Disintegration of the whig party free#

When the Whig Party crumbled and northern Democrats split in the mid-1850s, it was because both of those old parties had failed to respond to the threat of slavery’s expansion, which was fast becoming the major national issue-one which many Northerners had come to care more deeply about than any other policy question. Party systems can indeed collapse with stunning rapidity. Just a few years prior, such developments would have been almost completely unimaginable to all but the most prescient antislavery political spokesmen. Finally, after more than 20 years of agitation, the new Republican Party organized around precisely this agenda. Abolitionists had long argued that the southern states unfairly controlled the national government and needed to be stopped from further extending slavery’s reach. The one policy goal that united all Republicans was opposition to the expansion of slavery, though there were a host of other issues that this Republican Party also coalesced behind (including, ironically, many former Whigs’ disgust at the growing “problem” of Irish Catholic immigrants). In less than two years, this grand, and not-at-all-old, party emerged as the most popular political party in the North, electing the Speaker of the House in February of 1856 and winning 11 of 16 non-slaveholding states in the presidential contest later that year.

Disintegration of the whig party free#

A new coalition that combined most of the Free Soil Party, a majority of northern Whigs, and a substantial number of disgruntled northern Democrats came together to form the Republican party. Two years later, when Congress passed divisive legislation that could introduce slavery into Kansas, the teetering Whig party came tumbling down. In the vain hope of once more bridging the widening sectional rift, the party crafted a measured, proslavery platform distasteful to many northern Whigs, thousands of whom simply stayed home on Election Day.

The 1852 election was a disaster for the Whigs. The old issues began to matter less and less to average northern Whig voters. As the slavery issue grew increasingly salient in the face of rapid national expansion, so did disputes over slavery’s place in new western territories and conflicts over fugitive slaves. These activists fought fiercely, and ultimately successfully, to demolish the existing party system, seeing it (correctly) as overly protective of the slave states’ political power. Antislavery third parties (the abolitionist Liberty Party from 1840 to 1848 and the more moderate antislavery Free Soil Party from 1848 to 1854) relentlessly attacked the major parties’ inherent incapacity to offer meaningful policy outcomes on their central issue. Both systematically downplayed slavery, opting instead to spar over seemingly unrelated issues including taxation, trade policy, banking and infrastructure spending.Ībolitionists, by contrast, insisted that those issues were secondary to combatting the southern “slave power’s” control of federal policymaking. By the late 1830s a small and radical group of abolitionists had become fed up with the two major parties, the Whigs and Democrats. The major American political realignment of the mid-1850s had been brewing for decades due to fundamental divisions over the place of slavery in American politics. Looking back, the underlying causes of the Whig party’s downfall seem so much graver than today’s turmoil, noteworthy as it has been. Clearly, dramatic change in American party politics can happen fast, but is that kind of transformation happening today with the G.O.P.? But two years later, by the fall of 1855, the Whig party was effectively extinct. As late as the winter of 1853, a Whig president, Millard Fillmore of New York, occupied the White House. From the early 1830s well into the mid-1850s, the Whigs joined the Democrats as one of the nation’s two major parties. Pundits on sites such as Esquire and Salon find an intriguing precedent in the rapid demise of the Whig party in the middle of the 19th century. Major political parties can and have collapsed in the United States. The Republican establishment’s struggle to reconcile the rise of Donald Trump with its own attempts at retaking the White House serves as a reminder that political institutions are not necessarily permanent.

In the midst of this tumultuous campaign season, the long, stable two-party system appears to be fraying at the seams.