Whig Party
One of the two major political parties in the United States from approximately 1834 to 1856, the Whig Party had few South Carolina supporters during most of its existence. Nevertheless, South Carolina nullifiers were among the first to adopt this Anglo-American term connoting hostility to tyranny in order to signify their opposition to President Andrew Jackson, leader of the Democratic Party.
Led by John C. Calhoun, nullifiers joined other anti-Jackson men from across the country and across the ideological spectrum to form the national Whig Party in the early 1830s. However, Calhoun soon realized that his alliance with politicians such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who supported far greater federal power than he did, could not work. He therefore used the issue of banking policy to take his followers out of the national Whig fold in 1837.
Not all South Carolina Whigs, however, agreed to leave the party. Calhoun’s own Senate colleague William Campbell Preston remained a loyal Whig. With their numbers seriously depleted by the defection of Calhoun and most of his followers, South Carolina Whigs mounted effective campaigns in only a few areas. As in other southern states, Whigs in South Carolina stressed economic issues and enjoyed their greatest support among commercially oriented planters, merchants, and professionals.
After 1837 a remnant of planters in upcountry cotton districts such as Laurens and especially the Anderson section of Pendleton continued to support Whig financial policy. Democratic destruction of the Second Bank of the United States and the creation of the “pet bank” system had led, Whigs charged, to the depression of the late 1830s. The Highland Sentinel, a Pendleton Whig newspaper founded in 1840, declared that once the Democrats stopped “tampering with the business and currency of the country, our planters will pay their debts, and be found again marching forward in a train of uninterrupted prosperity and happiness.” Upcountry Whigs looked forward to the reestablishment of a national bank, for, as a Whig kinsman of Calhoun said, “we have always had a better currency with, than without” such a bank.
Although most of these planters had supported nullification, not all Whigs were former nullifiers. Some nullification-era Unionists found the Whig economic program appealing. These included merchants and professionals in Charleston, such as the lawyer James L. Petigru. The Charleston Courier, a major Unionist voice in the early 1830s, became one of the South’s foremost Whig newspapers.
Whigs never overcame Calhoun’s strong appeal and efficient political organization. Moreover, the national party’s inability to deliver on its financial program during the presidency of John Tyler (1841–1845) demoralized state party members. Whigs won a few legislative seats before disappearing from ballots after 1844. During the party’s brief life, it succeeded best in Pendleton District–ironically, Calhoun’s home. In 1840 Pendleton voters elected Whigs to the state Senate seat and to six of its seven state House seats. The Greenville-Pendleton congressional district elected the only two Whigs the state sent to Congress following Calhoun’s defection, Waddy Thompson, Jr., and William Butler.
Ford, Lacy K., Jr. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. “Whiggery in the South Carolina Upcountry: Jacksonian Politics in the Greenville-Pendleton Congressional District.” Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992.
