Michael F. Holt. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset
of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 1248 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-19-505544-3.
Reviewed by Daniel Feller (Department of History, University of New Mexico)
Published on H-SHEAR (December, 1999)
A REQUIEM FOR THE WHIGS
Michael Holt’s long-awaited The Rise and Fall of the
American Whig Party aims to be the definitive work on its
subject. Its densely packed narrative winds through 985
pages of text, and but for squeezed margins and tiny type
would be longer still. Holt’s 21-page bibliography lists
207 manuscript collections and 345 secondary works,
along with 44 unpublished papers and theses. His 2,897
footnotes occupy 192 pages (for which Oxford University
Press, which seems to delight in annoying its readers, has
supplied no running heads). The work is staggering in its
erudition and its sheer bulk.
Michael Holt, political parties are decidedly, as they were
for Richard P. McCormick thirty years ago, “above all
electoral machines.”[1]
Reflecting the book’s genesis in Holt’s curiosity about
the causes of Whig collapse in the 1850s, there is also
much more Fall here than Rise. By comparison with what
follows, the early chapters on the gathering of the Whig
coalition seem almost cursory. With his focus on organization rather than ideology or constituency, Holt does
not trace Whig antecedents back to the Revolution or
even to the Federalist era, but begins his tale in the 1820s.
He reaches the formal birth of the party in 1833-34 at
page 26, Harrison’s victory in 1840 at page 112, and the
1844 election, marking the meridian of Whig strength,
at page 194, less than one-quarter of the way through
the book. From there on it is all downhill through seven
hundred pages to the party’s dissolution after 1856.
As Holt makes plain from the first, this is political
history of a particular kind. His main concern is not
with “underlying structures of collective political behavior, the central tenets of party ideology, or the dominant features of an era’s political culture,” but rather with
the Whig party as an institution, an entity created for
the purpose of gaining and holding political power (p.
x). Since the men who conducted the organization–who
shaped its policies, ran its campaigns, and stood for office
under its banner–were leaders, not voters, Holt tells his
story from their perspective. And since the measure of
a party’s success–ultimately, what justifies its existence–
is its ability to win elections, Holt’s narrative attends far
more closely to campaigns for office at both local and national levels than to policymaking at the statehouses or
in Washington. Indeed, since another election is always
looming, Holt views policymaking itself not mainly as
an instrument to achieve social ends, but as a means of
positioning the party for its next test at the polls. For
The general thrust of Holt’s argument about the basis of the Whig party and the causes of its demise will
be familiar to readers of his earlier The Political Crisis of
the 1850s (1978) and Political Parties and American Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (1992). Throughout their history, the Whigs’ identity was bound up with that of their Democratic opponents within the confines of a two-party system. The
Whigs were the alternative, the other party, the outs
who wanted to be in. Whig strategies for taking power
oscillated back and forth between emphasizing and deemphasizing their party character–between “ultra Whig”
1
H-Net Reviews
and “no-party” campaigns and candidates, between attempts to muster an electoral majority by energizing
the Whig faithful on the one hand, and efforts to lure
unattached voters and disaffected Democrats by downplaying party identity and embracing new issues on the
other.
The Age of Jackson in 1945. Through much of the book
Holt appears to be looking for an argument. Repeatedly
he upbraids historians who stress the Whigs’ fragility after 1844, only to concede their point a few paragraphs or
pages later. He issues provocative pronouncements, then
qualifies or retracts them.
The Whigs first coalesced around “an ideological mission,” an “everlasting basic principle,” a “bedrock tenet” of
saving “republicanism” from executive tyranny (pp. xii,
27, 952). But it was their program of economic development, marketed as a cure for the depression of 1837,
that won the Whigs into popular favor by 1840 and cemented their core constituency. Despite the John Tyler
disaster and Henry Clay’s confidence-shattering defeat
in 1844, Whigs competed avidly, and often successfully,
with Democrats on a number of fronts through the 1840s.
But by the early 1850s their issues had gone stale, and the
rise of new concerns–over immigrants and Catholics, the
Slave Power conspiracy, and a seemingly unresponsive
political system–allowed upstart organizations to pose as
defenders of republicanism and supplant the Whigs as
the alternative to the Democrats. In the face of new ideological challenges, the glue that had held the Whigs together despite internal divisions–their hope of electoral
victory and of enjoying its fruits–waned, and the party
fell apart.
That The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party
may seem arcane and old-fashioned does not mean that
it is unconvincing. Indeed, many whose central interests
lie elsewhere may concede its persuasiveness rather than
commit to reading it through. In this way its very length
intimidates. Yet Holt’s approach to political history, no
matter how massively deployed, rests on certain assumptions that should not escape scrutiny. Two questions lurk
uneasily on the fringe of his saga: the question of voters,
and the question of issues.
Voters are the Macguffins in Holt’s story: they are
the unspoken presence, the key to the plot, the object
of the chase. Issues are the bait the parties use to lure
the voters in. Challenging those who see antebellum
elections mainly as exercises in identity expression, Holt
vigorously asserts the efficacy of issues in drawing citizens to the polls. The core of the Whig appeal was their
promise to preserve the republic and to restore prosperity. Throughout their period of greatest vitality, Whig
electoral strength at national, state, and even local levels
Holt tells this story in exhaustive detail. The distinc- closely tracked measures of economic performance and
tive feature of his text is its painstaking electoral analy- of voter satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, with Democratic
sis, which delves beneath the surface to scrutinize state policies. It was above all their program, not campaign
and district elections between the quadrennial presiden- “hoopla,” that brought Whigs their great victory in 1840.
tial contests and to analyze voter turnout rates as well
Holt’s understanding of voter behavior is thus thoras totals and percentages. These strategies enable Holt
oughly and even relentlessly instrumentalist. Every electo identify secular trends in party strength in the states,
tion outcome, from national down to local contests, has
and to pinpoint particular causes of victory and defeat in
any given race. An impressive but unobtrusive statistical its explanation; for every result there is a reason.
apparatus underlies his narrative of events.
Yet if Holt’s approach credits voters with intelligence
and
purpose, it also–though this is plainly not his intent–
The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party thus releaves
politicians of both parties looking deeply cyniflects the characteristic concerns of the “new political hiscal.
The
key to electoral success, as Holt makes plain–
tory” of the 1960s and 1970s, and carries its methods to
especially for the Whigs, who began as the outs–was
their full reach. To younger scholars reared on different
to offer voters a coherent and attractive alternative. To
questions, the book may have an antique air, accented in
those passages where Holt pauses to refight old historio- sustain their faith in the system, “the public had to believe that a change would result when they replaced one
graphic battles.
set of rulers with another. The parties therefore had to
He acquits the Whigs of opportunism and ideological stand for different things, and they had to enact differvacuity, complaining that “historians have normally por- ent policies” (p. 121). Politicians knew this and framed
trayed the name ’Whig’ as a sheer expedient” and “usu- their plans accordingly. Since Holt frankly admires the
ally stress the negativism of the Whig party” (p. 28). In Whigs and approves of their policies (he laments Henry
fact recent scholarship has rarely taken this line; its lat- Clay’s failure to win nomination and election in 1840
est purveyor cited by Holt is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in as a national misfortune), acknowledging the element of
2
H-Net Reviews
self-interested calculation that went into fashioning the
party’s platform entails, for him, no censure. In Holt’s
view Whig politicians generally did well for the country.
But it is another matter when the issue that politicians
chose to put into play was slavery.
porting incident, but in the flatness of perspective, the
one-dimensionality, that results from putting everything
on the same plane, from treating all subjects of political
action as “issues,” each intrinsically as important as the
next. What Holt misses in his recounting of the Ohio
Senate contest is what made cross-party coalition possible in the first place: not that most regular Whigs and
Democrats were indifferent to the Free Soilers’ stance
against slavery extension, but that they agreed with it.
Competitions over state policy and patronage came and
went in Ohio and elsewhere, arousing much localized and
temporary energy and dissipating often without much
trace. Yet as any historian knows who ventures outside
politics, or attends to other aspects of even politicians’
lives than their day-to-day routine of political management, the slavery question by the late 1840s overhung
these mundane and evanescent concerns like a brooding volcano. It was becoming–and not only in Ohio–the
stage, the setting, against which petty partisan encounters were played. Holt cannot see this, for he does not
look for it. For him, social concerns are only “issues,”
that appear and disappear as politicians take them up in
successive campaigns. He is so busy measuring the pattern of each wave in the electoral cycle–the interminable,
ever-varying rhythm of onset, crest, and recession–that
he does not notice the tide coming in.
The final two-thirds of The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party constitute an extended assault on what
Holt calls “historians’ preoccupations with the slavery
issue” (p. 331). Slavery, he insists, did not alone break
up the Whigs. Within the party Northerners and Southerners had always disagreed over slavery, but had also
agreed to disagree. Further, since nearly all Northern
voters opposed slavery’s expansion, that sentiment cannot by itself account for the rise of the Free Soilers or later
the Republicans. The fuller explanation lies in a complex
of factors, including the declining salience of the banner
Whig issues, the rise of nativism, anti-Catholicism, and
temperance, the strategic decisions of party leaders, and
multiple accidents of timing and circumstance.
Surely no historian would want to be caught advocating simplistic causal explanations. We make our bread
by complexity. Yet Holt’s complexity is not neutral: it
is complexity pointing always away from slavery, never
toward it. In Holt’s telling, politicians’ professions on
other matters may usually be taken at face value; those
regarding slavery almost never are.
In Holt’s minute dissection of events surrounding the
Compromise
of 1850, territorial slavery may be the osIn 1848-49, contests in state legislatures, especially
tensible
issue,
but political success is the motive. The
over election of United States Senators, exacerbated inthirst
for
patronage,
the desire for re-election, the need to
traparty rifts and thus “had a profound impact on the
take
a
position
both
popular and distinct from the other
Whig party.” One of these contests was in Ohio, where
party’s–these
are
the
imperatives which drive politicians.
Free Soilers and Democrats joined to elect Salmon Chase.
Thus
he
stresses
Zachary
Taylor’s “foolish and utopian,”
In Holt’s view, “a proper understanding of antebellum
“inept,
”
“abortive,
fractious,
and misguided,” “silly,” and
politics” shows that this event was not, as some Ohio spe“bungling”
amalgamationist
patronage
policy, which incialists have claimed, important mainly as a landmark in
furiated
regular
Whigs
everywhere
and
so sank the adthe rise of antislavery. For Chase “owed his success less
ministration’s
promising
solution
to
the
territorial
questo his advanced antislavery views than to the exigencies
tion.
“For
the
Whig
party,
this,
”
the
disastrous
infighting
of state politics.” “What really mattered” to the legislators who elected him was not slavery but “control of the over patronage, “was the true fire bell in the night” (pp.
state legislature, the state jobs at its disposal, and the poli- 414, 422, 424, 429).
cies it might enact for Ohio concerning banks, corporaLikewise with alignments over the Compromise ittions, taxes, constitutional revision, and other subjects.” self.
A “stark fact” explains why some northern
Democrats could join with Free Soilers to elevate Chase Whigs broke ranks to support the Democratic position:
because of their “great emotional intensity” over state is- “Democrats controlled the Senate, and the Senate dissues, while slavery “meant little to them” (pp. 390, 398posed of federal appointees” (p. 510). In Georgia, the
399, 401).
post-Compromise Union party movement arose when
This last assertion is not likely to convince anyone “office-hungry” leaders sabotaged the Whig organizaunpredisposed to accept it, and the piling up of narra- tion to defeat their intraparty rivals and “advance their
tive detail makes the argument more tedious than per- own careers” (pp. 613-614). At times this revisionism
suasive. For the difficulty lies not in the lack of sup- approaches caricature: “Of all the decisions that con3
H-Net Reviews
fronted Millard Fillmore upon becoming president, none
had greater potential for irreparably splitting the Whig
party and none seemed less susceptible to a compromise
solution than what he did regarding subcabinet-level appointments” (p. 544). Holt’s account of the Compromise
teems with narrative incident, yet there is none of the
analysis of the fundamental questions at stake or of the
long-term shifts in position that made, for instance, Don
E. Fehrenbacher’s work on antebellum politics so illuminating. (Nothing by Fehrenbacher appears in Holt’s bibliography.)
albeit on different grounds. Unfortunately “that chance
evaporated within twenty-fours” when a handful of Free
Soilers, aiming “to revive the flagging fortunes” of their
own party, “preempted the ground of opposition” by tagging Douglas’s bill as a proslavery measure. They thus
“converted what, only hours earlier, had been shaping up
as a partisan struggle between Democrats and Whigs into
a sectional brawl.” The motives of the Free Soilers (the
so-called “Independent Democrats”) are plain: Charles
Sumner, for instance, “needed to revitalize antislavery
sentiment” to stay in the Senate, since the coalition that
had first sent him there had fallen apart. That either the
Instead, along with office-seeking, Holt unearths the
men who issued the Free Soilers’ “insulting manifesto” or
tariff as a key to the events of 1850. Though “comthe voters who responded to it were sincerely exercised
pletely neglected by historians,” Secretary of the Trea- over the future of slavery in the country seems not worth
sury William Meredith’s call for a revision of duties in considering; neither does Holt explain why an address
1849 “excited Whigs far more than Taylor’s message” signed by six members of Congress had such wondrous
(p. 473). (Among these excited Whigs were shell- power to transform the political landscape (pp. 815, 787,
shocked congressmen emerging from a three-week, 62817).
ballot standoff over the House speakership that was not
prompted by quarrels over the tariff.) Eastern importing
In fact, he says a few pages later, it didn’t. When
merchants, however, did not like Meredith’s program– Whigs returned home from the session of 1854 “they enand so took the lead in opposing Taylor’s territorial pol- countered a cluster of issues that had nothing to do with
icy. Holt picks quarrels with previous historians of the slavery but mattered far more to many Whig and nonCompromise on an array of details, but his main com- Whig voters than the Nebraska bill” (p.835). Prohibitionplaint seems to be their focus on slavery as a substantive ism, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-partyism were
question demanding resolution rather than a political “is- all in play, and the Know-Nothing electoral surge in 1854
sue” to be worked for partisan advantage. Why it was proves that slavery had no pre-eminence among them.
an issue, why it proved so persistent and ultimately unaHolt concedes the inchoateness of the Know-Nothing
menable to the usual arts of party management, and what
appeal,
its “potential malleability and manipulability, its
that tells us about antebellum voters North and South,
capacity
to serve very different ends for different peoare questions Holt never confronts–all the more curiple” (p. 848). Some politicians took up Know-Nothingism
ously, since his earlier explication of contrasting Whig
precisely to ward off the slavery question, while for othand Democratic economic programs and philosophies is
ers Know-Nothingism itself was an antislavery vehicle.
both eloquent and persuasive.
The party hardly lived long enough to define itself–and
As he has elsewhere, Holt stresses the disruptive when it tried, it promptly broke over slavery. Yet this
power after the Compromise of 1850 of those issues concession does not register in Holt’s narrative, where
that finally found their vent in the Know-Nothing Party. “nativism, anti-Catholicism, and animosity toward unThe hope of luring Catholics from their Democratic al- responsive politicos”–but not antislavery–explain northlegiance was “the poisonous seed that would ultimately ern Know-Nothingism’s success, while prohibitionism
prove fatal to the Whig party.” The combination of “pro- explains much of the Republicans’ (p. 856). A kind
hibitionism, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and antiparty- of essentialism marks Holt’s treatment of the Knowism” became “the most powerful political force in the Nothings; he knows what they really stood for, even if
North, a storm that would shatter Whiggery.” Even when they did not. Candidates and voters who affiliate with
Free Soilers won an occasional election after 1850, their Know-Nothingism–for whatever reason, no matter how
espousal of anti-liquor platforms, not their Free-Soilism, briefly, and no matter what they did before or after–
explains their success (pp. 671, 780).
become, and remain, simply “nativist.” Thus with Millard
Fillmore, who Holt says banked on “riding the nativist
Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854 of- wave into the White House in 1856”–even though Fillfered Northern and Southern Whigs a last miraculous more’s own explanation for joining the Know-Nothings
shot at reviving the party, since they all could oppose it, was that they represented “ ‘the only hope of forming a
4
H-Net Reviews
truly national party, which shall ignore the constant and
disturbing agitation of slavery’ ” (pp. 911-912).
In the end it is fair to ask where Michael Holt’s approach to political history can lead us. The landmark
works on Jacksonian politics, from Frederick Jackson
In the end, as has happened with some other prac- Turner through Arthur Schlesinger to Ronald Formisano
titioners of the “new political history,” Holt’s systematic and Charles Sellers, always sought (though in very difdecentering of slavery leaves him without a credible ex- ferent ways) to integrate politics within a broader underplanation of the coming of the Civil War beyond an acstanding of American society, to show politics as part of a
cumulation of bad luck, bad timing, bad leaders, and bad
larger picture. Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson, in essence an
decisions. In his closing passage Holt asks why the war account of the Rise and Fall of the Van Buren Democracy
began when it did. Looking at the depth of public feel- over the same years as Michael Holt’s Whigs, had chaping over slavery–a feeling that well before 1860 had per- ters on “Jacksonian Democracy as an Intellectual Movemeated not only the nation’s politics but its literature, ment,” “Jacksonian Democracy and the Law,” “Jacksonian
its churches, its judicial systems, its very moral life–one
Democracy and Religion,” “Jacksonian Democracy and
might well ask how a reckoning was held off for so long.
Literature.”
Framing the question that way would put the politics of
the period, including the story of the Whig party, in a
Even Edward Pessen, who dismissed party competivery different light. Apportioning “blame”–Holt’s word– tion as a sordid struggle for pelf and power, saw the pofor bringing on the war presumes a judgment not only litical system as “reflecting beautifully the traits of the
that war was capable of avoidance or at least postpone- people it served.” In “background, beliefs, traits, and valment, but that it would have been better so; that the war ues,” political leaders were “in accord with the spirit of
did more harm than good, that its results were not worth the times,” perfect exemplars of the grasping, materialisthe cost. Abraham Lincoln, by the time of the Second tic society they governed. [2]
Inaugural, did not see it that way; neither did FrederThe Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party points
ick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison; nor need we
in
quite
a different direction. For Michael Holt, polias historians. Do we go looking for someone to blame
tics
is
a
world
unto itself. Holt’s politicians are not citfor bringing on the American Revolution? Disarmingly,
izens drawn into the public sphere; they are not people
Holt concedes that meting out responsibility for inflamwhose political aspirations are mixed in with the ordiing sectional tensions may open him to charges of being an “unreconstructed revisionist” purveying the old nary human concerns of their constituents. They share
“blundering-generation” thesis of Civil War causation (p. with them no apparent beliefs, no convictions. They are
a separate caste and nearly a separate breed of human be982).
ings, who live for one end: to get elected. Holt has taken
Indeed, that is exactly how he sounds. Because for his approach to studying these people about as far as it
Michael Holt, as for the diehard Whigs he most admires, can go. His work is almost overwhelming in its thormaintaining the political system in equilibrium is the oughness and erudition. Yet one cannot help thinking
highest desideratum, and those who destabilize it to ad- that the more closely we stare at politics and politicians
vance their own agendas, whatever they may be, can only through the narrow lens of Michael Holt, the less we rebe blameworthy. Slavery, in Holt’s understanding, was ally see.
not a problem until certain politicians chose to make it a
Notes
problem, or rather an “issue.” On their heads lie the consequences. And so he is left to rail at all of them, Southern
[1]. Richard P. McCormick, The Second American
hotheads and Northern “sectional tyrants”–abolitionists Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era
and Free Soilers and finally Abraham Lincoln, who (says (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966),
Holt) preferred to preserve the Republican party than 4.
accede to southern demands, and therefore “whose in[2]. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society,
transigence in the winter of 1860-61 helped provoke the
Personality,
and Politics, Revised Ed. (Homewood, Ill.:
Civil War that many northern and southern Whigs had
Dorsey
Press,
1978), pp. 326, 196.
long hoped to avert” (pp. 983-984). One wonders in
what, beyond his intent to assume an office to which
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This
he had been duly elected, Lincoln’s provoking intran- work may be copied for non-profit educational use if
sigence consisted–whether Union could still have been proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other
purchased in that winter, and at what enduring price.
permission, please contact [email protected].
5
H-Net Reviews
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at:
https://networks.h-net.org/h-shear/
Citation: Daniel Feller. Review of Holt, Michael F., The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics
and the Onset of the Civil War. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. December, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3652
Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication,
originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at [email protected].
6