, Abraham Lincoln won the White House.107 South Carolina, horrified by the implication—an openly antislavery party captured the White House with almost exclusively Northern votes—seceded from the Union before Lincoln was even sworn into office. The Civil War began. In the North, pro-war Democrats joined the Republicans in a “Union Party,” which became the postwar Republican Party. In the Confederacy, the Democrats ruled an effectively one-party state.
When the blood and smoke of the Civil War cleared, the Republicans had become the party of the North, professionals, and business, representing an ideology linking social and economic progress, the Yankee work ethic, and the old Whig vision of economic improvement and moral progress. The Democrats had become the party of the South and urban immigrants united around fighting the Republicans, particularly the scalawags and carpetbaggers governing Southern states under martial law. Over the following decades, these parties feuded over tariffs, political corruption and patronage, immigration, Catholicism, and temperance. Republicans “waved the bloody shirt,” while Democrats served as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”108 After years of turmoil, political violence, and a civil war, a Third American Party System had begun.
WHAT DESTROYED THE WHIGS AND WHY IT MATTERS
The collapse of the Whig Party and the destruction of the Second Party System stands as the starkest example of how a realignment can go horribly wrong. America's leaders in the 1840s and 1850s made almost every possible mistake necessary to turn a realignment into a disaster. Replacing the now irrelevant Jacksonian parties was both necessary and inevitable. The party implosion, years of political chaos, horrific decade of violence and disorder, and the rise of a nasty movement like the conspiratorial and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, were unnecessary man-made disasters. There's a case to be made it all worked out to the good—slavery might not have ended as quickly without an implosion and civil war. Even so, few would choose this model for future party realignments when anything less than mass enslavement was at stake. The reason the Second Party system crumbled in the way it did, forcing America to endure a difficult decade of disorder, violence, and chaos, is because, in the face of realigning pressures, America's political leaders chose to hide from reality. Failing to act first, the river's current swept them away, dashing them and America against the rocks as they went.
By the early 1850s, the old Jacksonian arguments over banks, tariffs, and internal improvements were no longer pressing or relevant. Northern industry had matured. Private investment was building the necessary internal improvements. America was clearly now the popular democracy Jackson represented. Property restrictions on voting had long been removed. Campaigns were no longer elite affairs but a popular sport with parades and bands and bunting of red, white, and blue. The spoils system had turned government service from an elite occupation for the educated and connected into a reward available to everyone. American politicians now competed to demonstrate how ordinary they were, with office seekers from comfortable backgrounds like William Henry Harrison pretending to have grown up in log cabins. The nation had expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean, so there was more than enough land for settlers to keep moving west. Economic development had turned settlements into towns, and then into cities with roads and canals and then railways. The young nation of pioneers pushing west to build homesteads and little towns had grown into a rising power and a vast nation of thirty-four states spanning a continent.
At the same time, while an influx of new states required a constant rebalancing of Senate power, a religious revival and a national spirit of moral reform had washed over the nation, radicalizing Americans on both sides of the slavery divide. That revival spread apocalyptic notions, a belief that the nation's fate turned on a great confrontation between good and evil, and that America could either live up to its destiny as God's Kingdom or else collapse as a republic. For many Americans, the idea of civil war was no longer a national horror to avoid at all costs—it was an opportunity to win a final victory against evil in the service of moral righteousness.109 The most important divisions in America in 1850 were no longer between Jacksonians and Whigs. They were between North and South, between an economic system based on plantation slavery and its national eradication.
The Jacksonian debate was over. It was a debate suited to solving the problems of young frontier America, not the America of the mid-nineteenth century. America had debated Jacksonian Democracy for decades and, after much time and experience, the American people had resolved it. They decided the Jacksonians were right. America could and would be a popular democracy in which the people, not elites, would rule. They also decided the Whigs were right. America could and would also be a meritocratic republic that would continue to build, modernize, and reform. America would be a nation of individual opportunity in which laborers, new immigrants, and the driven and ambitious could, whatever their background, remake themselves and rise. It would also expand manufacturing and erect great cities, canals, and rail lines across the continent. America would usher the people into politics, listen to their desires, and still pursue modernity, progress, and reform. It turned out there was no conflict after all. America could, and would, do both.
With the Jacksonian debate now resolved, America in the 1850s naturally fell into political decline. Unwilling or unable to talk about the issues that now mattered to people, politics turned empty. Political debate turned toward slogans and campaign hoopla in place of ideas because there was no real substance on the table. Both parties resorted to clever campaign tactics, nominating popular military heroes with no political experience or agenda, and offering pragmatic government inoffensive to all but without a compelling sense of vision. Short-sighted leaders ran campaigns without big ideas founded on personality and politicking, massaging short-term interests of important constituencies instead of offering a unifying vision. The Whigs and the Democrats were mainly walking-dead parties operating by habit and inertia bound no longer by pressing national interests but the mere formalities of politics. All it took was one bad election night to shatter the inertia propping up the dying system, and the entire party system tumbled.
It's no surprise that America's parties came apart in the 1850s—they were anachronisms that no longer served a purpose. The only question is why the Second Party System imploded so suddenly, driving the nation into years of chaos, violence, and disorder? It's commonly said the Whigs collapsed because disagreements over slavery drove the party apart, as if that alone were a persuasive answer. Slavery had divided America since its Founding. The Democrats and the Whigs were, from their beginnings, national parties with strong Northern and Southern wings divided over slavery. Saying slavery killed the Whigs is like saying a bullet caused a murder—technically true but evading the real question. The reason the transition between the Second Party System and the Third was so tragic and difficult was because America's leaders, when faced with a changed nation, sought to ignore it. In the face of a changing country, America's leaders looked for quick settlements that might push what they saw as annoying distractions away to get back to arguing about “normal” politics—meaning the outdated arguments of the Jacksonian era. What they failed to realize was the issues over which they obsessed—the Jacksonian backbone of their party ideologies—were in reality the irrelevant ones. The “distractions” they hoped to ignore were the new normal. In attempting to prop up a dying system that could no longer hold, America's leaders doomed their country to nearly a decade of disorder, chaos, and violence.
Instead of responding to the change and reforming their parties, America's political leaders essentially waited for their parties to collapse and then waded through the calamity their inaction had created. Neither party was prepared for the undoing of the old political order, nor was the country. The sudden crash in stability unleashed the worst voices and instincts. Ugly movements like the Know-Nothings captured the nation's attention. Political violence broke out in Kansas. Instability and violence even reached into the halls of Congress. Once the parties had crumbled, there was no way to easily put them back together again. The only way forward now was through. Every faction and interest in America had to grope about in the dark to find new allies. The process took years, during which factions jostled and new parties rose and fell, none of them strong enough yet to become a foundation for the next party system—not to mention the outbreak of a bloody civil war that killed over half a million Americans. Instead of a quick transition from one era to the next, America had to fight its way through years of anger, instability, and violence before a new order emerged.
If an individual or group had come along to renew America's parties with new ideas, and the American people had embraced the changes, the nation might have transitioned to its Third Party System quickly and cleanly. In refusing to acknowledge this reality and act, America's leaders instead ceded control to events. American politics after the collapse of the Whig Party was disruptive and chaotic because it was sudden and unplanned. The collapse of the Second Party System is a warning of what not to do when a realignment looms.