Directions: Using the outlines below and write a college-level essay for your Exam #2 responses. Be sure to edit your work carefully…spell correctly, punctuate accurately, capitalize correctly, write clearly, and, most significantly, respond fully to all parts of the question. Avoid using my language (please do NOT quote me). Shape your responses in your OWN words. Write well, take your time, do a first rate job. I’m eager to read your work. Dazzle me with your brilliance.
7.) Describe the nature of the Whig Party. What interest groups were dominant in its leadership? Who were some of the party’s leaders and what were their policies? How did the election of 1840 reflect the power of the new democratic ethos?
The Whigs Notes professor urged to be hit
I. Introduction
A. Whig Party was a national party with support in every region
B. Whig Party successfully elected 2 presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor
C. Whig Party Origins: Early 1830s Opposition to Jackson and Democracy
D. Whig Party Dominated by Two Important Groups, both of whom find Jackson’s policies destabilizing
1. Northeastern Business/Commercial Interests: Bankers, Businessmen, Shippers, Merchants
2. Southern Planters (An historical term for what we might call today an “agri-businessman”)
a. Big Cotton Planters in the lower south
b. Big Tobacco Planters in Virginia, Kentucky
c. Big Rice and Indigo Planters in South Carolina
d. The guy with 500+ acres and 20 or more slaves to work them
3. In the 1960s, we’d have called them “The Establishment” (Folks with a lot invested in the status quo)
4. The “River Oaksies” of this world? Folks who have money and want to live in a world where they’re most likely able to keep it.
5. Have little use for all this Jacksonian talk of Rugged Individualism and the value of the Common Man
II. Whig Party Spokesman
A. Kentucky U.S. Senator Henry Clay “The Great Compromiser,” “Harry of the West,” “The Mill Boy of the Slashes”
B. By the 1830s Clay articulates the Whig economic alternative to Jacksonian Economic Democracy: “The American System” made of four parts
1. A High Protective Tariff, which will produce many positive results:
a.) Sectional Harmony: Northeast benefits with continued industrial development, South benefits through a growing domestic market from the workers in the northeastern factories for their agricultural goods, and the west benefits by a growing northeastern market for their raw material.
b.) Economic Independence: We have our own domestic industry, agriculture, and raw material, don’t need any other country for prosperity.
c.) The government derives income from the tariff which allows lower taxes and revenue for:
2. A program of Internal Improvements: roads, canals, harbors, transportation infrastructure for further economic development
3. A Central Bank to provide a stable business environment
4. If all this sounds familiar…good…it is just an updated version of Hamiltonianism
III. Problem for the Whigs
A. How does a party dedicated to the interests of the elite deal with America’s enthusiasm for democracy?
B. By the middle 1830s the answer is clear: adopt the rhetoric (language, imagery) of democracy
C. One of their spokesman, Calvin Colton, addressed this when he wrote, “Democracy is a word of deep meaning and great potency in America. No political party can dispense with it. Regardless of your political philosophy, be it the most radical or the most conservative, your best passport is democracy.”
IV. Whig Adoption of Democratic Rhetoric
A. Henry Clay gets a new nickname: “The Mill Boy of the Slashes” implying he was just a poor boy who’d come to greatness…it’s a fiction…he was comfortably born and became a Kentucky gentleman who’s Lexington estate “Ashland” had its own private horse racing track. (Nothing illegal or fattening about this, it’s just not exactly the home of an ordinary citizen.)
B. Mass. U.S. Senator Daniel Webster had once explained his political philosophy this way: “There is not a more dangerous experiment than placing property in the hands of one class and political power in the hands of another.” (In other words, the folks who own the country should govern it….the “yuppie golden rule” “He with the gold, rules.”) He lived luxuriously on his New Hampshire farm where he sat on the porch fondling his gold headed walking stick and gazing out over his acres, yet he was quoted in the 1830s saying, “Any man who calls me an aristocrat is a liar, and the man who makes that charge and refuses to come within the reach of my arm, is not only a liar, but a coward!”
C. Whigs learned that their most successful candidates were “backwoods types” who could sound “democratic” but voted Whig. The best example of this type was David Crockett.
1. Voted into congress from Tennessee
2. Began voting Whig, made a permanent enemy of Andrew Jackson
3. Defeated for congress, became an entertainer, teller of tall tales
4. Ultimately left Tennessee for Texas and became John Wayne…just kidding…was killed at the Alamo, but everybody knows that.
D. The ultimate adoption of the democratic rhetoric by the Whigs came in the Presidential Election of 1840
E. Democrats renominated Martin Van Buren for a second term (Jackson’s successor, in trouble thanks to the Panic of 1837 and subsequent economic depression)
F. Whigs bypassed Henry Clay for a hero of the War of 1812, William Henry Harrison
1. Nicknamed “Old Tippecanoe” because he defeated Tecumseh there
2. Advertised as a westerner since he owned land in Ohio (really the product of the Virginia aristocracy)
3. Sounds just like Andrew Jackson, except he’s a Whig!!
4. Campaigned on the catchy slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” thanks to a Democratic Virginia Senator, John Tyler who switched to the Whig Party to accept their Vice Presidential nomination
5. Whigs tried to sell Harrison as a Whig version of Andrew Jackson and labelled Van Buren as a New York aristocrat…which was a complete fiction. His father’d been a barkeeper.
6. Results: Harrison elected the first Whig President, sworn into office in March, 1841 and died about a month later of pneumonia. Succeeded by Tyler who both parties hated (Democrats saw him as a turncoat, Whigs saw him as an opportunist…spent four years in the White House unable to do much of anything except make little Tylers…fathered nearly 20 children…with two wives, sequential not simultaneous…still ranks as the most reproductive president.)
IV. Conclusion
A. 1844 vividly demonstrates the permanent connection between democracy and American politics when the most anti-democratic political party must use it to gain office.
B. Former President John Quincy Adams, by this time serving in the House of Representatives from his home district, commented on the change brought about by the Jacksonian Era. Adams wrote in his diary (he’s an Adams, all Adamses keep diaries) about the 1840 election devoid of any substantive issues except who was the most representative of the common man and who was the most aristocratic, “Here is a revolution in American life. Politics, from now on, will have a broad base. Democracy is here to stay. Where will it all end?” I hope nobody digs him up and shows him how it’s evolved in the early twenty-first century.