Whig Party (US)

A major US party of 1834 to 1856, formed against Andrew Jackson and destroyed by the slavery question.

Overview

The Whigs united National Republicans, anti-Masonic men, and state rights dissenters under a name borrowed from British constitutional opposition. They stood for congressional supremacy over the presidency, internal improvements, banks, and moral reform, electing William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and the accidental presidencies of Tyler and Fillmore. The party bound together unlikely allies: Northern evangelicals and Southern planters. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 broke the bargain, Northern Whigs flowing into the new Republicans. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig legislator before he was a Republican. The party died within two elections, a textbook case of a major party killed by a single issue.