The Whigs Collapse! | Why Slavery Killed the Age of Jackson
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- The collapse of the Whig Party was one of the most epic political disasters in America’s history. Not only did one of America’ two major parties implode just after holding the White House. It took down the entire Jacksonian party system, ripped American politics apart, and eventually plunged the nation into a bloody civil war.
So why did it happen? And what can we learn from it so it doesn’t happen again?
The answer you usually hear is the Whig Party got ripped apart by internal disputes over the spread of slavery. But that’s hardly a good answer. The Whigs, just like the Jacksonian Democrats Party, had been internally divided over slavery since their party’s founding. In fact, all of America had been divided over slavery since the nation’s Founding. Saying the Whig Party got ripped apart by slavery is like saying a bullet caused a murder-true but hardly the point. The real question is why now, after all this time, did slavery suddenly tear both the party and all of American politics apart.
In this episode, we discuss the events that sent America’s stable Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats into an inevitable collapse. From Polk’s launching the Mexican-American War, and taking so much new land that would eventually need to be admitted as new states. To the religiously-fueled and newly-passionate abolition movement, a flourishing Underground Railroad taking enslaved people to freedom, and Martin Van Buren’s launching a new third party, the Free Soil Party. To the political feuding during the war, including a young Congressman Abraham Lincoln, and then fumbling through the peace with a foolish package of Congressional deals called the Compromise of 1850-including the horrific new Fugitive Slave Act.
And, ultimately, to the election of the 1852, in which furious Whig factions, angry at their party for different reasons, suddenly abandoned it’s candidate, General Winfield Scott, dooming the party to its inevitable collapse.
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The opening of this is eerily timely in January 2021
Fascinating! As a Brit, I had never heard of the American Whig party or President Polk. The British Whigs also imploded in the 1860s. Wonder if there was a connection?
Well Presented!
Thank you ... This makes more sense to me. I was told that we don't talk about Lincoln or the Republicans....
It's amazing how history repeats itself.
Great Series!! Thank you
really helped out with my essay. kudos!
thanks for the video frank :)
Great info!
Who else is here after an abolitionist told you to look into the collapse of the Whig party?
You are obviously passionate about the subject but you present an erroneous narrative to your viewers by acting as if the Wilmot Proviso was based on some altruistic opposition to slavery; it wasn't. It was introduced as a way to protect free white labor from competing against black slaves in the new territories. Wilmot himself said he wanted these lands to be "where the sons of toil, of my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery brings upon free labor." Also, you fall into the trap that many historians do in presenting the abolitionist movement as if it was far more powerful than it actually was. In the 1840s and 1850s, men like William Lloyd Garrison were considered to be crackpots in the North; outside of a few pockets in Massachusetts and New York, they were clearly on the fringes.
In fairness, although you're certainly not alone in your perspective, I'd say this is pretty far outside the historical consensus. Obviously, nothing is ever all one thing. There are multiple reasons for why different people support issues. But to say the Wilmot Proviso wasn't really about slavery or the abolition movement wasn't of earthshaking importance to American politics and the history of the middle nineteenth century is pretty far from the mainstream view.
what i find the most impeccable was that the sufferage movement grew to be closely aligned with the abolitionists and yet WE see the yields of when the gate keepers give them a right to vote and how they sub sequently vote and yield in favor of segregation....post "SOCIAL STANDING" earned. our country in a nutshell. "rainbow coalition" YIELDS
Thanks for telling one truth 😊
why the flag behind of you is backward?
Downward you mean.
@@smeekle2000 Thank you. At least you answered, though a year later.
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