Free Almost President by Scott Farris Page A

of intelligence who worked hard. “Who are the rich men of our country?” the New York American editorialized. “They are the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labours from the dust and turmoil of his workshop, to an abode of ease and elegance; the industrious tradesman, whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.”
    The Whigs, then, became the name of the national party of opposition to the Democrats and would remain so until supplanted in 1856 by the Republicans. The scope of the Whigs’ appeal is demonstrated by the fact that in the five presidential elections held from 1836 through 1852, Whigs averaged 48.3 percent of the popular vote while Democrats averaged 48.2 percent. Without Clay’s nationalist vision, the variety of sectional and special interest parties that rose and fell in America during the antebellum period in opposition to Jackson—the Anti-Masons, Free Soil, Native American (Know-Nothings), or Liberty Parties, to name a few—might have set a very different precedent for the American political system.
    The Whig Party, while short lived, was important because it was a truly national party that drew support from every section of the Union. It helped hold the Union together at a time when the republic was young enough that a sectional split might have been irrevocable. Having Whig support in the North, South, and West helped postpone the dissolution of the Union until 1860, when a divided nation was no longer acceptable to the North and West. As long as a Whig in Alabama felt he had more in common with a Whig in Connecticut than he did a Democrat in Mississippi, then that provided a little more glue to hold the nation together. When the Whig Party imploded before the war, largely over the issue of slavery, one of the most important checks on fervent sectionalism failed.
    Clay’s Whigs were also largely the foundation upon which the Republican Party was built. Most of those who formed the Republican Party had been Whigs, particularly Northern “Conscience Whigs” who embraced Clay’s economic program, but who were also aggressively anti-slavery. Lincoln described himself as “an old-line Henry Clay Whig,” and to prove the point Lincoln quoted Clay more than forty times during his debates with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s views on slavery (at least until well into the Civil War) and his economic program were nearly identical to Clay’s. Various observers have compared Clay’s influence on Lincoln with Jefferson’s on Madison or Franklin Roosevelt’s on Lyndon Johnson. It might even be said that when Lincoln and the Republicans who followed him implemented a good deal of Clay’s American System, they created a true Whig regime at last.
    Finally, in considering the Whigs’ legacy, more and more historians are concluding that the Whigs, not Jackson’s Democrats, are the real ideological forerunner of modern American liberalism. Some still argue that Jackson spurred modern liberalism by broadening the suffrage to include all adult white males, by antipathy toward elites, and by the Democratic Party’s embrace of immigrants. But broadening democratic participation is only one measure of liberalism. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose epic study, The Age of Jackson, set the tone for much modern Jackson scholarship, has since acknowledged that he gave Clay and the Whigs “a good deal less than justice” in using Jackson’s precedent as the rationale for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whig policies that were designed to broaden economic prosperity “had a sounder conception of the role of government and a more constructive policy of economic development than the anti-statist Jacksonians,” Schlesinger wrote in his memoirs.
    But Clay, the very “embodiment and polar star of Whig principles,”