I’d think this was from a teenager doing homework if it weren’t from me, but…
I’ve been reading a good bit about Lincoln lately and his involvement with the Whigs was of course a major fact of his life. Unfortunately most of the books either don’t go into enough detail on the differences in Whigs and Democrats or they go into a 200 page treatise on it. Near as I can figure- please tell me if I’m on the right track:
DEM: Wanted a loose confederation of states
WHIG: Strong unionist
DEM: Wanted no national bank, only state and regional banks
WHIG: Favored a national bank and currency
DEM: Had abolitionist members in the north but mostly neutral/pragmatic on the issue of slavery
WHIG: Same as the Dems originally, but became more agressively abolitionist after 1850
DEM: More popular among/supportive of farmers.
WHIG: More popular among/supportive of industry and urbanites.
What are other important differences?
Also, it’s surprising to me that as many of the key Whigs were southerners/planters/slaveowners like Henry Clay and Alexander Stephens. Whig policies seemed to very much favor the non slaveowning northerners. Can anyone explain the appeal of the party to a plantation owning southerner? (Clay was a border state planter, but Stephens and other prominent ones were deep south.)
The Whigs were founded not on any grand political principles, but rather as opposition to Andrew Jackson and his policies (that’s why they called themselves “Whigs,” taking their name for the party that opposed the British king in Parliament). Thus, anyone who hated Jackson (and his successor Van Buren) became a Whig.
Policies later evolved. Those who favored slavery gravitated toward the Democratic Party, and those who opposed gravitated toward the Whigs. But the Whigs were too limited as solely as a party of opposition, so when the Republican Party came along, a lot of Whig voters went that way.
No, there was no significant difference between the parties on slavery. Both had generally anti-slavery northern wings and generally pro-slavery southern wings. It was only after the controversy over Kansas-Nebraska, when anti-slavery northerners from both parties broke away to become Republicans, that the Democratic Party (by default) became the pro-slavery party.
Sampiro, the only other difference I would add is that Whigs favored “internal improvements” as part of their program for binding together the Union. This goes part of the way toward answering your question–
Any plantation owner who wanted the nearby harbor improved at federal expense, or better roads to his plantation, or a canal to ship his produce to market, tended to favor the Whigs.
The equation of Southerners with states rights is relatively recent. There have been a lot of times when Southern politicians and voters favored federal power. When South Carolina seceded, for example, one of the reasons they gave was that the national government was allowing states too much power over slavery (including the power to prohibit it in a state).
Whigs were the anti-populists. Jacksonian democracy preached the virtue of an egalitarian American agrarian society. He was against anything that had the trappings of elitism, instead prefering to empower the common man, which was usually a farmer at that time. The Whigs opposed this concept. They saw America as doing better by becoming a deeply-layered society, with interconnection among its parts. This had an appeal for tradesmen, businessmen, large scale planters, financial men, etc. Not surprisingly, it had its largest support in the Northeast, whereas Jacksonian Democrats had their largest support in the South. Of course, these are not absolutes: Clay’s loss to Polk in 1844 shows an example
It was the Midwest that kept the Whigs from being all they could be. From the mid-30s to the 1952 election, the Midwest tended to favor the Democrats. This was reflective of the fact that the Democrats favored western expansion, and small farmers. The Midwest was all about both. In the various Presidential elections, the Midwest tended to vote Democrat, with one notable exception: William Henry Harrison in 1940. The temporary death knell of the Democratic Party in 1860 can be laid in most respects to the loss of Midwestern sympathies over the slavery issue, which issue was also the killer of the Whig Party. Indeed, the Polk v Clay election showed that slavery would eventually do in the Whigs, though it took another 12 years to finish them off. When the admission of Texas was linked to slavery, it left Clay in a very tenuous position, one he never satisfactorily resolved. He had supporters in the party who were pro-slavery, and others who were anti-slavery. He couldn’t satisfy both well enough to win New York and the middle South.
This seems a bit of an optimistic interpretation of the Declaration of Secession, if it is a reference to that document. The South Carolinians open their declaration with an entirely obvious statement: “the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union.” They then go on to outline their understanding of the constitutional history, especially as regards slavery, commenting that
“The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States [4th Article of the Constitution]. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.”
and that therefore, South Carolinians “affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States,” but only with regard to the enforcement of the fugitive slave acts, not with regard to the power of deciding about allowing slavery or forbidding it, which the South Carolina declaration explicitly grants: “each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions.”
The only states-rights-relevant claim here is that the Federal government has allowed the states to undermine Federal law. I would be careful about classifying this as a problem with the doctrine of states rights, because those mostly refered to question of a Constitutional nature, at least after the Nullification Crisis.
By the time Lincoln was getting into politics, Whigs were the liberal/progressive party of the day, pretty much, and the Democrats were the conservatives. As noted above, the rise of abolitionist sentiment, and more broad support for limiting the spread of slavery, had a lot to do with the formation of the Republican Party, which by 1860 had absorbed most former Whigs (including Lincoln and William Seward, most notably). By then it was pretty obvious Whiggism had run its course. No Whig was elected President after Zachary Taylor in 1848, and he wasn’t even really a Whig before he ran.
In their backing of a strong Federal union, opposition to the spread of slavery, support for Federal expenditure for internal improvements (key to Lincoln, who strongly supported Federal spending for roads and canals in then-undeveloped Illinois), the Whig and later Republican parties set themselves apart from the Democrats.