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This chapter examines the speakership elections of 1849 and 1855–1856, the most chaotic instances of officer selection in the history of the House of Representatives. It considers how the Second Party System weakened and eventually collapsed as the slavery issue overwhelmed the interregional partisanship that had been in place for two decades. It also discusses the emergence of new political parties, such as the Free-Soil Party, the American Party, and the Republican Party, that created new avenues for coalitional organization. In particular, it looks at the rise of the Republican Party as the primary opposition party to the Democrats. Finally, it describes how the rising popularity of the new parties in congressional elections affected politicians in both the Whig Party and the Democratic Party.

Pearsall argues against the prevailing critical conception of dramatic monologists as inadvertent in their revelations and ignorant of the consequences of their speech, suggesting instead that dramatic monologists are highly purposeful in their speech, employing sophisticated rhetorical strategies in order to effect political and personal transformation, or “rapture.” The author divides Chapter One into two major sections. The first section, “Poetics: Persuasive Similitude,” offers a new approach to reading all Victorian dramatic monologues, identifying the trope of simile as a defining element of the genre, and arguing that monologists seek to perform a range of acts by way of their speech. The second section, “Politics: Whig Poetics,” details the relevance of Britain’s Whig Party and the furor surrounding the passage of the 1832 Reform Bill to Tennyson’s poetic development. Pearsall illuminates the ways in which Tennyson’s Whig political views were influenced by Arthur Henry Hallam, and helped shape his poetry both thematically and formally.

The South's response to the growth of an antislavery movement in the North proved disastrous to Southern white people. James Polk — the most powerful Southern politician in the late 1840s — imposed his will upon Mexicans and upon the Whig Party, but he failed to develop alternatives to the self-destructive tendencies of Southern Democrats. Instead of acknowledging that most Northern antislavery leaders respected the constitutional right of each Southern state to reach its own decisions about the future of slavery, Polk smeared every such leader with the “abolitionist” label. Instead of resolutely opposing Southern disunionism, he declared that disunionism was the natural response to the growth of an antislavery movement. The ultimate triumph of a secessionist policy arguably owed much to the suicidal policies pursued by influential Southern Democrats like James Polk.

Although during the 1840s James Polk cultivated the image of a Southern moderate on the slavery question, his early career contradicted this impression. In 1832 he had provoked a furious debate in the U.S. House of Representatives, aimed at discouraging any criticism there of slavery, which foreshadowed later debates over the “gag rule.” In October 1839, as governor of Tennessee, he publicly adopted the Calhounite view that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to take any antislavery action, even in the District of Columbia or in the federal territories. Both publicly and behind the scenes, Polk promoted the view that disunionism would be an inevitable consequence of the enactment of the (allegedly) abolitionist-tainted slavery policies of the Whig Party. Polk acted from political conviction, but also in accordance with his own economic interest, as he doubled his Mississippi plantation investment during the twelve months before October 1839.

Chapter forty-eight examines Hodge’s politics and his tripartite commitment to God’s sovereignty, property rights and the need for religion to be tied to political action for the good of the nation. Through an examination of Hodge’s Repertory review of Moses Stuart’s Conscience and the Constitution, one finds that Hodge had a firm commitment to believing that humanity’s common moral sense would bind the nation together. This belief was unsettled by the Civil War. Hodge also shifted political party allegiances during this life from the Whig party to the Republican party, but he always considered himself a Federalist at heart.

This chapter examines British politician Edmund Burke's relations with his Whig Party in 1791–92. His Reflections on the Revolution in France was well received across a wide spectrum of political opinion, including many members of his party. However, when Prime Minister Charles James Fox declared he was against the book, no-one from the opposition benches came to Burke's defence. Burke retaliated and started attacking Fox with the help of William Fitzwilliam in the hope of unifying the Whig Party.

This chapter details the lives of three prominent men who professed Whig conservative principles with a Burkean twist, as well as the overall politics of the mid-antebellum Whig Party, particularly in contrast to their Democratic rivals. The Whigs discussed in this chapter are Edward Everett (1794–1865), Rufus Choate (1799–1859), and Joseph Story (1779–1845). The careers of all three climaxed during the decades when Edmund Burke's reputation in America had lost most of the ideological valence that had been its signature in the 1790s and had settled into a comparatively nonpartisan legacy of thoughtful statesmanship and masterly rhetoric. None of them, however, is a household name in America today.

Dying of tuberculosis, Henry Clay sought again in 1850 to save the Union from dissolution. Friends and enemies recognized the depth of his patriotism only when life itself left no room for his ambition, and family members absorbed his sacrifice and sense of service. His death on June 29, 1852, left the nation and his sons standing alone. When the nation found no architect of compromise Civil War consumed it. His sons fared better but the patriarch's shadow hung heavily over them. Surviving sons tried to restore the Whig Party, served in national and state legislatures, and sought to avoid war, but they constantly asked what Henry Clay would have wanted. No son filled the father's shoes, but Thomas, James, and John were settled in “meaningful work” and making a contribution as their father had so fervently hoped they would.

Chapter Two traces the rise of the political antislavery movement. It shows how three pioneering leaders—Joshua Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, and Charles Sumner—continued the struggle to “denationalize” slavery. They would abolish it in the District of Columbia, prevent its spread to new territories, exempt the federal government from responsibility for fugitive slaves, limit the interstate slave trade, and bar new slave states from entering the Union. But the quest for electoral success created pressures to pull back from a broad-focus antislavery agenda. The rise of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s widened the appeal of antislavery politics, but Republicans toned down the antislavery stances taken by the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party in the 1840s and early 1850s.

This chapter examines the career and activities of British politician Edmund Burke during the period from 1792 to 1794. During this period, Burke's relationship with the Whig Party did not improve. The Whig leaders still refused to break ties with Prime Minister Charles James Fox despite the recognition of a national emergency requiring a united front against the dangers from abroad. During this time, Burke also attempted to revive the process of impeachment but he failed.

This chapter examines the consequences of the Kansas–Nebraska Act for the Northern Democratic Party. The passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act produced dramatic shifts in Northern public opinion and adversely affected Northern Democrats. Free state voters were appalled at the bravado of the Slave Power and the blatant disregard by Democrats for Northern antislavery sentiment. A majority of Northerners suddenly became “anti-Nebraska,” that is, opposed to the repeal of the 1820 Line and the spread of slavery into Kansas. This chapter discusses the Northern backlash caused by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, including the emergence of two new antislavery, anti-Democratic political parties: the Know-Nothings, or American Party, and the Republican Party. It considers how the Whig Party, Know-Nothings, and Republicans often worked together to defeat Democrats in the 1854 and 1855 elections. It also explores the crisis in Kansas and how it further strengthened the Republicans and concludes by looking at the 1856 Democratic nomination.

This chapter describes John Jordan Crittenden as part of a dying breed. The seventy-year old senator from Kentucky had been one of the earliest supporters of the Whig Party from its inception in the mid-1830s. Many of his old Whig colleagues, such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, had passed away. Others had left the party to join the fledgling Republican organization in the North, or switched over to the Democrats in the South. The Whig Party was so depleted that Crittenden himself would have to find a new political organization. Unlike some Southern Whigs, the Kentucky senator had no intention of switching allegiances to the Democrats. Crittenden had long opposed that party's ideological tenets, and recent events had strengthened his disapproval.

The economic, political, and racial environment in the middle border region sustained the western white consensus. Even as these states modernized between 1820 and 1850, resultant demographic and economic expansion and diversity, not slavery politics, irrevocably divided western white populations. To various degrees, political parties in the region (Democrats and National Republicans, or “Whigs”) adopted nationalist positions and eschewed the federal government’s involvement in the issue of slavery, considering it a states’ rights issue. As the debate over abolitionism influenced the West, racialized (or “conservative”) antislavery strategies and movements such as colonization and gradual emancipation emerged among white residents to harmonize the region. Abolition, the most strident of the various antislavery activisms, had a conservative western variant. Consistent with the West as slavery’s borderland, African Americans there collectively experienced a continuum of racial distinctions, statuses, and circumstances rather than a sharp division among them.

This chapter shows how the Whig Party both in and outside of Congress strongly opposed the war, often accusing President James K. Polk of provoking Mexican retaliation. Yet Democrats were generally behind the president. Northeastern merchants, northwestern farmers, and Southern slaveholders, in particular, advocated expansion westward. Thus, as the conflict opened in 1846, Polk hoped that a speedy decisive victory would result in negotiations to end the war and cede Mexican territory to the United States. On August 8, he expected the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to push through the $2 million war appropriation bill in the waning hours of the congressional session. Yet Polk did not account for the actions of a small group of antislavery Democrats, all of whom belonged to a wing of the party headed by former president Martin Van Buren. This group was inordinately frustrated by the lack of power it held in the Polk administration.

This chapter explores the political, economic, and social trajectory of the Border South during the decade of the 1850s. Utilizing census data, it demonstrates the importance of slavery to the Border South and its inhabitants. Moreover, this chapter emphasizes that Border South politicians were quite in touch with the politics of slavery, not unlike politicians in the other eleven slaveholding states. The chapter illuminates the diversity of the Border South economy over the course of the 1850s, and compares the region’s economy to the rest of the South. It also shows how the Democratic Party had made great gains in the Border South over the decade and suggests that some white border southerners had by the end of the 1850s embraced the radical political idea of secession.

The failure to gain the states of the Upper South when they held their secession elections in February 1861 was a major setback for the cause of secession. The seven states of the original Confederacy needed the manufacturing and white manpower of the Upper South, either to convince the North of the futility of military coercion or to be competitive should war break out. Both for its prestige and size, Virginia was the pivotal state that had to be won. As an institution, slavery was stagnant or declining across most of the Upper South, and levels of slave ownership and slaves in the population were roughly half of those in the Lower South. Secessionist appeals for the immediate need to leave the Union to protect slavery failed to gain any majority support. The conservative Whig Party was still very competitive and warned that the cotton Confederacy would push for free trade and the African slave trade, both of which would undermine the more diversified economies in the Upper South. Its leaders rallied non-slaveholders under the banner of conditional Unionism, a commitment to remain in the Union so long as concessions on slavery were granted and the North refrained from any military action against the states that had seceded. Aware of their distinctly minority status and the vulnerability of their slaves given the proximity of the free-labor Northern states, most of the slaveholders in the border slave states clung to the Union as the safest defender of their slave property.