Whiggism

Whiggism refers to the ideas of the Whig parties in Britain from the late 1600s to the mid 1800s, and of the Whig Party in the United States from 1834 to the 1850s. British Whigs stood for the supremacy of Parliament over the crown, a Protestant succession, religious toleration for Protestant dissenters and the interests of commerce. American Whigs took the name to signal opposition to what they saw as the executive overreach of President Andrew Jackson. In both countries the tradition combined respect for constitutional limits with a belief in steady economic and moral improvement. Historians often see Whiggism as an important forerunner of modern liberalism.

The terms Whig and Tory began as insults during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681, when one group tried to bar the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the throne. The Whigs supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights of 1689, which limited royal power. John Locke, who was close to the Whig leader the Earl of Shaftesbury, is often linked to early Whig ideas. After the Hanoverian succession in 1714, the Whigs dominated government for decades, and Robert Walpole led the ministry from 1721 to 1742. Later, Charles James Fox led Whigs who criticized royal influence and supported religious liberty. Under Earl Grey, a Whig government passed the Reform Act of 1832, which widened the vote, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 followed. From the 1850s the Whigs merged with Radicals and Peelites into the Liberal Party. In the United States, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster helped lead the Whig Party, which won the presidency in 1840 and 1848 before splitting over slavery in the 1850s.

Early British Whigs were often aristocratic landowners who defended Parliament and the Protestant succession. Later Foxite Whigs focused on civil and religious liberty and parliamentary reform. American Whigs backed Henry Clay's American System of a national bank, protective tariffs and federally funded internal improvements, and many supported evangelical moral reform. In the 1840s and 1850s, Conscience Whigs opposed slavery while Cotton Whigs sought compromise. The phrase Whig history, popularized by the historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931, describes the habit of telling the past as a story of inevitable progress toward the present.

Radical and democratic critics argued that British Whigs defended an oligarchy of great landowning families and accepted only a narrow franchise. Tories and later conservatives accused them of weakening the crown and the established church. In the United States, Jacksonian Democrats argued that Whig economic policies favored bankers and manufacturers over farmers and workers. Historians, following Butterfield, have criticized Whig history for judging the past by present values and treating progress as inevitable.

Whig governments shaped the British constitutional settlement of the eighteenth century, including cabinet government and the growing role of the prime minister. The Reform Act of 1832 and the end of slavery in most of the British Empire are often cited as major Whig achievements. In the United States, Whig ideas about a national bank, tariffs and infrastructure influenced the later Republican Party, and Abraham Lincoln was a Whig before he became a Republican.