America's Whigs named themselves to cast Andrew Jackson as a new King George
The Whig label was a jab: it likened President Andrew Jackson, dubbed King Andrew by his foes, to George III, the monarch Americans had revolted against. The party that grew from that insult won two presidential elections, then fell apart in the 1850s because it could never agree about slavery.
The Whigs coalesced from 1833 as a coalition against Jackson, with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster at the core. They absorbed former National Republicans, many Anti-Masons such as William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens, states' rights opponents of Jackson and defecting Democrats including John Tyler. The name was suggested by James Watson Webb, a New York newspaper editor. Their first major act was to censure Jackson for pulling government deposits out of the national bank, which they saw as executive overreach.
Their programme followed Clay's American System: protective tariffs, federal money for roads and canals, and a national bank to provide a uniform currency and steady credit. Support came from merchants, manufacturers, professionals, farmers and Southern planters, and was strongest among native-born Protestants touched by evangelical reform. From the Anti-Masons they inherited a suspicion of party bosses, and the broader era saw innovations such as nominating conventions and party newspapers.
Electoral success was patchy. Several regional Whigs won electoral votes in 1836 without beating Jackson's heir. Clay took the nomination in 1844 and narrowly lost to James K. Polk. In 1848 Zachary Taylor won, but he died in 1850 and Millard Fillmore backed the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which eased the threat of disunion only briefly.
Slavery finally broke the party. Its leaders had tried to keep the issue contained to hold together Southern enslavers and Northern opponents of slavery, but the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened the question of expansion. By 1856 the Whigs no longer worked as a national organisation. Many Northern members moved to the new Republican Party, while others went to the nativist American Party or later the Constitutional Union Party. Former Whigs helped pass measures echoing the American System under Abraham Lincoln, which makes them one major ancestor of the Republicans rather than their only one.
Source: Whig Party (United States)
