July 10, 2007
The Second Party System Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST In today’s feature article, John Steele Gordon reviews the tumult that arose from Andrew Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States. Mr. Gordon writes, “It’s hard to imagine today, but for much of the nineteenth century, matters like the gold standard, the money supply, and central banking were red-hot political issues. They not only took up space on editorial pages but were the casus belli in many a bar fight . . .” One of the more interesting books I often assign students who are working on the rise and fall of the second party system–the prevailing arrangement from the early 1830s through the early 1850s that pitted Whigs against Democrats–is Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s. Holt begins from precisely the same place as Mr. Gordon, observing that the truly salient issues in antebellum politics revolved around matters of political economy: Should the federal government finance infrastructure projects, then known as “internal improvements”? Should states and (or) the federal government charter banks and facilitate the proliferation of paper money, or should money transactions be limited to specie (gold and silver)? Was the ideal economy a “mixed” one in which manufacturing and agriculture prospered side-by-side, or should America remain a nation of small, self-sufficient farmers? In the 1950s consensus historians noted that Whigs and Democrats often agreed on more than they disagreed on. Good Democrats like Jackson were suspicious of the Second Bank of the United States but more sanguine about state-chartered banks (which tended to be less adequately capitalized and thus extremely unstable), just as many Whigs like Abraham Lincoln supported Henry Clay’s “American System” to promote economic development, even as they held up the yeoman farmer as the archetype of good citizenship. But the parties did disagree about a great many things. Some historians claim that Whigs favored expansion across time, meaning that they favored an economically developed and unified nation, while Democrats favored expansion across space – most notably, through annexation and conquest. Others believe that Democrats were less enthusiastic than Whigs about the emerging market economy and the values shift that accompanied it. At the most core level, there is no denying that the two parties had substantive differences. Holt argues that by the early 1850s these differences ceased to be salient. The 1849 Gold Rush and other such phenomena undercut the argument for paper currency and credit; the annexation of much of Mexico slaked most Democrats’ thirst for more land; and many of the battles over banks and corporate charters had settled themselves at the state level by the late 1840s, with Democrats usually winning the day. In other words, the issues that once stirred popular passions were becoming increasingly irrelevant through gradual resolution. A political vacuum thus left the two parties in a struggle to maintain the allegiance of their supporters, who were no longer sure why they identified either with the Democrats or with the Whigs. In this vacuum, a realignment occurred. It might have occurred around any numbers of issues, like temperance or nativism. In the latter case, it almost did. Instead, it occurred around slavery, and the second, bisectional party system gave way to a third, sectional system that pitted Northern Republicans against Southern Democrats. Most historians and political scientists believe we are still living in the “fifth party system,” which emerged in the 1930s. Then, voters realigned and reoriented the two existing parties (Republicans and Democrats). It’s remarkable to see a party system cling to life after 65 years. Despite claims of those on the radical left and those on the extreme right that the two parties are carbon copies of each other, the Bush years have shown otherwise. Say what you will about partisanship; America’s two-party system, for all its foibles, has kept the public debate sharp. The question I’d ask of my fellow contributors is whether the Iraq War, the big-spending conservatism of the Bush administration, the utopian ideology of the neoconservatives (utopianism being more often associated with the left), and the debates over abortion, gay rights, and immigration, might bring about a realignment?
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