Whigs and Democrats, the Past and the Future: The Political Emerson and Whitman’s 1855 Preface

In “Lecture on the Times,” Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that “the two omniscient parties of History, the Party of the Past and the Party of the Future, divide society to-day as of old.” This essay explores the way that the two leading parties of antebellum America, the Democrats and Whigs, offered different concepts of past and future as structuring constructs for American society, public policies and culture. The Whigs identified themselves as the party that drew from the past to give order, structure, and purpose to American life; conversely, the Democrats insisted that America must be understood as a product of the very future that the nation was creating. Close attention is paid to the leading monthlies of the two parties: John L. O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review and the George Hooker Colton’s American Review. After placing Emerson in the Democratic camp, the article shows how the poetics of Whitman’s 1855 preface is based on the ideology and politics of the antebellum Democrats.