The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [23]
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“Always a Whig”: Lincoln, the Law, and the Second Party System
I
“ALWAYS A WHIG IN POLITICS.” With these words, Lincoln in 1859 summarized the first part of his political career. Lincoln joined the Whig party at its birth in the 1830s and left only when it disintegrated in the mid-1850s. Throughout these years, Lincoln remained a party stalwart and perennial aspirant for public office. While many Whigs viewed party organization with discomfort, Lincoln became a skilled political manager. He pushed for the development of an effective Whig political machine down to local precinct captains throughout Illinois. He contributed literally hundreds of unsigned articles to the Whig newspaper in Springfield. Two decades before using the phrase in one of his most celebrated speeches, Lincoln, commenting on the need for better party discipline, declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln took his own advice about grassroots party organizing. A Boston reporter who accompanied him on a stagecoach ride from Peoria to Springfield in 1847 noted that Lincoln (then a congressman-elect) “knew, or appeared to know, every body we met.”1
Unfortunately, being a Whig in Illinois meant almost always ending up on the losing side. In the party’s twenty-year history, never once was one of its candidates elected a governor or senator, nor did its presidential candidate ever carry the state. To be sure, central Illinois, where Lincoln lived, was the party’s one reliable stronghold, consistently electing Whigs to the state legislature and Congress. But “the tendency in Illinois,” Lincoln’s law partner John Todd Stuart later remarked, “was for every man of ambition to turn Democrat.” “I should as leave think of seeing one rise from the dead,” Lincoln’s friend David Davis wrote in 1845, as to expect to see Illinois “ever being Whig.”2
Nonetheless, it is not surprising that a person with Lincoln’s deeply rooted desire for self-improvement found the Whig outlook appealing. Both major parties in the Age of Jackson were broad coalitions, attracting support in every part of the country and across the social spectrum. But in general, social classes most attuned to the market revolution—merchants, industrialists, professionals, and commercial farmers, including, in the South, the largest planters—tended to vote Whig. Democratic support centered on urban laborers and small farmers isolated from national markets. Religious and ethnic identities also distinguished the parties. Whigs drew support from evangelical Protestants, including many attracted to the era’s myriad social reform movements—temperance, school reform, and, in the North, antislavery. Democrats did well among more traditional Protestant sects as well as Roman Catholics, among them the growing number of immigrants from Germany and Ireland.3
The outlooks of the two parties reflected these social realities. Whigs, North and South, viewed government as an agent of economic development, moral improvement, and national unity. They rallied to Henry Clay’s American System, a comprehensive program of government-sponsored economic modernization. The plan centered on a tariff on imported manufactured goods to aid industry and protect American workers from the competition of low-wage foreign labor; government aid to internal improvements like the roads, canals, and railroads that formed the infrastructure of the market economy; and a national bank to provide a stable currency. They also believed government should improve the moral character of the citizenry by building schools and discouraging drinking, violations of the Sabbath, and other vices.4
Whigs insisted that in an expanding economy all classes shared a harmony of interests. Government-promoted economic growth created the context in which