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Reviews in American History 28.2 (2000) 215-222



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The Whigs, the Wood, and the Trees

John Ashworth


Michael F. Holt. The Rise of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 1248pp. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, and index. $55.00.

The appearance of this long-awaited volume completes a revolution in the historiography of the American Whig party. A generation ago the Whigs were routinely dismissed as a party bereft of ideas and principles. Disunited and opportunistic, they were able to win the presidency only by running military heroes--whose Whiggery was in any case suspect--in campaigns where hard cider and log cabins were used to divert the electorate or where military victories were unashamedly emphasized, even though the party had roundly condemned the war in which they had been achieved. Thus Henry Adams wrote in 1879 that "of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas." 1 Until comparatively recently, most historians did not dissent.

In the last thirty years, however, a new view has emerged. There have been two full-length studies of Whig thought as well as a number of works that have treated the ideology of both Whigs and Democrats, without in any way privileging the latter. 2 Common to all is a willingness to treat Whig ideas as seriously as those of any other party in American history. Michael Holt's extremely lengthy study of the Whigs, though not primarily and indeed not sufficiently concerned with ideology, in one sense brings this trend to a culmination. Holt does not shrink from confessing his admiration for the Whigs and openly laments the failure of modern political parties to match their statesmanship and their commitment to principle. A historiographical revolution is complete.

For this reason, perhaps, he has devoted almost a thousand pages of text, almost two hundred pages of notes and references, and almost a quarter of a century of study to them. Indeed the gestation of the book matches the life span of the party, which came into existence in 1834 and, as a force in national politics, had effectively expired by 1857. But the coverage is not chronologically even. The author tells us that the project began as an investigation into the collapse of the party and the final version continues to bear that stamp. By [End Page 215] page 120 we are at the end of 1840; after little more than 200 pages Polk is in office. Thus the final decade comprises three-fourths of the volume.

Holt writes in a narrative form. This proves an advantage in that it illuminates the political events of the era, but also, as we shall see, a disadvantage since it obscures some important underlying social, economic, and even political factors or patterns. Nevertheless, a central feature of the book is the author's skill in moving between state and federal politics. His book is based upon an enormous amount of research into the primary sources and especially the manuscript collections of the period. More than two hundred collections are cited, as well as an impressive list of newspapers, tracts, and speeches. Indeed a glance at the bibliography will quickly tell the reader why the volume has been so long in the making. Holt's achievement is to have acquired a familiarity with, and a detailed knowledge of, politics not only at national level, but also in all the states where the Whigs had a significant electoral presence. He knows enough about the politics of each state to be able to trace the factional alignments that developed within the party; indeed an emphasis upon intra-party hostilities is a major theme of the work. At the same time, he goes out of his way to emphasize the symbiosis with the Democrats: from its earliest days the party's health, he insists, was always heavily influenced by the actions of the Democrats.

Here is a major argument of the book. The Whigs...

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