The Whigs, like their predecessors, the Federalists, were ostensibly the party of national ideas.  Their association began with a group of Jeffersonian Republicans who, after the second English war, sought to resume the interrupted work of national consolidation.  The results of that war had clearly exposed certain grave deficiencies in the American national organization; and these deficiencies a group of progressive young men, under the lead of Calhoun and Clay, proposed to remedy.  One of the greatest handicaps from which the military conduct of the war had suffered was the lack of any sufficient means of internal communication; and the construction of a system of national roads and waterways became an important plank in their platform.  There was also proposed a policy of industrial protection which Calhoun supported by arguments so national in import and scope that they might well have been derived from Hamilton’s report.  Under the influence of similar ideas the National Bank was rechartered; and as the correlative of this constructive policy, a liberal nationalistic interpretation of the Constitution was explicitly advocated.  As one reads the speeches delivered by some of these men, particularly by Calhoun, during the first session of Congress after the conclusion of peace, it seems as if a genuine revival had taken place of Hamiltonian nationalism, and that this revival was both by way of escaping Hamilton’s fatal distrust of democracy and of avoiding the factious and embittered opposition of the earlier period.

The Whigs made a fair start, but unfortunately they ran a poor race and came to a bad end.  No doubt they were in a way an improvement on the Federalists, in that they, like their opponents, the Democrats, stood for a combination between democracy and nationalism.  They believed that the consolidation and the development of the national organization was contributory rather than antagonistic to the purpose of the American political system.  Yet they made no conquests on behalf of their convictions.  The Federalists really accomplished a great and necessary task of national organization and founded a tradition of constructive national achievement.  The Whigs at best kept this tradition alive.  They were on the defensive throughout, and they accomplished nothing at all in the way of permanent constructive legislation.  Their successes were merely electioneering raids, whereas their defeats were wholly disastrous in that they lost, not only all of their strongholds, but most of their military reputation and good name.  Their final disappearance was wholly the result of their own incapacity.  They were condemned somehow to inefficiency, defeat, and dishonor.