Whig Party

“ The Whig theory was the government of the people, for the people by existing privileged classes, that was practically, by the aristocracy. We now have evidence of the more definite formation, within the bounds of what we call Liberalism, of a party the individual members of which would have called themselves Whigs, and are some of them still regarded as characteristic leaders of that body, but who aimed at objects and would have adopted means which were distinctly beyond the Whig programme. ”

“ The whigs of 1840 stand where the republicans of 1798 stood, and where the whigs of the revolution were, battling for liberty, for the people, for free institutions, against power, against corruption, against executive encroachments, against monarchy.
We are reproached with struggling for offices and their emoluments. If we acted on the avowed and acknowledged principle of our opponents, ‘that the spoils belong to the victors,’ we should indeed be unworthy of the support of the people. No! fellow-citizens; higher, nobler, more patriotic motives actuate the whig party. ”

“ Dissolution of the Whig party.—Before the canvass of 1852, the Whigs avoided making the question of slavery a political issue. The compromises contained the Fugitive Slave bill, and other features which were offensive to the mass of northern Whigs, and when their platform sanctioned the measures, the party divided against itself, and, without power for good or evil, became as dead “for all the purposes of a political campaign.” After the election, the members of the party began to look elsewhere for political affiliation, and, in time, entered such organizations as met their approval. ”

“ Allegheny county was overwhelmingly Whig. The Visiter worked against the party, and the cry from the Whig press became:
"Why attack our party? It is better than the Democratic. If you were honest, you would devote yourself to its destruction, not to that of the Whig."
To this, the answer was:
"The Whig party is a gold-bearing quartz rock, and we mean to pound it into the smallest possible pieces, in order to get out the gold. The Democratic party is an old red sandstone, and there is plenty of sand lying all around about." ”

“ The truth is, that, considerable as are the abilities of the Whig leaders, highly accomplished as many of them unquestionably must be acknowledged in parliamentary debate, experienced in council, sedulous in office, eminent as scholars, powerful from their position, the absence of individual influence, and of the pervading authority of a commanding mind, have been the cause of the fall of the Whig party. ”

“ While the two great national parties divided the suffrages of the people, North and South, everything in his eyes was dead. He detested the bargains by which those parties were in the habit of composing sectional troubles, and sacrificing the principle of freedom. When the Whig party paid its breath to time, he looked upon its last agonies as but another instance of divine retribution. He had no patience with time-servers, and regarded with indignant contempt the policy which would postpone the natural rights of an enslaved race to the success of parties and politicians. ”

“ It is in this virtual absence of a real and recognised leader, almost from the moment that they passed their great measure, that we must seek a chief cause of all that insubordination, all those distempered ambitions, and all those dark intrigues, that finally broke up, not only the Whig government, but the Whig party; demoralised their ranks, and sent them to the country, both in 1835 and 1837, with every illusion, which had operated so happily in their favour in 1832, scattered to the winds. In all things we trace the irresistible influence of the individual. ”

“ The party then in opposition possessed almost every man distinguished in public life: a host of formidable competitors in the road to honour and preferment, supposing preferment and honour to be attainable by talent. But this was not all. The Whig party, then, as always, was essentially an exclusive party; its preferments were concentrated on a clique, which regarded all without it as its subordinates and instruments.
On the other side, the Prime Minister stood almost alone. He had every office to bestow, and few candidates of any merit for official employments. ”

“ The object of selecting an old-line Whig and an old-line Democrat, was to nail to the counter the charge that the American party is the Whig party in disguise, and to induce, if possible, conservative men of both the old parties to unite and rescue the country from Democratic misrule. ”

“ But a party whose only program is an endorsement of the status quo is destined to go to pieces whenever the course of events brings a principle strongly to the fore. The American Union was moving toward a civil conflict in which ideological [80] differences, as deep as any that have appeared in modern revolutions, were to divide men. As always occurs in such crises, the compromisers are regarded as unreliable by both sides and are soon ejected from the scene. It now seems impossible that the Whig Party, with its political history, could have survived the fifties. ”

“ An opposition was awakened among all the dissenting communities of the most hearty nature, and the government sowed the seeds of distrust of the whig party, which their old abettors, the dissenters, have cherished to this day, although ten years have since elapsed. It is unlikely that the Whigs, as a party, will ever regain the confidence of the Protestant dissenters of Great Britain. ”

“ There were many in the old Whig party known as Conscience-Whigs, and in the Democratic party known as Barnburners and Free Democrats, who were anti-slavery in sentiment and utterly opposed to the extension of the slave system to territory hitherto uncursed by its presence, but who nevertheless were not willing to join the Liberty party. ”

“ In this party there are doubtless individuals anxious to do all in their power against Slavery; but indulge me in saying, that, so long as they continue members of a party which upholds the Nebraska Bill, they can do very little. [Applause and laughter.] What may we expect from the Whig party? [A voice, "Resolutions."] If more might be expected from the Whig party than the Democratic party, candor must attribute much of the difference to the fact that the Whigs are out of power, while the Democrats are in power. ”

“ Webster and the election of General Pierce ended the Whig Party in the State. In 1855 the Democratic Party was a nerveless organization, and without hope, except as the leaders looked to the supremacy of the party in the country as a guaranty of office-holding to the few who were in the ascendency in the commonwealth. In one short year of power the Know Nothing Party had destroyed its influence in the State. Thus was the way prepared for a new and formidable organization, destined to succeed under the declaration that slavery was not to be extended to the territories of the Union. ”

“ There was a Whig party that was not essentially the party of Pitt, a party which was recruiting its ranks with earnest, thoughtful, high-minded, honorable men to whom the principles or want of principles which permitted the old Whig dominion were as intolerable as they appear to a statesman of to-day. At the head of this new development of Whig activity was the man to whom Cumberland now turned in the hour of the King's trial, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of Rockingham. ”

“ The mission of the resuscitated Whig party is to be—not gaining any victory, but—being beaten by the Democrats! It is important to the nationality of the Democratic party that they have a sound and national opposition for them to defeat regularly, year after year,—and this want the Whigs are to be so obliging as to supply! ”

“ During the years of my later childhood, a few public events touched my consciousness. I was much concerned in the fortunes of the Whig party from the candidacy of Henry Clay in 1844 to the fusion of the anti-slavery Whigs with the Freesoil party after their bolt of the Taylor nomination in 1848, when I followed my father as far as a boy of eleven could go. He himself went so far as to sell his newspaper and take every risk for the future rather than support a slave-holding candidate who had been chosen for his vote-winning qualities as a victorious general in the Mexican War. ”

“ No person is so hardy as to assert that the present Democratic party embodies this idea. But there are partisans, who, in disregard of well-known facts, claim it as the property of the late Whig party, even in its present metamorphosis into the Taylor faction. ”

“ Some earnest anti-slavery men favored the movement because they thought that it would help in breaking up the old political organizations, especially the Whig party, and thus facilitate the eventual passing of citizens, once detached from their old party affiliations, into the Republican ranks. ”

“ Never, perhaps, was the inability of the Whig party to govern exhibited in such a marked manner as at the period immediately succeeding the passing of the Reform Bill. With a majority of three hundred, they yet disagreed amongst themselves concerning the desirability of introducing innovations into the Irish Church, and they fell. Some have declared that an excess of power—a majority too large to manage—was fatal to the endurance of their power. We rather think that it was but a conclusive proof that a Whig Minister must be a Minister on sufferance—in other words, is unable to govern. ”

“ The Whigs of the eighteenth century would have rendered the House of Lords unchangeable; the Whigs of the nineteenth remodel the House of Commons.
I conclude here the first chapter of the ‘Spirit of Whiggism’-a little book which I hope may be easily read and easily remembered. The Whig party have always adopted popular cries. In one age it is Liberty, in another reform; at one period they sound the tocsin against popery, in another they ally themselves with papists. They have many cries, and various modes of conduct ”

“ What was most strange, however, was that the Conservative party, so strong in politics, had no literary organ of their own—and this at a time when the line of demarcation between the rival sides in politics was so fixed that no virtue could be recognised in an opponent or in an opponent's views, even though they were held regarding matters quite remote from politics. The Whig party, though in a minority politically and socially, represented a minority of tremendous power, and possessed latent capabilities which soon broke forth into action. ”

“ Can I say that in his hands Whig measures will be safe and secure, when he refuses to pledge himself to their support? When some of his most active friends say they are obsolete? When he is presented as a no-party candidate? When the Whig Convention at Philadelphia refused to recognize or proclaim its attachment to any principles or measures, and actually laid on the table resolutions having that object in view? ”

“ There is no man in England to-day—no man who has made any position for himself as a writer—who is better acquainted than Mr. Russell with the history of the Whig party from the Reform Act of 1832 to the eclipse of Whiggism that resulted from the extension of the parliamentary franchise in 1884-1885, and the epoch-making division in the Liberal party over Gladstone's bill for Home Rule for Ireland of 1886. Mr. Russell was born into the Whig cult. ”

“ Even those who were most opposed to the Democratic party beheld its peril with a certain feeling of regret not unmixed with apprehension. The Whig party had been destroyed; and its Northern and Southern members, who, but a few years before, had worked harmoniously for Harrison, for Clay, for Taylor, were now enrolled in rival and hostile organizations. A similar dissolution of the Democratic party would sweep away the only common basis of political action still existing for men of the free States and men of the slave States. ”

“ The House was overwhelmingly Radical and Nonconformist: it closed its ears to the wider Imperialism, and in 'Liberal League' saw but 'Whig Party' writ large. The result was hardly fortunate. Rather than surrender principle or power, the Whigs went to work underground, systematically corrupting the Radical majority in the House in the brief intervals of misleading the Radical majority in the Cabinet. Perhaps it was invincible necessity that demanded it, perhaps the Whig section showed the higher statesmanship in committing Democracy to a course it might not have taken without blinkers. ”

“ He refused to admit that the Whigs were an exclusive party, and he thought that such an idea was refuted by the fact that they had consented to serve in a Coalition Government. ‘I believe that opinion to have been unjust, and I think that the Whig party during the last two years have fully justified the opinion I entertained. I will venture to say that no set of men ever behaved with greater honour or with more disinterested patriotism than those who have supported the [257] Government of the Earl of Aberdeen. ”

“ I oppose the Whig party, because, according to their reading of the Constitution, Congress possess, and they think ought to exercise, powers which would endanger the rights of the States and the liberties of the people. ”

“ The facility with which old political opponents came together in the compromise measures of 1850, and abandoned principles and doctrines for which they had battled through their whole lives, begot popular distrust. Confidence in the sincerity of the men who so readily made sacrifices of principles was forfeited or greatly impaired. The Whig party dwindled under it, and as an organization shortly went out of existence. ”