The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

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Most Americans remember the Whigs as morally uptight New Englanders who provided us with some of our more mediocre presidents. In his exhaustively researched book The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael F. Holt partially rehabilitates the reputation of this once-thriving political party. Founded in 1833, following Andrew Jackson's decimation of the Second Bank of the United States, the Whigs were united in the belief that the federal government was obligated to sponsor the nation's internal development and to promote manufacturing and large-scale agricultural endeavors. In Holt's account, however, proponents of Whiggery were divided on numerous other issues.

The nature of these disagreements amongst party leaders (most notably Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and future presidents such as John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore) take up the majority of space in Holt's 1,200-page account. Instead of relating how general sentiment on major issues (such as territorial expansion and the Compromise of 1850) determined the Whigs' fate, Holt shows how local and statewide political caucuses, party "kingmakers," federal patronage, and special interests created competing factions within the party even before sectionalism fractured cooperation between Northern and Southern wings in 1854. Amidst the diffused levels of power that defined the Federalism of the post-Jacksonian era, Holt concludes that the more popular leaders (such as Taylor and Fillmore) tried to balance competition amongst party factions instead of imposing an ideological "hard line" on sectional issues, a move that alienated many of the party's key ideological supporters. Written in an engaging narrative style with a minimal engagement of abstract theory, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party meticulously reconstructs the byzantine world of 19th-century American politics. --John M. Anderson


From Library Journal
In 1834, opponents of Andrew Jackson organized the Whig Party. In all, four Whigs sat in the White HouseAHarrison, Tyler, Taylor, and FillmoreAwhile leaders such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster failed to capture that prize, contending with Democrats over tariffs, banks, internal improvements, territorial expansion, and, ultimately, slavery until the party's demise in the 1850s. The University of Virginia's Holt, author of Political Parties and American Political Development (LJ 6/1/92), details how great national issues intersected with lesser matters like control of patronage and the ambitions of persons and factions as well as with local and state-level concerns to shape the history of the Whigs. Although only dedicated readers will complete the trek through these 1000 dense pages, this book caps the career of a prominent political historian and will long be a staple for academic library collections in history and political science.ARobert F. Nardini, North Chichester, NH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Wall Street Journal, Stuart Ferguson
Mr. Holt's huge volume is straight political history; the ground he must cover is so vast that there is no time for the scenic route. But we should be grateful for the thoroughness with which Mr. Holt ... recounts the important era leading up to the Civil War.


From Kirkus Reviews
In a massively researched survey, Holt (American History/Univ. of Virginia) painstakingly details the career of an odd political party that flourished, then vanished in the three decades before the Civil War. An unlikely union of Southern states' rights enthusiasts, Anti-Masonic Party members, supporters of the Bank of the United States, and moderate pro-development republicans hobbled together by opponents of the populist nationalism of Andrew Jackson, the Whig Party became the party of such giants as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln, but also of such eminently forgettable figures as Thurlow Weed and Millard Fillmore. Because state and local elections were of comprehensive importance to national politicians in the 19th century, Holt delves in minutest detail into electoral developments in states and localities. Surveying the impacts of local conditions on national elections, Holt tries to show that the Whig Party's development hinged on a variety of factorsits competitive relationship with the Democratic Party, which had local, state, and national dimensions, and the internal divisions of Whigs (which ultimately destroyed the party) as the country's sectional crisis split them into factions were the most dynamic of these. The disparate nature of the Whigs' ideology in different sections prevented them from developing a coherent national program, though they did win the White House with military heroes in issue-free campaigns in 1840 (William Henry Harrison) and 1848 (Zachary Taylor). Holt shows that the Whigs were consistent in their goal of attempting to unite the nation's sections and to find a compromise on the issue of slavery, and represented the country's last failed hope of avoiding civil war. Of evident importance to specialists, but because of its massive size and detailed emphasis on the minutiae of state and local events, inaccessible to all but the hardiest general reader. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


B.D. Simpson, CHOICE, October 1999
Steeped in extensive archival research, this detailed recounting of the policies and practices of Whig politicos and the party's achievements, shortcomings, and eventual demise will long stand as definitive. A magnificent resource for scholars, Holt's weighty tome will prove essential reading for political historians.


Wesley Ann Riddle, Civil War Book Review, Fall 1999
Michael Holt...has written a monumental and superb study. The tome is richly detailed and written in lucid prose, supplemented by tables showing key vote returns....The result of 20 years' work, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is by far the most comprehensive account of the Whig party ever written and is perhaps the single most essential reference today for research into American antebellum politics.


Brent Tarter, Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 5, 1999
How they tried and why they ultimately failed are instructive and important themes in this exhaustive study....For the hard-core student of political history told in all its rich and complicated detail, "The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" will offer many hours of instructive reading.


Book Description
The political home of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, and the young Abraham Lincoln, the American Whig Party was involved at every level of American politics--local, state, and federal--in the years before the Civil War, and controlled the White House for eight of the twenty-two years that it existed. Now, in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written--a monumental history covering in rich detail the American political landscape from the Age of Jackson to impending disunion. In Michael Holt's hands, the history of the Whig Party becomes a political history of the United States during the tumultuous Antebellum period. He offers a panoramic account of a time when a welter of parties (Whig, Democratic, Anti-Mason, Know Nothing, Free Soil, Republican) and many extraordinary political statesmen (including Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, William Seward, Daniel Webster, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay) struggled to control the national agenda as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events rocked the country, including the Nullification Controversy, the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Holt captures all of this as he shows that, amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, repeatedly trying to find a compromise position. Indeed, the Whig Party emerges as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession and civil war. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is a magisterial work of history, one that has already been hailed by William Gienapp of Harvard as "one of the most important books on nineteenth-century politics ever written."


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Michael Holt's history of the Whig Party is magisterial....This massive book will have a thunderous impact on scholarship and on the understanding of the American past. — Louisiana State University


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