Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Whig Party was a mid-19th century political party in the United States. [14] ... Northern Whigs tended to be more anti-slavery than Northern Democrats, ...
A smaller group of Northern Whig leaders, including Edward Everett, rejected both new parties and continued to adhere to the Whig Party. [158] In the South, most Whigs abandoned their party for the Know Nothings, though some joined the Democratic Party instead. [159]
Passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854 both did major short-term political damage to Northern Democrats and fractured the Whig Party on the slavery issue, driving the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party. During that transitional period, the Opposition Party served as a successor to, or a continuation of, the imploding Whig Party.
The party gained control over the state governments of California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island in the 1854 and 1855 elections. The party also controlled the Tennessee legislature and received at least 45% of the vote in multiple southern states, far better than the Whig Party following 1848. [4]
Northern Whigs favored Scott while Southern Whigs tended to prefer Fillmore. The party was also torn on the issue of slavery. Most in the party wanted to prevent slavery from becoming the dominating issue in the election. However, the Whigs were split on the issue of the Compromise of 1850, proposed and designed by Whig senator Henry Clay of ...
The Whig party leadership was acutely aware that any proslavery legislation advanced by its southern wing would alienate its anti-slavery northern wing and cripple the party in the general election. [95] In order to preserve their party, Whigs would need to stand squarely against acquiring a new slave state.
Later, the United States Whig Party was founded in 1833 on the basis of opposition to a strong presidency, initially the presidency of Andrew Jackson, analogous to the British Whig opposition to a strong monarchy. [39] The True Whig Party, which for a century dominated Liberia, was named for the American party rather than directly for the ...
As cooperation between Northern and Southern Whigs appeared to be increasingly impossible, leaders from both sections continued to abandon the party. [76] In September 1855, Seward led his faction of Whigs into the Republican Party, effectively marking the end of the Whig Party as an independent and significant political force. [77]