Second Party System

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Party System was born out of a stolen election, or at least that is what Andrew Jackson believed. In 1824, Jackson won more popular votes and more electoral votes than any other candidate, yet he did not become president. The House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams instead, and Adams immediately named Henry Clay as Secretary of State. Jackson called it a "corrupt bargain" and spent the next four years turning his fury into a political movement that would remake American democracy.

  What emerged from that grievance was something genuinely new: the first well-organized national party in American history. Between roughly 1828 and early 1854, the United States operated under a two-party framework unlike anything that had come before. Voters showed up in numbers that astonished observers. Rallies filled town squares. Partisan newspapers carried the arguments of party leaders into homes across the country. Politics, which had once been the quiet business of local elites, became the consuming passion of ordinary farmers and day laborers.

  Two great coalitions stood at the center of it all: the Democratic Party behind Jackson, and the Whig Party assembled by Clay from the fragments of those who opposed him. Between them they shaped every major question of the Jacksonian era, from the fate of the national bank to the expansion of slavery. How they argued, how they organized, and why one of them collapsed will carry this documentary forward.

• 2. The Corrupt Bargain

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  Henry Clay was not even among the three finalists when the 1824 election went to the House of Representatives. The four candidates that year, Clay, William Crawford, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams, were all nominally Democratic-Republicans. No one had won an electoral college majority. Under the Constitution, the choice fell to the House, which could only consider the top three vote-getters. Clay, as Speaker of the House, negotiated the outcome from the sidelines.

  Jackson had every reason to expect the presidency. He had the most popular votes and the most electoral votes of any candidate. Instead Adams won, and his first act was to offer Clay the most prestigious cabinet post in the government. Whether or not a deal had been struck, the optics were devastating. Jackson denounced it loudly and launched what he described as a crusade against Washington corruption.

  Martin Van Buren, described by historian Robert Remini as possessing a creative contribution to the nation's political development that was enormous, became Jackson's indispensable partner. Van Buren had already built one of the country's first successful statewide political machines in New York, the Albany Regency, which ran the state during his absences and relied on professional patronage, the legislative caucus, and a party newspaper. He brought that expertise to the national stage, forging what he called an alliance between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North. Van Buren delivered Virginia and Pennsylvania's electoral votes to Jackson in 1828, and his reward was appointment as Secretary of State.

• 3. Mass Democracy Arrives

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  Before 1828, most white men who could vote simply did not bother. Historian William Gienapp traced the psychological turning point to the panic of 1819, which shattered confidence in the old order of deference to upper-class elites. Jackson's 1828 campaign channeled that anger into participation. The suffrage laws had long permitted mass voting among white men; what changed was that politics suddenly seemed to matter.

  By 1840, Gienapp argued, the transformation was complete. Campaigns featured appeals to the common man, mass meetings, parades, and celebrations. Elections generated voter participation running between 75 and 85 percent of eligible voters. In the words Gienapp chose to summarize the shift: "With the full establishment of the second party system, campaigns were characterized by appeals to the common man, mass meetings, parades, celebrations, and intense enthusiasm, while elections generated high voter participation. In structure and ideology, American politics had been democratized."

  Historian Richard P. McCormick, most responsible for defining the term "Second Party System," identified several features that made it distinct. For the first time, two-party politics extended to the South and West, regions that had functioned as one-party territories. In each region, the two parties were roughly equal in strength, a balance McCormick called unique among all American party systems. The political convention replaced the caucus everywhere. Close elections, not charismatic candidates or particular issues, were what drove voters to the polls. Abraham Lincoln emerged early as the Whig leader in Illinois, though McCormick noted he was usually bested there by Stephen Douglas.

• 4. Jackson's War on the Bank

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  The Second Bank of the United States, headquartered in Philadelphia with offices in major cities across the country, functioned something like a central bank. Nicholas Biddle ran it with a firm hand that local bankers and politicians found infuriating. Jackson found it intolerable on principle. He distrusted paper money entirely, believing that only gold and silver, what he called "specie," should circulate. He regarded any bank as an engine of special privilege.

  Henry Clay was the bank's political champion, which made the fight personal as well as ideological. After what the source describes as Herculean battles with Clay, Jackson broke Biddle's bank. He refused to renew its charter.

  In July 1836, Jackson went further. His Specie Circular declared that federal land could no longer be purchased with paper money issued by banks; only gold and silver coins would do. Most businessmen and bankers moved to the Whig party in response. Commercial and industrial cities became Whig strongholds. Jackson meanwhile grew more popular among subsistence farmers and day laborers who had long distrusted finance. Economic historians, following the conclusions of Peter Temin, have largely absolved Jackson's policies for the financial instability that followed. A survey of economic historians in 1995 found that the vast majority agreed that the inflation and financial crisis of the 1830s originated in events beyond Jackson's control, including conditions in Mexico, China, and Britain.

• 5. The Spoils System

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  When Jackson became president, he declared rotation in office to be a leading principle in the republican creed. The idea was that no one should hold a government post so long that they became corrupted by it. In practice, rotation meant replacing civil servants with party loyalists. Jackson called it reform.

  The spoils system did not originate with Jackson. Thomas Jefferson had removed Federalist office-holders after taking office years earlier. Jackson also did not sweep out the entire civil service. By the end of his term he had dismissed less than twenty percent of the original civil servants. What made his approach different, as one historian quoted in the source explained, was that he defended these changes as a positive good, framing patronage not as a reward for friends but as a removal of minority political representatives whose long tenure had made them corrupt.

  Martin Van Buren had already demonstrated in New York how patronage, properly managed, could hold a party together across the distances of a large state. Jackson applied the same logic nationally. He rewarded past supporters and promised future jobs to local and state politicians who joined his coalition. The spoils system became a central feature not only of the Second Party System but of the Third Party System that followed, persisting until the reform movements of the 1890s finally curtailed it.

• 6. Who Were the Whigs

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  Henry Clay assembled the Whig Party in 1836 from the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and Southern planters angered by Jackson's handling of the nullification crisis. The name was deliberate. Just as the Whigs of 1776 had positioned themselves as patriots resisting the tyranny of King George III, the new party cast itself as resisting what it called "King Andrew."

  The Anti-Masons deserve a separate mention. They had flourished in Vermont, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania as a reaction against the secretive Masonic order, and the source identifies them as an important political innovator between 1827 and 1834. Their methods, particularly the political convention as an organizing tool, passed into the mainstream of American party politics.

  The social profile of Whig voters differed sharply from Democratic voters. In Boston and New York City, 85 to 90 percent of men worth over $100,000 voted Whig. The party was stronger in market towns and commercial areas; the Democrats were stronger on the frontier and in isolated rural communities. Irish and German Catholic immigrants were heavily Democratic; evangelical Protestants and English and Scots-Irish immigrants tended toward the Whigs. Historian Frank Towers summarized the ideological core of the divide: Democrats stood for the sovereignty of the people as expressed in popular demonstrations and majority rule, while Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, and protections for minority interests against majority tyranny.

  On economic policy, Whigs favored high tariffs to protect American manufacturers, corporate charters, a national bank, and paper currency. They also supported public schools, abolition of capital punishment, prison reform, asylum reform, and temperance. Democrats opposed nearly all of it, viewing activist government as a threat to individual liberty and a tool of the wealthy.

• 7. The Slavery Fault Line

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  The Whig coalition contained a structural flaw that no amount of organization could fix. Its Northern wing, rooted in the old National Republican tradition, and its Southern wing, made up of planters hostile to Jackson, held directly opposing views on slavery. The party could succeed only as long as the slavery question was kept off the agenda.

  Minor parties tested that silence throughout the era. The Liberty Party, which ran on an abolitionist platform in 1840, and the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories in 1848 and 1852, both drew votes that complicated the two-party balance. The Free Soil movement was strongest in New England and the Great Lakes region, precisely the areas where the Whig coalition had its most principled antislavery voices.

  By the early 1850s, the Whigs could no longer hold together. The old leaders who had defined the era, Calhoun, Webster, Clay, Jackson, and Polk, had all passed from the scene. New questions, especially slavery, nativism, and religion, took their place. In 1856, the remaining Whigs endorsed the Know Nothing campaign of Millard Fillmore. In 1860, they backed the Constitutional Union ticket of John Bell. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Whig Party ceased to exist. The Whigs not carried off by the Free Soil movement had flowed toward the Know Nothing ticket, and then toward the Constitutional Union Party, a sequence that marks the final dissolution of the Second Party System's original coalition.