A History of American Political Parties, Part III

Read Part II

A major shift in partisan politics occurred in the 1830's, following the rise of Andrew Jackson's new party, the Democrats.  The popularity of this new, largely agrarian, party led to the demise of the short-lived National Republicans, who had been made up of the remnants left over from the collapse of the Democratic-Republican party, which had dominated U.S. politics since about 1800.

Out of the ashes, in the 1830's, grew another party to oppose Jackson and his Democrats: the Whig Party.

The name of this party has sometimes caused confusion for students of history.  The term "Whig" was a common term in colonial America, and referred to those members of the British parliament who were opposed to the powers of the monarchy.  During the American Revolution, this term came to be associated with anyone who was opposed to tyranny.  Most Americans of the 1770's would have called themselves "Whigs" - not as members of any party, but as ideological opponents of kings and monarchs.  As a result, many of America's earliest statesmen are sometimes referred to as Whigs - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, even George Washington.

When the Whig Party was formed in the 1830's, the name was chosen for the very simple fact that Whigs were known to have been supporters of the Republic, and enemies of the king.  The name, then, was meant to imply what the members stood for.  It didn't, however, have any direct connection to the Whigs of the British parliament or of the American colonial period.

As an alternative to the Jacksonian Democrats, the Whig Party believed in protectionism (taxing foreign goods very highly in order to generate revenue for the government, and make competition easier for American companies), and believed in a largely ceremonial role for the president.  For Whigs, it was Congress who should really have most of the power.  The president, they believed, should concern himself primarily with foreign affairs and with being the figurehead of the Republic.  This, of course, was perfectly in line with the anti-monarchy beliefs of colonial-era Whigs.

One of the ways the Whig Party put this belief into practice was by pushing for the elimination - or at least the dramatic limitation - of the president's veto rights.  With the ability to veto any legislation passed by Congress, the president had been given an enormous amount of power, which could easily be used to dramatically influence American society. Whigs wanted this largely unregulated power overturned.

In 1836, the Whigs had their first chance on the presidential stage.  Andrew Jackson had decided to retire after two terms, so the Democrats nominated his vice-president, Martin Van Buren of New York.

The Whigs, however, were still a new party without a whole lot of widespread unity.  As a result, they were unable to agree on a single candidate, and ended up nominating four different people for president.  William Henry Harrison was on most of the ballots in the North, while Hugh White was the Whig candidate in most of the South.  In Massachusetts, however, the Whig candidate was Daniel Webster, and in South Carolina, William Mangum.

How, exactly, could the Whigs hope to win with none of their candidates on all the ballots?  Quite simply, they hoped for a repeat of the 1828 election, when no candidate won a majority of the electoral votes, and the House of Representatives was forced to choose the president (which is a stipulation of the 12th Amendment).  They figured that their four candidates would secure enough electoral votes to keep Van Buren from winning a majority, and they believed they had enough influence in the House of Representatives to ensure that one of their own candidates would be chosen as president.

It didn't work.  Van Buren ended up winning 170 electoral votes, far more than the 148 needed to win a majority.

Despite its loss, the Whig Party slowly became united during Van Buren's term, eventually engulfing a prominent third party called the Anti-Masonic Party.  This party had evolved in the late 1820's with its central platform opposed to the influence of Freemasonry in American politics.  In time, it moved away from this focus on Freemasonry, and eventually began embracing many of the same beliefs held by the Whigs - most notably an opposition to a powerful executive office.  During the 1840 election, both the Whigs and the Anti-Masonic Party nominated the same person for the presidency, and afterwards, the Anti-Masons effectively ceased to exist.

That double nomination went to William Henry Harrison, one of the Whig candidates from 1836, and the one Whig who had had the best showing against Martin Van Buren.  The Whig cause was helped by an economic recession under Van Buren's watch, the so-called Panic of 1837.  That, coupled with an effective campaign by Harrison, swept him into office in 1841 as the first Whig president.

The good feelings didn't last long.  Just one month after taking the presidency, and before he really did anything other than give a few speeches, Harrison came down with an illness and died.  His vice-president, John Tyler - who was also a Whig - took over.

Things went downhill for the Whigs after that.  Tyler almost immediately put himself at odds with his own party by vetoing two major banking bills sponsored by Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig majority in Congress.  Outraged not just at Tyler's refusal to support Whig legislation, but at his presumption of using the veto in a way that Whigs were ideologically opposed to (they believed a veto should only be used when the constitutionality of a bill was in question), the Whigs voted to expel Tyler from the party.  They eventually went so far as to try to impeach him, though the bill for impeachment never got off the ground.  His expulsion from the party made him, effectively, an Independent throughout the remainder of his presidency - the only non-partisan president since George Washington.

Despite its disastrous first attempt at putting a Whig in the White House, the Whig party managed to maintain its influence throughout the 1840's, losing the 1844 election by just a few thousand votes, in an election that turned heavily on the issue of territorial expansion - which Whigs generally opposed, but Democrats supported.  In 1848, however, the Whigs won again, placing war hero Zachary Taylor into office and giving them not just their second president, but their second war-hero president.

The Whigs, however, just didn't have much luck when it came to presidents.  Taylor, much like John Tyler before him, proved to be independently-minded, and frequently found himself at odds with Whig platforms and policies.  He had personally never been affiliated with any political party before running for president in 1848, and during that election, both parties had courted him as a war hero.

Then, in 1850, just 18 months after taking office, he got sick and died.  As such, in less than 10 years, the Whigs had put two men in the White House, both won primarily because of their records as great war heroes, and both died from illness before completing even the first half of their first term.  In Taylor's case, however, the Whigs got a good consolation prize - Taylor's vice-president, Millard Fillmore, had first entered politics with the Anti-Masonic Party, and had joined the Whigs by 1832.  As such, he was an ideological and loyal Whig.

Despite this, even Fillmore managed to do things to harm his reputation with some Whig factions, particularly his signing of the Fugitive Slave Act, which many northern Whig abolitionists saw as essentially favoring the South and supporting slavery.

In 1852, the Whigs - again in disarray by sectional disputes - chose not to renominate Fillmore, and instead gave the nod to Winfield Scott, yet another war hero.  Unfortunately, three times was not the charm for the Whigs; Scott was defeated in one of the biggest landslides in history, losing by 7 percentage points in the popular vote, and more than 200 in the electoral vote, to Democrat Franklin Pierce.

This disastrous election proved to be the downfall of the Whigs, and the entire party collapsed into ruins during the 1850's as the issue of slavery began to put a stranglehold on the nation and split party loyalties.  In 1856, the Whigs did gather to make a nomination for the presidency, but they opted instead to support the nomination of the new American Party, which had nominated former president Millard Fillmore.  Afterwards, the party effectively ceased to exist, and the Democrats won an easy victory, putting James Buchanan into the White House.

The American Party, also known as the Know-Nothing Party, had grown largely out of the ashes of the Whigs, but so had another party, formed in 1854 and known simply as the Republican Party.  This party would grow to dominate American politics for the next 80 years.

10 Fun Facts About Martin Van Buren

Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States

1. Born in New York in 1782, Martin Van Buren was the first U.S. president born as a citizen of the United States. All of his predecessors had been born as British subjects prior to the American Revolution.  His family was of Dutch ancestry, and Van Buren was the only president in U.S. history for whom English was a second language.

2. A lawyer by trade, Van Buren married Hannah Hoes in 1807.  The marriage produced five sons and one daughter.   Hannah Van Buren died in 1819, long before her husband's presidency, and he never remarried.   He became the second widower to assume the office of the president (his immediate predecessor, Andrew Jackson, had been the first).

3. As a New York state politician, Van Buren was instrumental in forming the first true "political machine" in U.S. history, helping to develop a political system in New York that virtually controlled all of New York politics.  Later, during the tenure of Andrew Jackson, for whom Van Buren served first as Secretary of State, and later as Vice-President, Van Buren was the primary leader in the formation of Jacksonian Democracy, the original Democratic Party.

4. During Van Buren's time as Secretary of State to Andrew Jackson, he became embroiled in the so-called Petticoat Affair.  This scandal occurred when a prominent Washington widow, Peggy Timberlake, married Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War, John Eaton.  Washington society women found this marriage scandalous because Peggy Timberlake had only been widowed for a short time, and her deceased husband had been a close associate of Eaton's.  The wives of Jackson's cabinent members shunned her, and the scandal intensified when Vice-President John Calhoun's wife, Floride, began leading a virtual witch-hunt against John Eaton and his new wife, calling for his resignation.  The scandal eventually caused such a rift in Jackson's cabinet that the entire cabinet resigned, including Martin Van Buren, though - as a widower - he had largely stayed out of the fray.  A year later, Andrew Jackson named Van Buren to be his running mate for re-election, replacing John Calhoun, who had also resigned.

5. Van Buren won the 1836 presidential election in an electoral college landslide, though he garnered only about 50% of the total popular vote.  Van Buren's victory is notable because no sitting vice-president would be elected to the presidency again until George H. W. Bush in 1988.  In the 1836 election, the Democrat Van Buren ran against a coalition of Whig Party candidates from different areas of the country - the only time in a presidential election when a major party ran more than one candidate.  The Whigs had hoped that by running multiple candidates, they would split the electoral vote sufficiently to force a run-off in the House of Representatives, which they believed they could win.  Their strategy failed; because so many Whig votes were split among the Whig candidates, Van Buren ended up winning states (particularly in the south) that he would likely have never won had the Whigs run a single man against him.

6. Within several months of taking office in 1837, an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1837 erupted, leading to an economic depression that lasted throughout Van Buren's presidency.  His political enemies would come to refer to him as Martin Van Ruin, blaming him not only for the economic depression in the first place, but for his failure to resolve it.

7. Van Buren served under Andrew Jackson as the 8th Vice-President of the United States.  Later, he became the 8th President of the United States.  After his presidency, he lived to see the election of 8 more presidents, each from 8 different states.  He was also the first in a consecutive string of 8 one-term presidents.  Earlier in his career, he had been the 8th elected governor of New York (one prior governor, John Taylor, had served only as Acting Governor for several months, following a the elected governor's resignation).

8. From early in his career, Van Buren had been known as "Old Kinderhook" (a reference to the New York city of his birth.)  In the 1840 election, one of the rallying cries of his supporters was "Vote for OK!"  The abbreviation "o.k.," meaning "all is well," had only just appeared in the 1830's, during a fad for humorous abbreviations - it stood for the phrase "Oll Korrect," spelled with Germanic inflections.  Van Buren's campaign quickly picked up on it, claiming it stood for "Old Kinderhook," and its widespread use in the 1840 election has been cited as the primary reason the word fell into general use in American English.

9. Because of the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression, Van Buren lost his re-election bid in 1840 to one of his opponents from 1836, William Henry Harrison.  Harrison, a war hero, had gotten the most votes among the various Whig candidates in 1836, and defeated Van Buren easily in 1840, thanks largely to a remarkably effective campaign.  After it was over, Van Buren was famously quoted as saying: "As to the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it."

10. Despite his famous quip, Van Buren was not deterred by his defeat in 1840.  He ran for the Democratic nomination again in 1844, but eventually lost to James K. Polk.   In 1848, he ran on the ticket of the anti-slavery Free Soil party, but failed to win any electoral votes.  He lived out the remainder of his life at his home in New York, dying in 1862, having outlived four of his successors to the White House (Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor).