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The Whig Party was a political party active in the middle of the 19th century in the United States of America. Many of the early Presidents of the United States were members of the Whig Party. Along with the rival Democratic Party, it was central to the Second Party System from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s.〔Holt (1999), p. 231.〕 It formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829–37) and his Democratic Party. In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization, banking and economic protectionism to stimulate manufacturing. It appealed to entrepreneurs and planters, but had few subsistence farmers or unskilled workers. It included many active Protestants, and voiced a moralistic opposition to the Jacksonian Indian removal policies. The "Whig" name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence. "Whig" meant opposing tyranny.〔The name was not directly related to the Whig party in England. Holt (1999), pp. 27–30.〕 Historian Frank Towers has specified a deep ideological divide: :Democrats stood for the 'sovereignty of the people' as expressed in popular demonstrations, constitutional conventions, and majority rule as a general principle of governing, whereas Whigs advocated the rule of law, written and unchanging constitutions, and protections for minority interests against majority tyranny.〔Frank Towers, "Mobtown's Impact on the Study of Urban Politics in the Early Republic." ''Maryland Historical Magazine'' 107 (Winter 2012) pp: 469-75, p 472, citing Robert E, Shalhope, ''The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland'' (2009) p. 147〕 The Whig Party nominated for president such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky. The Whig Party also nominated for president war-hero generals William Henry Harrison (in 1840), Zachary Taylor (in 1848), and Winfield Scott (in 1852). In its two decades of existence, the Whig Party had two of its candidates, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, elected President. Both died in office. John Tyler succeeded to the Presidency after Harrison's death in 1841, but he was expelled from the party. Millard Fillmore, who became President after Taylor's death in 1850, was the last president under the Whig label. The party self-destructed because of the internal tension over the expansion of slavery to the territories. With deep fissures in the party on this question, the anti-slavery faction prevented the nomination for a full-term of its own incumbent, President Fillmore, in the 1852 presidential election; instead, the party nominated General Winfield Scott. Most Whig Party leaders eventually quit politics (as Abraham Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The northern voter-base mostly gravitated to the new Republican Party. By the 1856 presidential election, the Whig Party had become defunct. The Constitutional Union Party enjoyed a moderate measure of success from conservative former Whigs (particularly in the Upper South) in the 1860 presidential election. In the South the party vanished, but Whig ideology as a policy orientation persisted for decades and played a major role in shaping the modernizing policies of the state governments during Reconstruction.〔 ==Origins== The name ''Whig'' was derived from a common term that Patriots used to refer to themselves during the American Revolution. It indicated hostility to the British Sovereign, and despite the identical name, it was not directly derived from the British Whig Party. The American Whigs were modernizers who saw President Andrew Jackson as "a dangerous man on horseback" with a "reactionary opposition" to the forces of social, economic, and moral modernization. Most of the founders of the Whig party had supported Jeffersonian democracy and the Democratic-Republican Party. The Democratic-Republicans who formed the Whig Party, led by Kentucky Senator Henry Clay and President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, drew on a Jeffersonian tradition of compromise and balance in government, national unity, territorial expansion, and support for a national transportation network and domestic manufacturing. Casting their enemy as "King Andrew", they sought to identify themselves as modern-day opponents of governmental overreaching. Despite the apparent unity of Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans from 1800 to 1824, the American people ultimately preferred partisan opposition to popular political agreement.〔David Brown, "Jeffersonian Ideology and the Second Party System." ''Historian'' 1999 62(1): 17–30.〕 As Jackson purged his opponents, vetoed internal improvements, and killed the Second Bank of the United States, alarmed local elites fought back. In 1831, Henry Clay re-entered the Senate and started planning a new party. He defended national rather than sectional interests. Clay's plan for distributing the proceeds from the sale of lands among the states in the public domain was intended to serve the nation by providing the states with funds for building roads and canals, which would stimulate growth and knit the sections together. His Jacksonian opponents, however, distrusted the federal government and opposed all federal aid for internal improvements and they again frustrated Clay's plan. Jacksonians promoted opposition to the National Bank and internal improvements and support of egalitarian democracy, state power, and hard money. The "Tariff of Abominations" of 1828 had outraged Southern feelings; the South's leaders held that the high duties on foreign imports gave an advantage to the North (where the factories were located). Clay's own high tariff schedule of 1832 further disturbed them, as did his stubborn defense of high duties as necessary to his "American System". Clay however moved to pass the Compromise of 1833, which met Southern complaints by a gradual reduction of the rates on imports to a maximum of twenty percent. Controlling the Senate for a while, Whigs passed a censure motion denouncing Jackson's arrogant assumption of executive power in the face of the true will of the people as represented by Congress. The Whig Party began to take shape in 1833. Clay had run as a National Republican against Jackson in 1832, but carried only 49 electoral votes against Jackson's 219, and the National Republicans became discredited as a major political force. The Whig Party emerged in the aftermath of the 1832 election, the Nullification Crisis, and debates regarding the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson denounced as a monopoly and from which he abruptly removed all government deposits. Supporters of Clay, supporters of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, former Antimasons, and former Jacksonians (led by John C. Calhoun), who viewed Jackson's actions as impeding on the prerogatives of Congress and the states, formed the new party. The "Whig" name emphasized the party's opposition to Jackson's perceived executive tyranny, and the name helped the Whigs shed the elitist image of the National Republican Party. Clay was the clear leader of the Whig Party nationwide and in Washington, but he was vulnerable to Jacksonian allegations that he associated with the upper class at a time when white males without property had the right to vote and wanted someone more like themselves. The Whigs nominated a war hero in 1840—and emphasized that William Henry Harrison had given up the high life to live in a log cabin on the frontier. Harrison won. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Whig Party (United States)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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