Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

SYNOPSIS:

Holt meticulously tracks the rise and fall of the Whig Party at the national, state, and local levels. Holt wants to explain how the Whig Party could so completely disintegrate in the 1850s. His analysis concentrates on the party structures in the localities and states, where Holt finds the party suffered from weak interparty conflict and strong intraparty divisions.

EXCERPT:

"There would have been no Civil War without an underlying sectional conflict, but a specific chain of political events and politicians' decisions both aggravated that conflict and explain why the war started in April 1861. And among the most important links in this chain of causation were the decisions and developments that put the Whig party in its grave." (984)

"Although the often self-consciously respectable, God-fearing, church-going, sober middle classes in towns and cities across the nation also tended to be Whig, . . . the party could never have dominated almost every city in the country or the small towns and prosperous agricultural regions that constituted the core of its strength if only the social elite and smugly fastidious middle classes composed it." (951)

"To a large but not exclusive extent, therefore, explaining the Whig party's expiration requires explaining the shifting relationships after 1844 between the forces of interparty conflict and intraparty division. The diminution of the first and exacerbation of the second together did alienate Whig voters, provoke their defection, and thereby contribute to the problem of 'not enough people.'" (954)

"Sectional division was not the only thing that destroyed the Whig party and drove it to its grave. But the death of the Whig party clearly contributed to the outbreak of the war, if only by clearing the way for and, in the form of essential northern Whig converts, aiding the rise of the Republican party as the major opponent of Democrats in American political life." (981)

"For over thirty years, the accepted interpretation of the war's coming in the academy has been that it resulted from basic social, economic, and ideological differences between the sections deriving from the presence of African-American slavery in the South and its absence from the North. In its cruder--and more common--formulation, the 'forces' that caused the war were self-generating and operated toward their inevitable conclusion almost without the need of human agency. And most certainly, this argument goes, specific political leaders cannot be held accountable for the war since the sectional conflict producing it involved mass public opinion and sensibilities growing out of different economic and social systems, not something as epiphenomenal as politics." (982)

RELATIONSHIP:

As in other works by Holt, we see a commanding understanding of the complex workings of the American political machinery. Like Holt, we believe that machinery had its own momentum and dynamics that prevented any party from serving as a mere projection of its voters' economic or ethnic identities. Unlike Holt, we believe that slavery drove much political action and contributed centrally to the collapse of the two-party system.

"In Augusta clusters of contiguous precincts gave their support in the 1860 presidential election in similar patterns."

"Whigs accounted for the most visible party activists in Augusta County, but activists in both parties exerted significant influence."

"Precincts in Augusta that supported Breckinridge at a high level in 1860 represented the extremes of wealth, as the wealthiest and the poorest precincts drew more support for Breckinridge than any other precincts."

"The precincts with high Bell support had average household wealth and farm value well below county averages. For these marginal places a vote for Bell represented a safe course, the least change."

"In Franklin County, John Breckinridge won a majority in six precincts, most of them in the far northern and western belt of the county, where few blacks lived and farmers planted corn not wheat."

"Lincoln won sixteen precincts in Franklin, ten of them by margins greater than 55 percent, with support mainly from the urban center of the county and places with the highest numbers of black residents--even though black men could not vote in Pennsylvania."