Another Party:

Look at the Late Whig T h e Perspective of the

Loyal Whig BY

KENNETH B. SHOVER*

T HE American Whig party disintegrated during the decade before the Civil War, bringing to an end the twenty-year-old second party system. In the intervening years before a new alignment had clearly formed, the symbiotic relationship

between an old system crumbling and a new one emerging obscured the precise nature of future parties, hence adding unwanted complications for the exiled Whig in search of a new party affiliation. The choices eventually presented to him obviously varied in their attractiveness but did not include a revived Whig party. In its recognized form at least, that party had truly vanished.’

+The author is Professor of History at The University of Texas at El faso. ‘The most recent sustained treatment of the Whigs is Daniel Walker Howe’s The

Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979). Through a searching inquiry into the ideas, values and politics of great and near great Whigs, Howe succeeds in isolating the critical stress points within this culture as well as discovering what united these men, other than their common membership in a nineteenth-century political party. The most provocative recent work. on the years of party disintegration and realignment is Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 101-81. Holt’s major contention is that the absenceof interparty conflict on most issues in theearly 1850s (prior to the Kansas-Nebraska debate) produced voter apathy; and that this, as well as a widespread loss of faith in the ability of either the Whigor Democratic parties to promote and make secure republican society, led to that system’s collapse. The best recent general study of the pre-Civil War era is David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1976). In a discussion of the collapse of the Whig party, Potter wonders why that party could not have survived as a northern sectional party when the Democratic party managed to survive despite similar heavy losses among northern voters. The answer, he suggests, may have less to do with the slavery question than with the huge increase in immigration and the resulting conflict between native Protestants and foreign-born Catholics. Ibid., 218-251. For the plight of the exiled Whig, see Shover, “The Free State Whig and the Idea of a Conservative Strategy,” Mid-America 54 (October 1972): 251-66; Holt, “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know-Nothingism,” Journal of American History60(September 1971): 309-31; EricFoner, Freesoil, FreeLabor, FreeMm: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 186-225; Robert F. Dalzell, Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, I8434852

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All Whigs had become increasingly conscious of their party’s declining health, but none lookedupon its approaching end with more profound sorrow than the faithful member who had convinced himself that the fate of his party and his country were inextricably joined.2 Referred to by such labels as “union,” “old-line,” or “straight-out,” (and others less flattering), he was present in varying strength in every state, but only in the free states were antislavery Whigs numerous enough to cause him peculiar and distressing problems. Devoted to a party and an arrangement of parties then under siege, his conservatism demanded above all circumspection and restraint, especially in the use of language. Indeed, to admonish others to exercise restraint came almost as natural to him as breathing.3

(Boston, 1973), 203-301; and .Thomas H. O’Connor, Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1968), 114-31.

?See, for example, the New York Daily Times, 23,30October, 28 November 1851,3, 4, 5 November 1852, 13 January 1853. The influential Whig literary and political monthly, The American Review, took regular readings on the state of the party’s health. See especially 1 (March 1848), 129-40; 6 (August 1850), 114-26; 7 (January 1851). 1-6 7 (April 1851), 289-301; 7 (May 1851), 383-94; 8 (December 1852), 569-73. For the views of some conservative Whigs, see Thomas Corwin to J. D. March, 13 January 1850, Thomas Corwin Papers; AlphonsoTaft toDaniel Webster, 25 August 1850, Miscellaneous Papers; J. Pearce to L. D. Campbell, 26 June 1851, L. D. Campbell Papers, all at the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus. David Davis to [?I, 8 January 1852; Davis to [?I, 17 October 1852; Davis to J. F. Henry, 27 December 1852, David Davis Papers, Chicago Historical Society. W. B. Fairchild to Isaac Strohm, 28 February 1852; W. B. Thrall to Strohm, 23 February 1851, Isaac Strohm Papers, Cincinnati Historical Society. Robert C. Winthrop toEdward Everett, 12 May 1850, Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

31n referring to one of Charles Sumner’s “rhetorical flights’’ in a debate in the Senate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Winthrop declared “If the gentlemen of this streak . . . would have been a little less violent in their tone, or would even have kept silence altogether, I should have had better hope of the result.” Winthrop to Everett 13 February 1854, Everett Papers. See also Winthrop to Everett, 22 January 1851, ibid. Rufus Choate, Addresses and Orations, 3d ed. (Boston, 1879), 408, 472-73. Similar admonitions can be found throughout these discordant years in what amounted to a national Whig daily newspaper, the [Washington] Nationallntelligencer. In addition to those cited in the first note, numerous sources studying the Whigs from various perspectives are: Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1838-1860 (New York, 1976); DavidDonald, CharlesSumner and the Coming oft he Ciuil War (New York, 1960); Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886 (Boston, 1961); Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967); Albert D. Kirwan, John J . Crittenden, The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962); Robert J. Rayback, Millard Fillmore, Biography of a President (Buffalo, N.Y., 1959); Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (New York, 1978); Maurice G. Baxter, Orville H . Browning: Lincoln’s Friend and Critic (Bloomington, Ind., 1957); Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of M a s Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, N.J., 1971); Paul R. Frothingham, Edward Everett, Orator and Statesman (New York, 1925); Jean V. Matthews, Rufus Choate: The Law and Civic Virtue (Philadelphia, 1980); Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish:

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Despite its relatively brief life, the Whigparty has been thesubject of intensive study over the years. In an earlier time, historians tended to examine the American political party in the context of national politics: leaders, constituencies, political ideas, public issues, and presidential elections. But this mode of inquiry has been largely superseded by one which sees the political party rather as a functional part of an evolving party system, fixed within a distinctive political culture, whose defining characteristics are a mixture of the body of political ideas, the distinguishing attributes of politicians and voters drawn to it, the competitive relationship to the rival party, and, not least, by the stresses arising from the inevitable factional and personal disputes. This analysis has begun to provide definitive answers to such questions as how are parties formed, what determines their essential character, quality and style of leadership, and what may dispose a particular voter to join one party or the other. The result has been a richer, better- informed portrait of the entire political ~ociety.~

One question still not satisfactorily answered, however, has to do with the quality of the bond that united members in a common political endeavor: “quality,” referring not only to its durability but more importantly, to the measure of regard of party members for the relationship to kindred partisans. Quality in this sense is very difficult to evaluate, deriving as it must from an assessment subject to conflicting pulls and tugs: emotional ones expressed as duty, loyalty, or commitment versus a reasoned calculation of whether the party might advance, or at

The Inner History of the Grant Administration, 2 vols. (New York, 1957), 1; and Charles Winslow Elliott, Winfield Scott, the Soldier and the Man (New York, 1937). “Union Whig” was reasonably familiar to contemporaries. See especially Fairchild to Strohm, 25 January 1852, in the Strohm Papers. Also see Stephen A. Douglas to John A. McClernand, 23 December 1856, in Robert W. Johanssen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana, Ill., 1961), 171.

‘In addition to the works cited in notes one and three, the following confonn to either the first or second mode of analysis. With some obvious variations, the treatment of party or parties is usually set in the context of national political issues, as in E. Malcolm Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (Durham, N.C., 1925); George R. Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936 reprint, Gloucester, Mass., 1965); Wilfred E. Binkley, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (New York, 1943); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945); and Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era (Boston, 1959). Beginningwith Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961), party structure and composition have become the principal focus of discussion, as is also the case in Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System (Chapel Hill, 1966); William N. Chambers and Walter D. Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York, 1967); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, 1973); and most recently and provocatively in Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: TheFirst Century (New York, 1979).

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least minimally sustain, the interests of its adherents.5 Each Whig, in some manner, weighed the alternatives, but not without at some point having to confront an appeal that would characterize the threatened relationship as extraordinary, historically unique, and salvageable. Its power lay almost entirely in the emotional force brought to bear, a quintessential part of which was the intriguing notion that the bond uniting members of an established and legitimate6 political party had conferred what amounted to a virtual immunity to disruption, as though once having achieved the structural integrity required of a major party i t had been rendered immortal. Thus, what was presented was a model of a political party in which the bond itself had become its crucial defining feature, and stood paramount to all others.’

5 1 have made the same general observation in an earlier article, but related it there to an analysis of the options loyal Whigs in the free states, as a group, may have considered as they faced the impending demise of their party. My conclusion was that, for a variety of reasons, they failed collectively to devise any strategy, and events in time overtook them, leaving individual members with choices that were distasteful to one degree or another. Shover, “Free State Whig,” 255-66. In the present essay, I have instead examined the response of two distinguished loyal Whigs to the same circumstances, which took the form of an unusual andstriking definition of the proper role, function and responsibility of the American political party, presented in a public forum, at a time of maximum crisis for their party.

6By Rufus Choate’s standards, “legitimate” meant a party having “national” and not “geographical” (sectional) purposes and constituencies.

7This view is strikingly at variance with one which argues that antipartyism was an essential and enduring element in the Whig party, inherited in part, according to one historian, from George Washington’s conviction that parties were the incorrigible offspring of republican politics. But the more immediate source, he asserts, was the powerful evangelical force anti-Masonry exerted in the party’s formative years, manifested in the predisposition of Whigs to question organizational authority in matters of conscience. When Whigs responded to the slavery issue and obeyed the dictates of conscience, the forceof antipartyism was fully revealed the party literally self-destructed. The term is, however, a twentieth-century invention, the persuasivenessof which depends heavily on the knowledge of what did happen to the Whigparty. Formisano, Birth ofMass Political Parties, 56-57, 60-71. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 280, appears to subscribe fully to the antipartyist view, but Thomas Brown, “Southern Whigs and the Politics of Statesmanship, 1833-1841,” The journal of Southern History 46 (August 1980): 366, note 14, maintains that the antipartyist school has neglected the sources of Whig cohesion. The subject of party character is treated from various perspectives in Lynn L. Marshall, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” American Historical Review 72 (January 1967): 445-68; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Reuolution (New York, 1955); McCormick, Second American Party System; Roy F. Nichols, Thelnvention of the American Political Parties (New York, 1967); Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley, 1969); and Chambers and Bumham, American Party Systems.

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While national victories were lamentably rare for Whigs, as with all engaged partisans, winning at any level brought exhilaration, a sense of purpose, and a heightened awareness of what bound them together as Whigs. Even the name was resonant with historical meaning: the direct link to the patriot Whigof the American Revolution combined with the “country party” bundle of symbols that had charged so many battles of the Jackson era.* But when defections undermined their voting strength, particulary in states where they had enjoyed success, these revitalizing forces were neutralized. Not only were there now fewer Whigs, but there was less party vitality, traceable to benign competition between dominance-seeking factions. Those who remained, the loyalists, could not fight with each other, for nothing was really left to fight over. The party had in a real sense become a defeated party, defeated by i t ~ e l f . ~ The realization of this overwhelmed the loyalist. For him, the act of a fellow Whig quitting the party and taking up with others was not simply one of changing a party affiliation but was truly an act of desertion.10

8For the colonial and revolutionary connections to nineteenth-century Whiggery, see Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1968), 124, 142-43; Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, 1-49 Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 11-22; and especially Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill, 1969), 3-124. For the style and character of the Whig association at its birth, see Marshall, “Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” 445-68; Brown, “Southern Whigs and the Politics of Statesmanship,” 361-80, and Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties,

gWhether the slavery issue (“cotton versus conscience”) was the principal cause of the Whig party’s undoing is a question historians may finally have transcended. Potter, who entertained doubts about the older interpretation, nevertheless maintained that Whigs were “more susceptible to sectional disruptions than the Democrats because of a difference in their degree of responsiveness to the slavery question” in Impending Crisis, 236. This essential view is amplified into a major interpretation in Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1967). But see also, O’Connor, Lords of the Loom, 77-113; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, passim; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 190-91; Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil, The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970); Van Deusen, Seward, 142-43; Kirwan, Crittenden, 279 George H . Mayer, The Republican Party, 1854-1964 (New York, 1964), 28; and especially, Formisano, Birth of Mass Political Parties, 195, 205-16. Holt argues that consensus, the near total absence of interparty conflict, destroyed the second party system in Political Crisis of the 1850s, 13. The most recent variation on the Holt thesis is William E. Gienapp, “The Whig Party, The Compromise of 1850, and the Nomination of Winfield Scott,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 14 (Summer 1984), 399-415.

‘ T h e intensity of this reaction is well conveyed in the statements of Choate and Winthrop in Cctober 1855. Also see The American Reuiew 1 (March 1848), 225; 1 (April 1848). 418; 2 (July 1848), 8-9 6(August 1850), 114-26; the National lntelligencer, 11 March, 20 June and 4 November 1854,6,8 October 1855, and especially 1 January 1856. See also Albany, N.Y. StateRegister andAlbany, N.Y. Argus, quotedin ibid., 24October 1855. See also the statements of New York Whigs Washington Hunt and Millard Fillmore, quoted

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An extensive reading of loyal Whig statements in the form of speeches, diary entries, letters and comment from their periodicals points to a singular understanding of “party.” “Party,” in the conven- tional meaning of “organization,” misses because it fails to convey the quality of personal commitment invested. The better term is “association”-one Whigs themselves used and understood to mean something akin to a modern-day fellowship or fraternal order, with members “bonded” to one another so that defections would produce feelings of shock, anger, and even grief among the deserted.”

Loyal Whigs in the free states had been appalled by the allure of what they styled “political abolition” almost from the time of its incarnation in the Liberty party. In fact, Clay’s narrow defeat in the election of 1844 troubled Whigs long after what might have been expected.’* It became a defeat they never managed to overcome. Its

in National Zntelligencer, 8, 30 August, 15 October 1855 and 27 June 1856. [?I to Daniel Webster, 19 July 1852, Webster Papers, Library of Congress. Rayback, Fillmore, 344,362, 386. The difficulty of retrospectively weighing the impact of such an emotionally charged argument should be obvious. Yet the conception of the Whig party as advanced here rests on an interpretation of “feeling.”

ll“For myself,” wrote the loyal Whig and former New York governor, Washington Hunt, in a letter to the editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, “instead of forming new political associations, let me adhere to those cherished principles which have the approval of my best judgment and which find a response in the sentimentsof my heart. We are invited to wander after strange gods, but some of us must adhere to ancient faith. I am still a Whig, and I do not intend to desert the ship, even if I am left alone.” Quoted in the NationalZntelligencer, 30August 1855. TheAmerican Review, prone to assess the stateof the party from time to time, found that it hadan immortal soul,” . . . that whichwill never permit it to die, even if broken into fragments. . . .” 7 (May 1851), 399.. Such “ultimate” statements may be attributable in part to a style of expression common to that age, but their significance extends well beyond style to encompass a particular understanding of the party. See also ibid., 2 (July 1848), 1 and 6 (August 1850), 115; The National Zntelligencer, 20August 1853,9 June, 1,21 August and 1 November 1854,17 Julyand6.8 October 1855,l January, 21 April and27 June 1856; Davis toF. W. Rockwell, 27 December 1855, Davis Papers; Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1925-1933), 1:7; Marshall, “StrangeStillbirthof the Whig Party,” 445, 460-63; and Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815-1828,” American Historical Reuiew 74 (December 1968):

IZThe defeat of this prototypal Whig seemed to have traumatized Whigs. In retrospect it loomed larger and larger. The defeat of Scott in 1852, opined the New York Times (4 November 1852), was much less of a blow than Clay’s loss in 1844. Looking back from the post-Civil War years, Henry Carey maintained that the Civil War would never have been fought if Clay had been elected president in 1844. Howe, Political Cultureofthe American Whigs, 120,129. See also Albany Register quoted in the National fntelligencer, 4 November 1854; ibid., 27 June 1856; CalvinColton, TheLifeand TimesofHenry Clay, 2 vols. (New York, 1846). 2: 425-31; Kirwan, Criltenden, 293-95; Poage, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, 151; Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston, 1937), 376-78.

453-91.

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consequences-the election of Polk and the ensuing war with Mexico- generated in time an even more powerful antislavery party and the prospect of additional Whig defections.

Tragically, the expected Whig rejuvenation, spurred by a war especially despised in areas of Whig voting strength, was aborted. Critical losses to the Free Soil party in the election of 1848 were averted by the Whig convention’s nomination of General Zachary Taylor along with a Free Soil nomination of Martin Van Buren, the one Democrat (other than Andrew Jackson) certain to revive memories of what it had meant in the beginning to be a Whig.13 But that was only in the short term. The longer term augured for continued losses as the sectional crisis worsened. The result was not what conservative Whigs most wanted: continuity nurtured by sectional stability, permitting their party to grow and prosper-solidifying its base, firming up connections, and heightening among members the consciousness, pride, and confidence that could make future victories possible.

The election of 1852 proved a catastrophic national defeat for Whigs.“ Despite the superficial signs of a country acquiescing to even the more distasteful parts of the recent compromise, months before the election Whigs had sunk into a mood of despondency and pessimism about their future.15 “I have long seen,” declared Millard Fillmore, looking back from a later election battle, “that the time was approaching when that noble Whig party, of which I was ever proud, would be unavoidably destroyed.”I6 And he had no doubt as to which event had inaugurated the fatal process. “You have spoken of the treachery that

”Rayback, Free Soil: T h e Election of 1848, 301-302; Holt, Political Crisis of the

“For those to whom the outcome mattered most their defeat was catastrophic. Measured in actual numbers, however, it might have been something less. While the Whig presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, carried only four of thirty-one states, his percentage of the two-party vote was a respectable 46.1 percent. Furthermore, his vote total was actually greater than that of Zachary Taylor who had won the presidency as the Whig candidate four years before. See Svend Peterson, comp., A Statistical History of the American PresidentialElections (New York, 1963), 30-32. The most recent analysis of the effect of this election on the Whig party is Gienapp, “The Whig Party, Compromise of 1850, and Scott,” 399-415.

I5See, for example, George S. Hilliard to Webster, 22 June 1852; Sam H. Waller to Webster, 22 June 1852; [?] to Webster, 19 July 1852; John Barney to Webster, 10 October 1852; Joseph Cook et al. to Webster, 7 October 1852, Webster Papers; Corwin to J. D. March, 13 December 1856, Corwin Papers; Pearce tocampbell, 26 June 1851, Campbell Papers; Fairchild to Strohm, 29 February 1852, Strohm Papers. New York Daily Times, 23, 30October 1850,28November 1851; TheAmerican Review, 7 (April 1851): 300, and(May 1851): 383; Shover, “The Free State Whig,” 260; Holt, Political Crisisofthe1850:, 101-30.

I6Fillmore’sremarks wereaddressed to the Whig General Committeeof Constitution Hall in New York City. New York Commercial Advertiser, quoted in the National Intelligencer, 27 June 1856.

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defeated Henry Clay in 1844. The canker worm that has been gnawing at the very vitals of that party has at last, I fear, destroyed it. . . .”I7 “Treachery,” “canker worm,” “gnawing at the . . . vitals’’-these were expressions that conveyed Fillmore’s contempt for those he held responsible for the destruction of his party. At the very least, they suggested how Whigs viewed their party and what membership in i t signified for them.

At what point the loyal Whigs became fully convinced their party was beyond resuscitation varied from one part of the country to another; and, no doubt from one Whig to another. This question, like so many other historical conundrums, is at bottom a function of time, local circumstances, and individual assessment of these and other variables. But the symptoms of Whig decay were too apparent to be ignored; the evidence was accessible, much of it to be found in the gloomy analyses of their periodicals. Yet while Whig organs were understandably dismayed at the approaching calamity, the question of whether the party lived or died was, for the Whig politician, a far more serious matter. As the disruptive “fusionist” movement gathered momentum in opposition to Stephen Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska bill-fueled either by anti- slaveryism or Know-Nothingism-it cut deeply into the strength of both major parties. But in the end it was the Whig party that died.’*

#

During periods when old party ties are dissolving, the political fragments in search of a new alignment must have some plasticity. Pressures bending them one way or another arise from the perceived interests of politicians and voters, the indeterminable mixture of national issues and national leaders with local and special circumstances, and the ease or difficulty with which particular personalities and groups can work in harness.lgThe politicians who must adjust to a new and unpredictable situation find this the most trying stage of all: before

“Ibid. Fillmore’s epitaph for Whiggery was balanced by his conviction that the American party in 1856 was a true replica of his former party, or as he put it more colorfully: ‘.. . . a phoenix that has arisen from its ashes . . . to save the Country.” Putting aside this dubious prophecy, what is genuinely noteworthy here is the unstated premise that what the country needed most was a party to perform the unifying and healing function of the old Whig party-a party which could “save the Country.”

Votter, Impending Crisis, 218-51. IgThis last factor has received little attention, yet it must have been a matter of some

consequence in the attempt to form new alliances. For discussion of the problems arising during the process of party formation, see McCormick, Second American Party System, 352; Nichols, Invention of American Political Parties, 279-327; Chambers and Burnham, American Party Sysfems, 3-32, 90-1 16; Hofstadter, Idea o f a Party System, 212-71; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 139-81; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; and Potter, Impending Crisis, 225-65.

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all elements have been fused, rudimentary traditions established, unifying symbols acknowledged, habits of cooperation and bargaining worked out, and old enmities put aside.Z0 It is a time when no one can be certain about the final shape of things but when decisions cannot long be delayed if there is to be a future with influence, power, and elective office. Should one try at any cost to hold together what remains of the old party, or commit oneself fully to a new one? Or, is the preferred course simply to remain aloof until the future has become less clouded? Anxiety is intensified by the cries of theold party loyalists who begin to flail at the defectors as they sense things are coming apart. Labels such as “traitor” and “deserter” come readily to the lips. “What has the party meant to you my friend and how are you treating it now?” “Will not the old party serve as well the principles we share instead of a new alliance that must necessarily include old enemies?”*l Such appeals could not be easily dismissed, for they invoked nothing less than the still-vivid memory of a common political effort-the very substance binding the association together, fixing it within the constellation of parties, and giving its members their political identity.

The knitting of connections that defines a political association such as the Whig party proceeds so gradually that its members may readily grasp its role in the conventional politics of the time but be only faintly conscious of their party’s unique character and what sets it apart in the larger political culture. What may have caused a few to probe more deeply into the nature of parties and the political culture was the very life-threatening situation their own party faced and its source. Even a cursory reading of the traditional sources of loyal Whig expression will yield essentially one elemental imploring question which today might

ZOEvidence here is to be found mainly in the letters politicians exchanged with one another. See, for example, Davis to Rockwell, 4 March 1855, 27 December 1855. Davis Papers; Lyman Trumbull to Owen Lovejoy, 20 August 1855, Trumbull Papers, Illinois State Library, Springfield Everett to Mrs. Charles Eames, 4 June 1855, Everett Papers; and B. F. Wade to Campbell, 27 June 1853, Campbell Papers. The biographer of John J. Crittenden observes, “. . . in periods of political disorganization, politicians seem to feel so insecure that they grasp at every issue, however transitory, that might bring even temporary personal advantage.” Kirwan, Crittenden, 290-91.

*‘The evidence here is overwhelming. See issues of the National Intelligencer and other loyal Whig newspapers for the years 1854 and 1855. The Zntelligencer customarily published proceedings of state Whig conventions and letters from notable Whigs. Further evidence can be found in letters from the middle years of the decade in such collections as the Everett Papers and the Robert C. Winthrop Papers, also in the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. See also Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System; Bailyn, Origins of American Politics; Wood, Creation of the American Republic; David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford, 1963), and Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth andC. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958).

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be reduced to some such exclamation as “What in hell is going on!” But these gentlemen possessed a dauntless faith in the power of words. For the most part hortatory and didactic, their verbal avalanche became the trusted means with which to coax the faithless Whigs.

Loyalists had access to an enormous fund of oratorical and literary talent. In states where their party had been successful, the stakes were correspondingly larger and the ensuing struggle between promoters of fusionism and Whig loyalists measurably more savage. Massachusetts provided such a battleground, for there the strength of fusionism had been markedly influenced by the residual stamina of the Whig party as well as by the inordinate power of Know-Nothingism.22 And there, two eloquent and resourceful Whig loyalists, Rufus Choate and Robert C . Winthrop, fashioned an arresting and ingenious argument for their party; indeed for the entire party system in which theirs had been an indispensable and functional part.

Both men had been loyal supporters of Daniel Webster for many years, despite his unseemly political ambition and pecuniary greed which placed embarrasing burdens upon them and other Whigs. “Cotton” is the label often used to designate these Whig conservatives, but the term is as misleading in one direction as “conscience” is in the other, as though the political actions of the two groups were governed entirely by monetary and moral criteria respectively. During the heated exchanges over slavery, their conservatism was construed as mere posture, and fervent appeals to unionism little more than apologetics for the South. But their conservatism and unionism were intimately connected to a conception of the role properly assigned to the political party in the American republic, which in turn led them to condemn the savage assaults upon the South and slavery.23

220’Connor, Lords of the Loom, 93-131; Potter, Impending Crisis, 237,250; Foner, FreeSoil, Free Labor, FreeMen, 194. Two recent studies have defined more clearly the role of Know-Nothingism in the realignment of party affiliations. Holt, “Politics of Impatience,” 309-31; Dale Baum, “Know-Nothingism and the Republican Majority in Massachusetts: The Political Realignment of the 1850s.” Journal of American History 64 (March, 1978): 959-86. For a contemporary assessment of the Know-Nothing phenomenon, see Everett to Eames, 13, 22 November 1854, 4 June 1855, Everett Papers.

Z3Brief biographical sketches of each can be found in Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary ofAmericanBiography (New York, 1928-44), 4: 86-90,20: 416-17. Claude M. Fuess, Rufus Choate, The Wizard of the Law (New York, 1928), provides a more lengthy but nonetheless disappointing account of this remarkable life. Howe, Polztical Culture of the American Whigs, 225-37, offers an astute but generally unflattering Choate profile. Matthews, Choate, is by far the most balanced and informed study of this solitary (and hence not terribly effective) Whig politician. Though a disciple of the archetypal conservative Edmund Burke, Choate’s veneration for the law in its American mold branded his as a fundamentally American conservatism, making him the advqrsary of misguided philanthropies (the “uninstructed conscience”) and unrestrained

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Choate, the older of the two, had served briefly in both houses of the Massachusetts state legislature, as well as in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Though a dedicated member of the Whig party, he preferred law practice to elective or appointive office. His fame and reputation rested upon his eminence as a lawyer and brilliance as a political thinker and speaker. At a time when the Bay State could boast an abundance of brilliant minds, talented lawyers, and spell-binding orators, Richard Henry Dana, hardly a supporter of Choate’s politics, considered him the finest in the Commonwealth in all categories.**

Choate was an inveterate and eloquent speech maker in an age in which rhetoric as a form of cultivated expression was looked upon as the equal of belles lettres. In a series of addresses during these trying years, he carefully defined his political philosophy, placing himself squarely within the body of Whig conservatism. Daniel Walker Howe, in his recent study of Whig culture and thought, sees their conservatism arising from a set of deeply held convictions about society, government, and the people. To the Whig, society is natural and organic, not confined to temporal constraints; the “given” into which one is born and owes his being in that he is a particle occupying space momentarily, but bound irrevocably to those who preceded and those who will follow him. Government is not the sovereign but the creature of society which is the true locus of sovereignty. Society, in turn, is the people, “not. . . as an undifferentiated mass, but . . . organized with their families and property, their various abilities, training and social roles, their language, customs, and tradition.”25 Hence, each society on earth is unique and particular.

In an address to the Cambridge Law School in 1845, Choate characterized the law (and the American bar) as the most expedient and functional tool to further this conservative design:

. . . to keepalive thesacredsentiments of obedienceandreverenceandjustice

. . . to withstand the pernicious sophism that the successive generations, as they come to life, are but as so many successive flights of summer flies, without relations to the past or duties to the future. . . that all-all the dead, the living, the unborn-[are] one moral person . . . [and] that the

majorities. In a discussion of the statement, considered at length below, Matthews observes that it included “a Madisonian assessment of the role of party in America,” but beyond that offers little analysis of what is the central theme of this paper. Zbid., 218. For Winthrop’s activities in the 1840s and early 1850s, see Brauer, Cotton Versus Conscience; Dalzell, Webster; and O’Connor, Lords of the Loom. For a candid appraisal of the mixed character of Webster’s contribution to his party and country, see Winthrop to Everett, 21 May, 9, 29 July 1851, Everett Papers.

24Robert F. Lucid, ed., The Journal of RichardHenry Dana, Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 2: 565.

Z5Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 82.

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engagements of one age may bind the conscienceof another; the glory or the shame of a day may brighten or stain the current of a thousand years of continuous national beingr.126

Choate’s distinctive “nation” (“continuous national being”) was nothing less than an unending stream of cohering life, linking founders to countless future generations. But, he insisted, this fragile thing required the most solicitous care and attention from its leaders and all its supporting institutions, especially the political parties. T h e latter, the unintended creatures of the founding fathers’ handiwork, had become essential to the proper and efficient administration of the state and national governments. In fact, the continuance of free government in the United States depended on them.27 However, Choate reminded a Whig audience in a speech in Faneuil Hall in October 1855, that if a political association had potential for good, it unfortunately had the same potential for evil. And evil, he declared, was the predictable result of the attempt to destroy old parties in order to build a new one from their remnants.

. . . when you consider how prodigious an agency in a republic a flushed and powerful party is at the best. [That it] is sure to form and guide that public opinion which rules the world. . . [and] when you consider that to win or retain the general voice, all the ability this organization can possibly command will be enlisted and paid; that it will offer office to the ambitious, spoils to the greedy, the dear, delicious indulgence of the one single idea to the zealot [and] the cure of one evil by the creation of ten thousand. . . you attain to some conception of what the party is to be.Z8

A year later, in a speech in Lowell, Choate elaborated on the evil consequences of the “geographical” (Republican) party, which had by then become plainly visible to him. But it was less the devastatingeffects on old parties that concerned him than the more subtle, insidious effects upon the whole public:

[The new party] accustoms the people of each section to turn from contemplating that fair and grand ideal, the whole America, and to find their country in one of its fragments; a revolution of the public affections, andasubstitutionof anew publiclife; that it accustoms them toexaggerate, intensify, and put forward into every thing the one element of discord and diversity, and to neglect the cultivation of the less energetic elements of resemblance and union; that in fixing their attention on a single subject, and that one appealing simply to passion and emotion, to pride, to fear, to moral sensibilities, it sows the seeds of sentiments which we did not inherit, but which we may transmit . . . that it has to an extraordinary degree

Whoate, Addresses, 138. For an extended discussion of Choate’s practiceof law and

27Quoted in the National Intelligencer, 6 October 1855. ZChoate, Addresses, 428-29.

his legal philosophy, see Matthews, Choate, 147-91.

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changed the tone of political discussion in this its own section, and made it intolerant, immoral, abusive, and insolent to those who differ . . . that it tends to place moderate men and national men, North and South, in a false position, by presenting to them the alternative of treason to the whole or treason to the section,-thus putting moderate counsels to shame, and destroying the influence which might help to restore the good temper and generous affection of the parts and the whole.29

Robert Winthrop was more a politician than Choate, and less inclined to place an emotional attachment to his party within a broadly conceived holistic design. A lineal descendant of the Bay Colony’s founder, he had been Boston’s representative in Congress throughout most of the 1840s, serving as speaker during one term. In 1850 the governor of Massachusetts appointed him to Webster’s seat in the Senate when Webster became Millard Fillmore’s secretary of state. But later, when Winthrop sought election to a full term, the legislature instead chose the Free Soiler, Charles Sumner. Disappointed and bitter, Winthrop went into what became permanent retirement from public life at the age of forty-two.90

While in Congress, he imagined himself squarely within the Whig party’s center-as he wrote to one friend, between the ultraisms of Toombs on the one hand and Giddings on the other. And, he concluded, “I could have no better evidence that I am not far from right, and to be right is, after all, better than to be successful.” This comment, made in 1849, is full of irony, for i t accurately summed u p Winthrop’s career in the 1850s, far more than he would have liked or intended.31

A remarkably astute and even prophetic politician, Winthrop believed that in order to survive, the Whig party must establish for itself a credible position within the northern political community, one that would not be viewed as predictably pro-southern. To that end he opposed the tough fugitive slave bill, for which he earned Webster’s enmity, while supporting with enthusiasm the other parts of the Compromise of 1850.32 And he urged conservative Whigs to lead the opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Bi11.33 But however well or poorly

Ybid., 472-73. See also Matthews, Choate, 218-19. SOWinthrop to Isaac P. Davis, 10 January 1851, Winthrop Papers; Winthrop to

Everett, 6 January, 21 May and 6 August 1851, 17, 24 January 1853, Everett Papers. Winthrop suffered a second painful defeat when he sought the governorship in 1851.

JlWinthrop to Nathan Appleton, 4 December 1849, Winthrop Papers. 3ZIt is clear in the following that Winthrop had carefully considered the effect of each

part of the compromise on the health of the Whig party: Winthrop to Appleton, 6 January, 17 February and3, l l March 1850; Winthrop to Mrs. Gardner, 10 February 1850; Winthrop to George Morey, 10, 17, 20 September 1850, Winthrop Papers. For Webster’s dissatisfaction with Winthrop, see Henry A. Wise to Everett, 6 February 1851; Winthrop to Everett, 9 July 1851, Everett Papers.

”Winthrop to Everett, 28 January and 13,24 February 1854, Everett Papers.

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managed these strategies may have been, neither produced the effect sought. The frustration and bitterness Winthrop had felt over his own failure to win election to the Senate was compounded by theresignation from the Senate of his good friend and fellow loyal Whig, Edward Everett, in the very session in which the Kansas-Nebraska Bill became

On the eve of Franklin Pierce’s inauguration, Winthrop had predicted that with the Whigs’ loss of the presidency, the party would be helpless to impede the erosion of its strength in the North; hence its future well-being lay entirely in the hands of its political adversary. Despite President Pierce’s protestations of undying unionism, Winthrop believed the southern tendencies of the Democratic party over time would destroy the unionists’ base in both sections.35

In October 1855, at the annual state convention of Massachusetts Whigs in Worcester, the question of party survival could no longer be finessed or postponed. Choate and Winthrop received invitations to address the convention, but both declined. Choate responded with a letter to the convention indicting fusionism’s speciousness, and urging the Whigs of Massachusetts to continue their political efforts in their historic form. Winthrop’s response took the form of an open letter to a Faneuil Hall meeting of Boston Whigs on October 15.36 But illustrious as each man’s career had been, the significance of their statements rested only marginally on their acknowledged stature, Instead, it is to be found in the overall quality and cogency of the argument advanced. The question of whether that argument faithfully reflected the attitudes of other loyal Whigs or fulfilled the transitory political needs of their constituency is dwarfed by the much larger issue addressed: the enduring mission of the political party in this republic.

Choate saw the movement to form a new and necessarily sectional party as absurd, unnecessary, and infinitely dangerous. Over the years,

)‘The anguish he felt over Everett’s resignation is revealed in Winthrop to Everett, 12 May 1854, Everett Papers. Everett’s voluntary departure from the Senate at such a critical point reverberated through the ranks of loyal Whigs for some time. A year afterward, one Illinoisan wondered whether the stated reason, his health, was not “a mere subterfuge,” suggesting that Everett no longer had stomach for the violent politics of Washington. D. Davis to Rockwell, 4 March 1855, Davis Papers. “He is not at home in the turmoil of political contention,” declared theNationa1 Intelligences (26 May 1854): “His tastes hold him aloof from party struggles, and from the sharp conflict of political debate.”

SSWinthrop to Everett, 13 December 1852, Everett Papers. TheAmerican Review had forecast much the same outcome the year before, 7 (April 1851): 300.

56Both letters are reprinted in full from the Boston Daily Advertiser in the National Zntelligmcer, 6, 23 October 1855. Other Whig notables-Hilliard, Waller and Thomas Stevenson-addressed the Worcester convention along the same lines. Hunt’s earlier statement, previously cited, paralleled the Choate-Winthrop arguments. None, however, hadraisedsuch fundamental issues in the same probingmanner. Zbid., 30August and 4.8, 19, 24 October 1855. See also Matthews, Choate, 218-19.

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he believed, established and responsible political associations had demonstrated their extreme utility in preserving and perpetuating free government in the Unitedstates. Despite a tendency to faction, they had become the necessary vehicles through which unformed political ideas took shape, found expression, and became institutionalized in law and policies. In turn, the association had served both as schoolmaster and classroom-informing the citizen, helping him shape his own conception of political affairs.

“In this country,” Choate went on, “parties heretofore have helped, not delayed, the slow and difficult growth of a consummated nationality.” Differences which would have rent smaller republics have “welded and compacted the vast fabric of our own.” But the key to their proper and healthful functioning was that they be national not geographical. “There should be no Alleghanies, no Mississippi Rivers in our politics,” he declared.

For the citizen, he explained, the most “difficult and delicate duty” was to choose correctly his “political connexion.” And a political connection, once made, should never be lightly surrendered. Only thus could the electorate discover itself and channel its political effort legitimately. The quest for prizes, honors, and offices was entirely proper, but the fundamental question the citizen must ask as he sought his political connection was what were a party’s politics.

What, in the most general outline, is its creed of national or State policy? How does it interpret the Constitution? What is its theory of State rights? What is its foreign policy? By what measure, by what school of politicians, by what laws on what subject, by what diplomacy, how generally does it propose to accomplish that good and prevent that evil, and provide for those wants for which States are formed and government established?

These vital questions the citizen must ask before entering an association or leaving one for another. And on these questions fusionism remained silent.

But what, asked Choate, were the positively harmful effects that must follow the formation of a new party without “politics” and with but one unifying idea, slavery? And, what about slavery? All citizens in the free states thought very much alike on that subject. “Before we make men President, and Governor, and Senators, and Judges, and Diplo- matists, we demand to see what else beside cheap, easy, unavoidable, comformity to the sectional faith on that one topic they can show for themselves.” Did he who would replace the traditional mode of settling the country’s differences with “geographical” parties understand the consequences of his action? Did he consider “how vast an educational instrumentality the party life and influence compose . . . [and] how the public opinion of a people is created, and that when created, it [determined] their history?”

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Implicit in all this is a studied contempt for a political association founded upon a narrow and restrictive creed, dedicated to the pursuit of a principle, and to a conclusion that would smash his own elegant, organic construct of party. For members of a self-conscious, conservative party to think in these terms was natural. After all, very real differences might exist within the party, but not prove fatal. Party boundaries must correspond with national boundaries, and the same divisions which produced conflict within the country were permissible within the party. In the end, an association was held together by the sturdy bonds of fellowship, and within i t ideological strains were subordinate to shared feelings. What was there, he asked, in the existing conditions that required Whigs to surrender this cherished association and join a new one? Must we entirely suppress, he continued,

all that natural indignation and sense of wounded pride and grief which might be permitted in view of such a proposition to Whigs who remember their history, the names of the good and wise men of the living and dead that have illustrated their connexion and served their country through it; who remember their grand and large creed of Union; the Constitution, peace with honor, nationality, the development and culture of all sources of material growth, the education of the people, [and] the industry of the people.. . .

To all these considerations, the fusionist would offer the seductive appeal of political advantage, dishonestly andcheaply won. In effect he was cheating by any responsible interpretation of the game rules. No one had ever denied that most northerners deplored the existence of human slavery within their country, nor that they wanted desperately to confine i t to its existing limits. They all conformed to what he called, “the sectional faith.” But what did the fusionist politicians propose that differed in substance from what Massachusetts Whigs had been proposing all along? “We know that [Whig congressmen from this state] do and must completely express the antislavery sentiment of Massachusetts . . .”; and, he added, “. . . so far as it may be expressed under the Constitution. More than this we do not seek to express for the honest objects of the fusionists.;’ There i t was. To express opposition to slavery and its extension was not only proper for the Whig from Massachusetts, i t was expected, but within the clearly defined limits of law and the Constitution, and within the equally binding limits which discretion and the attachment to brother Whigs in the South required.

Winthrop’s statement was less philosophical in tone, and more concerned with ascertaining the real motives behind fusionism and the consequences that must surely follow its success. But he too sought to identify the distinctive quality of the Whig party. Above all, it was a constitutional party, a party of law andorder. Legitimate reforms could not be effected by riotous or revolutionary undertakings. The redress of occasional grievances must be left “to the peaceful and legitimate

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operation of the republican institutions” established by the founding fathers. Nullification and disunion were no more abhorrent than the actions of “those who would burn constitutions or batter down courthouses.”

As a conservative party, the transcendent concern of Whigs must be form and procedure as established and sanctified by long use. These provided the “given” outside of which society was a jungle. Evils such as slavery could be managed only within the “given.” “But,” declared Winthrop, “we are urged to abandon our old colors and rush wildly into the promiscuous ranks of a one-idea party in order to promote some grand result connected with human liberty.”

This brought Winthrop to the heart of his argument: an analysis of the fusionists’ motives. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which had inaugu- rated the process of party realignment, he described as “an act of a character to put ‘toys of desperation’ in all our brains, to tempt us for the moment to break from all our old relations and to plunge into any policy which might hold out ever so delusive a hope of redress.” The “toys” were spurious; the need to break up old parties in order to oppose effectively this measure could not be demonstrated. Who had done more to defeat either this bill or the earlier Fugitive Slave Law, Winthrop demanded to know, than the Whig congressmen from Massachusetts? But, “did a vote against [either], did the most uncompromising fidelity to the ‘paramount issue’ ever satisfy the [fusionists] while their own ambition was ungratified?” In his mind, their real purpose was beyond question: to fragment the old parties in order to form a new one in which their own advancement to offices and power would be guaranteed. If it had been otherwise, those who claimed devotion to human liberty and issued ringing manifestoes against the old parties would have done all in their power to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. But this would have meant deferring to others, and made i t possible for southerners, many of whom had initially opposed the bill, to vote against it. Instead, in giving opposition to the bill the “odor of abolition,” they made it impossible for southerners to vote against it. Still, they knew what they were doing, for they had adopted the very strategy certain to guarantee passage. Their advantage, coldly and shrewdly calculated, could only be gained by keeping alive the inflammatory issue. In the end, the result would be the destruction not only of the Whig party but of the Union itself.

#

The Choate-Winthrop case was a marvel of clarity, eloquence, and polemical force. The two had neatly juxtaposed the fate of their party and their country in a way fusionist-minded Whigs could not safely disregard. Choate especially, in this and other statements, had set forth an imposing vision of a huge and diverse polity, moving through time, and like any healthy organism adapting with greater or lesser difficulty

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to change; but nonetheless asking its citizens, as they associated to conduct the public business, to celebrate its oneness and singularity, and while enjoying its undisputed blessings to recognize in the most cautionary way its special vulnerabilities. For his part, Winthrop had demonstrated, satisfactorily to himself at least, that the fusionists’ stated purpose hadnot a shredof seriousness to it. In a contemptuous reference to those with a known antislavery record who leaped forward to stake out a claim of exclusive leadership in opposition to the Douglas bill, he asked: “What shall be said of those who perilled and lost this momentous stake by their unwise and reckless precipitancy?”S’ And again, elsewhere: “It is not enough considered that the real retarders of any movement are often found among those who are claiming to be its leaders.”38The slave’s condition would not be impToved, nor the end of slavery brought one day sooner. Instead, he warned, another more grim prospect was imminent: a country in shambles, brought down in no small measure by disingenuous, self-serving demagogues.

But while Chaote and Winthrop had effectively penetrated the moral sophistry that undeniably attended the fusionists’ proposition, the obsessive demand for restraint and forbearance-what reason, principle, and a decent respect for the Whig association required of them- nevertheless blinded them to the reality of the genuinely revolutionary situation in which they found themselves. In a time of radically shifting party allegiances, wherein loyal Whigs were the only ones to exercise “restraint,” the word itself had become little more than a synonym for paralysis. Furthermore, in asking their defecting brethren to stay with their party as a first step to assertingcontrol over their country’s affairs, they had revealed another and much less attractive quality often present in Whig polemics: hubris, the belief that by virtue of superior intellect and character the men of their party could best manage the affairs of the nation. Actually, the decade, which saw internal changes greatly exceeding any the country had experienced in its brief national life, found these conservatives philosophically indisposed to act in ways much different than in the past. But, in fact, one plausible explanation for their seeming inability to act differently, or to adjust in more positive ways to the realities of an entire party system in the process of disintegration, may be found in the very conception of the proper uses of a political party they advanced.39

s7The National Intelligencer, 23 October 1855. Italics are author’s. Wbid. 39While voting for the Democratic presidential candidate James Buchanan in 1856,

Choate emphatically maintained that he nevertheless remained a Whig. Choate, Addresses, 475. For a similar expression, see the letter of Washington Hunt, quoted in the National Intelligencer, 30 August 1855. This suggestion cannot be empirically verified here, nor does it follow that other loyal Whigs felt similarly constrained, but it does offer a

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“Moderation is of advantage to every establishment,” David Hume had observed many years before. “Nothing but zeal can overturn a settled power: And an over-active zeal in friends is apt to beget a like spirit in antagonists.”40 Whether “zeal” in the shape of fusionism had been the prime cause in overturning the “settled power,” the twenty- year-old Whig-Democratic party alignment, is a question historians have not finally settled.41 Yet one wonders what might have happened if the Whig party, in its historic form, had survived with enough of the traditional party system remaining so that voters in both sections, repelled by proffered extremes, would have retained the instruments with which to maximize their potentially large voting power. The facts of course are otherwise. The Whig party failure was simultaneous with the swift erosion of Democratic strength in the North and the appearance of a powerful anti-slavery, Know-Nothing movement. Among other results that might be enumerated, this congruence of unprecedented developments fatally weakened the voting power of moderates and, in turn, the influence and leverage their political leaders had customarily wielded, at least that amount of it which could be employed with any effect outside the boundaries of the emergingmajor party alignment.

The American Party of 1856 was regarded by Millard Fillmore as, in all respects, the legitimate successor to his former party, and he urged fellow Whigs to unite behind his presidential candidacy.42 Yet such respected loyal Whigs as Rufus Choate and the United States senator from New York, Hamilton Fish, categorically rejected it in favor of two starkly opposing alternatives. “I a Whig all my life,” Choate declared, “a Whig in all things, and, as regards all other names, a Whig to-day, have thought I would discharge my duty most effectually by voting for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Breckinridge; and I shall do it. . . .”43 On the other hand, Fish voted for the Republican candidate on the ground that the contest “was practically confined to Buchanan 8c Fremont,” and of

useful conceptual framework for examining the behavior of politicians with such problems.

‘OQuoted in Hofstadter, Iden of a Party System, 27. ”Holt, Political Crzsisof the 1850s, 13,101-138, argues persuasively that the process

of disintegration in the second party system was well under way before the crucial Kansas-Nebraska debate of 1854. Potter, Impending Crisis, 225-65, while acknowledging that the intensification of thesectional aisis in the 1850s produced major changes in party structure, nevertheless questions certain aspects of the traditional interpretation. For an astute discussion of the profoundly vexing nature of this question, see McCormick, “Political Development and the Second Party System,” in Chambers and Burnham, American Party Systems, 113-14.

42Address to the Whig General Committee of Constitutional Hall, New York City, quoted in the National Intelligencer, 27 June 1856; Rayback, Fillmore, 405-14.

9peech in Lowell, Massachusetts, 28 October 1856, in Choate, Addresses, 475.

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the two he considered the Democratic party the more extreme.“‘ Winthrop and Everett, while supporting Fillmore, were nevertheless dismayed by the force of the Know-Nothing element within the American party.45

One conclusion to be drawn from these sharply contrasting decisions seems inescapable: Whatever had bound Whigs together as a party afforded them no clear prescription for making future party affiliations, and pointed directly to a further scattering and dispersal of their numbers and influence.46 Confirmation of this came in the form of the Republican electoral victory four years later which, among other challenges, swept aside the Bell-Everett Constitutional Union party, one seemingly made-to-order for the loyal Whig. But clearly it had come much too late; the Whig Party was dead.

44Hamilton Fish to Everett, 15 September 1856, Everett Papers. Fish’scredentialsasa loyal Whig are attested to in Nevins, Hamilton Fish, 1: 49-51.

45Winthrop made a number of earnpt Fillmore speeches but insistedon maintaining his identity as a member of the “Old Whig Party.” Winthrop, Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions, 4 vols. (Boston, 1852-1886), 2: 244-57,292-308. See also the following: Undated Winthrop Memorandum, “Insert at end of 1856, tho’ Written Later,” Winthrop Papers; Everett to Eames, 13.22 November 1854,4 June 1855 and2 November 1857, Everett Papers.

46For the ambivalent attitudes of loyal Whigs toward the American party and the dismal choices they facedover the next four years, seeshover, “The FreeState Whig,” 226; and Kirwan, Crittenden, 346-49. For intcresting comment on the campaign and election of 1860 by aparticipant, seeEverett to Eames, 17 May and31 December 1860, Everett Papers.

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