The Political Culture of the American Whigs

Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Howe's study was a landmark in restoring the reputation of the American Whig Party; a project which in retrospect seems to have been long overdue. This is an intellectual history of a political party which several generations of historians had dismissed as being without intellectual substance. It was therefore both an examination of political culture as well as a restoration project.

Because this is a book concerned with abstract concepts and often unstated assumptions, it might have become bogged down in purely theoretical language, but Howe solved that problem by framing his themes in short biographies. As he puts it, "One of the postulates of this book is that social tensions mirror individual tensions. By examining the lives of individual Whigs, we can locate problems that the party as a whole confronted." Using the careers of notable Whigs such as Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Stephens, and others not only adds a narrative element to what otherwise might have been a mass of supposition and abstracted inquiry, it also emphasizes the degree to which Whig ideology was a product of intellectual and cultural factors along with the economic and social indicators which traditionally defined Whigs in the popular and scholarly imagination.

Howe's central argument is that the Whigs had a coherent and rational ideology which was grounded in a defense of a particular understanding of the relationship between society and the market economy. That balance became untenable by the 1850's, not only due to rising sectional tensions over slavery, but because the growth of the market economy and the industrial revolution undermined the authority and legitimacy of an older, paternal approach to entrepreneurial capitalism.