Book Review

"In politics," John Adams observed, "the middle way is none at all." Michael F. Holt's much anticipated study of the American Whig party proves Adams correct. In this massively researched, closely argued, and remarkably insightful analysis of the rise but mostly the fall of Whiggery, Holt convincingly maintains that the party was most vibrant and viable when it clearly differentiated its policies (and thus its persona) from those of the Democrats. The party formed in the 1830s to rescue public liberty from the executive excesses of Andrew Jackson and thereby save the revolutionary experiment in self-government that was the nation's heritage. Whig principles embraced social order and Union, activist domestic governance to improve people's lives, and a nonaggressive foreign policy. Holt's focus on party politics, the strength of this study, forefronts partisan strategies and tends to situate the electorate in the background. Thus the reaction of the rank and file to partisan maneuvering is at points narrated and parsed rather than fully explained.

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The economic crisis of the late 1830s in particular proved to be a fillip for the party and made relevant its message of personal uplift and national affluence. So long as the centripetal force of principled political combat with "the Democracy" over economic issues kept in check the centrifugal forces that always threatened to tear the party apart, Whigs remained competitive in presidential campaigns and within most states. Unhappily, the Whig party was never the master of its own fate. While the Democracy dictated the terms of engagement, economic forces such as the panic of 1837 and events such as the Mexican-American War shaped the terrain of political combat. Weakened, ironically, by the prosperous economy of the 1840s that vitiated the party's message of prosperity and positive government, Whiggery lost its identity—and then its existence—in the sectional crisis following the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso. Even though the Whig mission to preserve and extend republican liberties remained constant, forces and events of the late 1840s drastically altered the parameters of their political calculations.

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