The Republicans’ replacement of the Whig Party can’t be duplicated today.
The Republicans’ replacement of the Whig Party can’t be duplicated today.
K evin Williamson argued yesterday that “the Republican Party as it currently is constituted is not the only instrument available to [conservatives], nor is it the only possible instrument that might be available to us. Those who speak despairingly about the prospects of third parties should remember that the GOP began as one.” Kevin has, of course, his reasons for discontent with the party, as do many of us. But the situation today is quite dramatically different from the conditions that led to the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, and a comparison illustrates precisely why — as I have argued on prior occasions — a third-party effort today would have the opposite effect of what Republicans accomplished in building a national majority party by the 1860s.
The Fall of the House of Whig
The Whigs formed into a national party by 1834 out of the supporters of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. (Adams, ironically, was late to associate with the Whigs, being elected to the House after his presidency as a member of the Anti-Masonic Party.) They grew swiftly to become at least an equal competitor with the Democrats after Andrew Jackson left office in 1836. In the national popular vote in the four presidential elections between 1836 and 1848, Whigs drew 49.2 percent of the vote, compared with 46.9 percent for Democrats. That includes the Whigs’ strange strategy in 1836 of running different candidates in different states. (The national popular-vote figures slightly understate the Democrats, who typically controlled South Carolina, the one state that did not hold popular votes in this period, but the Whig candidate did carry South Carolina in 1836.)
Looking on a state-by-state level, the Whigs over that run of four elections won a popular majority in 14 states: four in New England (Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut), one mid-Atlantic free state (New Jersey), two mid-Atlantic slave states (Maryland and Delaware), four southern slave states (Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia), two western slave states (Kentucky and Tennessee), and one western free state (Indiana). They also outpolled the Democrats by a plurality over those years in the three largest states, all of them free states: New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. This was a genuinely national party. The Democrats, by contrast, won a majority of the vote over 1836–48 in ten states, two of them in New England (New Hampshire and Maine), two western free states (Illinois and Iowa), and six slave states (Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia), plus pluralities in the western battlegrounds of Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Whigs did much to set the national agenda, but they had bad luck with their presidential candidates. William Henry Harrison, the victor in convincing fashion in 1840, died in office a month into his term, when the Whigs held decisive majorities in both houses of Congress and Harrison planned an ambitious agenda. His successor, John Tyler, so thwarted the Whig agenda that the party formally expelled him. The Whigs never held the trifecta again. In 1844, they ran Clay for a third time, and he lost the election because of losing New York by 1.05 percent of the vote. If Clay had carried the three states he lost by fewer than two points, he would have won the electoral college by a lopsided 179–96 margin. The Whigs won again behind another general, Zachary Taylor, in 1848, and he, too, died in office less than halfway into his term. His successor, New Yorker Millard Fillmore, sided decisively with the party’s soft-on-slavery wing, which divided the party in ways even more damaging than Tyler’s apostasy.
In 1852, the Whigs tried a third time behind another military man, Winfield Scott, but the party suffered a decisive collapse up and down the ticket from which it never recovered. The reason was the party’s internal rupture over slavery. The Whigs were, in many ways, the more issue-oriented party in the 1840s, with a more comprehensive platform and unifying worldview than the Democrats, but their status as a national party depended on papering over divisions between “Conscience Whigs” centered in the North who opposed slavery and its expansion, and “Cotton Whigs” centered in the South (but with some Northern allies) who were functionally pro-slavery, albeit somewhat divided among themselves on its expansion. The Democrats were more coherently pro-slavery, but until the end of the 1840s, they had their own Northern anti-slavery wing.
Texas’s annexation and the Mexican War added a huge amount of new territory in the West between 1845 and 1848, and the debates over slavery’s expansion into that territory fundamentally realigned the parties between 1846 and 1854 and almost drove the nation into civil war until the Compromise of 1850 forestalled it for a time. The Whigs were the first victims. The Compromise of 1850 was, on balance, a better deal for the free states, banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia and tipping the free-slave state balance in favor of free states for the first time since 1817 (as it turned out, permanently) by admitting California as a free state. But it also included provisions that stuck in the craw of anti-slavery Northerners, mainly a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act.
Vigorous enforcement of that law in the North between 1850 and 1852 triggered a massive national controversy that led Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialized in 1851 and published to sensational effect in 1852). Watching slavery enforced in their own backyards radicalized a lot of previously complacent Northerners. John Brown first took up arms to enter the slavery fight in 1851 in Springfield, Mass. The Underground Railroad expanded its operations; it is not a coincidence that Harriet Tubman began her missions south in late 1850.
As black men and women in the North were dragged back to the South in shackles, it was Northern Whig leaders pulling the chains. Fillmore and his secretary of state, longtime Whig stalwart Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, had been strong supporters of the Compromise of 1850 and made its enforcement their top priority. Fillmore and Webster issued a joint proclamation in February 1851 “calling on all well-disposed citizens to rally to the support of the laws of their country,” and in a speech in May 1851, Webster called resistance to the law “treason, treason, Treason, and nothing else.” That stance killed the support for Fillmore and Webster among Northern Whigs. At the June 1852 convention, anti-slavery Whig firebrand William Seward (then a senator from New York) pushed through the nomination of Scott, a moderate Virginian, over Fillmore. Webster finished a distant third. Pro-slavery Georgia Whig Alexander Stephens, however, got the convention to adopt a platform that endorsed the Compromise of 1850. Scott refused to run on his party’s own platform.
The result, compared with the party’s average performance over the previous four elections, was that Whig support collapsed most dramatically in the states most polarized by slavery: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi in the South, and Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the North:
The same trends are clear if we focus on the Whigs’ share of the two-party vote:
Scott still carried Massachusetts, where Democrats were weak, but he carried only three other states — Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee — while falling below 45 percent of the two-party vote in 13 of the 30 states that held popular votes. As you can see from the second chart, the Whigs’ 1852 debacle was apparent both in states where anti-slavery third parties had performed strongly in the 1844, 1848, and 1852 elections, and in states where third parties were not a factor.
The problem was not that the Democrats suddenly got more popular. With turnout down, Franklin Pierce drew the support of 35.3 percent of all eligible voters, up from 30.9 percent for Lewis Cass in 1848 but significantly lower than the 39.2 percent support for James K. Polk in 1844 or even Van Buren’s losing share of 37.6 percent in 1840. It was not the third-party Free Soil vote, which dropped in half from 1848. The problem was hemorrhaging support for the Whigs. Harrison’s 1840 campaign drew the support of 42.5 percent of all eligible voters, second only to Ulysses S. Grant’s 1868 showing in all of American history. Whig support dropped in each of the successive three elections and was down by 1852 to 30.5 percent. Over a quarter of Harrison’s vote had left the party.
The Whigs also got crushed in the congressional elections of 1850 and 1852, giving the Democrats an overwhelming advantage in the House and a growing majority in the Senate:
While Democrats were emboldened — Pierce’s biggest fear in 1853 was that his party would splinter into factions over patronage because there was no longer any fear of an opposing party — the Whigs were leaderless. Adams followed Harrison and Taylor to the grave in 1848, Tyler and Fillmore were both persona non grata, and Clay and Webster died in 1852. Webster’s heavy drinking killed him in October 1852, just four months after losing the nomination, but Stephens cast a protest vote for a dead man rather than vote for Scott. Seward, by now the party’s most prominent figure, was unviable in the South.
Pierce tried to press the Democrats’ advantage in January 1854 by backing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to blow up not only the Compromise of 1850 but the 1820 Missouri Compromise as well, opening territories north of the Missouri Compromise line to slavery. He got the polarizing domestic-policy fight he wanted, but lived to regret it. In May 1854, the bill passed the House, 113–100, with Stephens as its floor leader. The result showed that Democrats could push through a radically pro-slavery agenda, with Whigs too weak and divided to stop it:
The victory was the result of intense effort by . . . Pierce to use all the power of incumbency to keep the Democratic Party together. In the end, all but two of fifty-nine southern Democrats voted for the bill, while forty-four of eighty-six northern Democrats voted with the administration and against their constituents, in support of the bill. In light of the agitation the bill created in the North, it was a remarkable display of party discipline. It was the Whig party that had failed to hold together. Not one northern Whig had voted for the bill, while twelve of nineteen southern Whigs endorsed it.
Stephens left the party in 1855 for the Democrats, following his friend and Georgia colleague Robert Toombs, who had done so in 1853. While many Southern Whigs would actually stay loyal to the party long after its death, their estrangement from the Northern wing of the party was complete.
This, then, was the context in which the Republican Party was formed in the spring of 1854, from its first meeting in Ripon, Wis., in March to naming its first slate of candidates in July. In the 1840s, there were true third parties — the Liberty Party, then the Free Soil Party — that appealed to anti-slavery voters who rejected the binary choice between the mostly pro-slavery Democrats and the moderate Whigs. The Liberty Party candidate may have swung New York and Michigan to the Democrats in 1844, and the Free Soil Party candidate — former Democratic president Martin Van Buren — probably swung New York and Connecticut to the Whigs in 1848, in each case determining the outcome of the election. But neither could actually change the course of the major parties.
From the outset, however, the Republicans were playing a different game. They were not founded as a protest party to influence the Whig agenda, or to launch a takeover of the party from the outside. They were founded because the Whig Party had proven itself an inadequate vehicle to stop the Democrats’ radicalizing agenda. Horace Greeley christened the party in an editorial calling for a big-tent united front against the Kansas-Nebraska bill: “We should not care much whether those thus united were designated ‘Whig,’ ‘Free Democrat’ or something else; though we think some simple name like ‘Republican’ would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery.”
Seward concluded, in abandoning the Whig Party’s remains in 1855, that it “is now manifestly no longer able to maintain and carry forward, alone and unaided, the great revolution that it inaugurated.”
The Last Time
A glance at American political history since 1854 shows that it would be much harder to duplicate the same feat. Ideological third parties can have an effect, but they bloom and wilt in a few cycles. The Populist Party moved into the Democratic Party between 1894 and 1896, and essentially took over its agenda — but at the cost of weakening the Democrats to the point where Republicans won increasingly lopsided majorities between 1896 and 1908 and controlled the national policy agenda, including fortifying the Populists’ bugaboo, the gold standard. Teddy Roosevelt bolted for the Progressive Party in 1912, but succeeded mainly in collapsing the Republican Party for six years and letting Woodrow Wilson run the national agenda. The Dixiecrats bolted their party in the 1948 and 1968 elections, but the first rebellion helped begin the Democrats’ turn away from the segregationist agenda, and the second handed power to Richard Nixon, who oversaw the complete collapse of support for de jure segregation and instituted the first federal racial preferences for African Americans. Ross Perot’s Reform Party, which broke away largely from the Republicans, helped turn both parties toward deficit hawkishness in the 1990s, but it also handed power to Bill Clinton and was a conspicuous failure in influencing either party away from free trade during the Clinton years.
In short, unlike the Republicans in the 1850s, none of those efforts improved the position of one party in resisting the agenda of the other. Nor did any of them do anything to replace one of the existing parties, improve the character of their leaders, or augment the nation’s respect for constitutional principle or the rule of law.
Today’s Republicans Are Not the Whigs
Whatever their failings in proposing their own agenda or rolling back past Democratic victories, today’s Republicans have no such lack of strength or will to oppose the increasingly radical Democratic agenda. The party in Washington has maintained a united front against most of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, including the Build Back Better boondoggle, the attempted takeovers of state election law, and the crusade against the filibuster. The party at the state level has gone on offense against left-wing indoctrination in schools. Republicans also have a Supreme Court majority, with six justices appointed by Republican presidents; the Whigs only ever got one justice confirmed. Today’s Democrats, unlike their forbears in the 1850s, cannot go on offense in the courts.
The Whigs were collapsing at the ballot box, heading for extinction in states where they had been competitive for years. Republicans, by contrast, won back a governorship and a state assembly in Democrat-held Virginia, highlighting a strong showing in blue states last November. With historically favorable numbers in generic-ballot polls, Republicans increasingly seem well positioned for a wave election in 2022 and a possible reclaiming of the White House in 2024. Everything is breaking the party’s way.
The Whigs were left leaderless by deaths and political suicides. Today’s Republicans suffer more from a former president who won’t go away and from a bumper crop of prominent people itching to take their turns once he’s gone. It is the Democrats who are leaning on a president who will turn 80 in November because he has a desperately bad bench behind him.
None of this should be reason for conservatives to be complacent about policy progress or our place in the Republican coalition. The years from 1988 to 2012 illustrated how easily the party could take conservatives for granted even when populist waves delivered conservative protest movements and electoral victories in 1994 and 2010. The Trump era, by contrast, showed how easily the party could cave to populist demands to throw conservative principle to the wind for more visceral forms of right-wingery and in pursuit of one man’s vanity. But the Republican Party as a political institution is strong and growing stronger, and the prospects for replacing it are impractical pie in the sky. The Democrats, meanwhile, seem devoted to purging their remaining moderates and staking their image on a bizarre and unpopular social agenda.
Like it or not, conservatives who want to accomplish anything in American politics in the next decade will have no realistic choice but to work within the structure of the Republican Party.