What is Whiggism?
Whigs were the party of Parliament. In Britain they defended the idea that a monarch must rule under law and share power with the legislature, and they spoke for landowners, merchants and Protestant dissenters. They liked trade, property rights and the settlement that followed 1688. In the United States, a later Whig Party opposed a strong presidency and backed national development. The word also has a second sense: Whig history is the habit of telling the past as a march toward the present, with good guys winning.
Core beliefs
- Rulers must obey the law, and Parliament or Congress should check the executive.
- Property, commerce and trade are the base of prosperity and liberty.
- Religious toleration should protect Protestant dissenters, within a Protestant state.
- Reform should come early and gradually, to prevent revolution.
- The constitution that came out of 1688 is worth defending.
History
Both names started as slurs during a fight over the succession, the Exclusion Crisis of 1679 to 1681, when one camp tried to bar the Catholic heir, James, Duke of York. The Whigs went on to support the revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights of 1689. John Locke moved in Whig circles. When the Hanoverian kings arrived in 1714, the Whigs held power for long stretches, with Robert Walpole as chief minister from 1721 to 1742. Charles James Fox later criticized the crown's influence and spoke for religious freedom. Earl Grey's ministry then passed the Great Reform Act of 1832, and the empire-wide end of slavery followed in 1833. By the 1850s they had merged with Radicals and Peelites to form the Liberal Party. In America, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were prominent in a separate Whig Party, which took the presidency in 1840 and 1848 and fell apart in the 1850s over slavery.
Variants
The first British Whigs were mostly rich landowners who guarded Parliament and the Protestant succession. Followers of Fox pushed harder for civil and religious liberty and for reform. American Whigs followed Clay's American System of a national bank, protective tariffs and federal money for roads and canals, and many backed moral reform. In the years before the Civil War the party divided: Conscience Whigs opposed slavery, and Cotton Whigs sought a deal with the South. Whig history, a phrase from the historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931, names a way of writing about the past.
Criticisms
Critics say the Whigs spoke of liberty while serving a narrow elite of landowners, and kept the vote from most people. Historians fault Whig history for judging the past by the present and for ignoring losers. American Whigs were attacked as friends of banks and industry by Jacksonian Democrats, and the party failed to settle the question of slavery. Defenders reply that the Whigs built the habit of limits on power, a free Parliament and peaceful reform that later liberals inherited.
In practice
Whig governments shaped Britain's constitutional monarchy and passed major reforms, from the 1832 Reform Act to the end of slavery in the empire. Their heirs became the Liberal Party, while the American Whigs shaped debate about banks, tariffs and national projects before fading. On the 12 axes, it scores toward Private on Ownership, and toward Democratic on Authority, and it leans toward Embrace on Technology, in line with its interest in commerce and improvement.