Posted on 05/21/2003 2:44:50 PM PDT by William McKinley
Was he right that Southerners would have been better off sticking to the Whigs? In hindsight they certainly would have been better off sticking to the Union. But Southerners had gained so much power in the Union through the Democratic party that they wouldn't have left it. The Party had won them Texas and had looked after their interests for many years. Indeed, the power that prominent Southerners wielded through that party made them so strong they became them arrogant, demanding, and overconfident.
One problem with his argument is that the radical democrats were not so large or powerful a group. The class conflicts of the Jacksonian period were already in the past, and the complex of labor unions, social bureaucracies, and urban machines that was so strong in the 20th century hadn't yet formed. Urban discontent didn't seem to have any focus in the 1850s, save perhaps getting out of the city and going West. Big city politics barely made itself felt on the many farmers or merchants outside the cities. It would have been hard to mobilize against people who were so few and far away. Certainly harder than organizing people for or against slavery (or for a time, against immigration). The Democrats still were the Southern party in those days and Tammany Hall was only a tail on the dog.
Another problem is that urban radical democrats and backwoods egalitarians in the South had a lot in common. Without being socialist or statist, both groups distrusted big banks, urban financiers, and pious or canting Yankees. The alliance between Southern planters and farmers and the manual workers and poor of the big cities of the East was a constant in US politics from Jefferson until the day before yesterday. Both groups felt themselves disadvantaged in comparison to wealthy Northerners like the Conservative Whigs, and both felt that culturally alienated from the New Englanders who were the mainstay of the Whig Party.
From what I can see, the big planters of Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennesee largely did take the author's advice and clung to the Whig Party. Tariffs were a factor in some states. But winning the upper third of the voting population didn't do much good when the bottom two thirds voted Democrat. In other Southern states, and ultimately in the region as a whole, the planters found it more useful to make common cause with the more plebian Democrats against the common Northern enemy.
It is worth noting, that the Southern Whigs were more moderate on slavery questions than the Democrats. Privately and amonst themselves some of the Southern Whigs did consider the compensated abolition of slavery and colonization of the freed slaves outside the US. The price tag would have been enormous, and getting the necessary support for the measure very difficult. Abolition without resettlement would have been impossible without some miracle or catastrophe.
It is interesting to speculate, though. An economic depression would have split the country on economic rather than on sectional lines and postponed the coming catastrophe. But when the Panic of 1857 came the Whig Party was already dead, and with it perhaps the potential of defusing the slavery question.
BTTT for later today.
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