The Whigs' America: Middle-Class Political Thought in the Age of Jackson and Clay

Abstract

In The Whigs' America, Joseph W. Pearson seeks to explore and explain “the deeply felt, shared cultural soil” underlying the politics of the Antebellum Whigs (p. 1). He argues that one of the most illuminating ways to understand both Whig policies and their fundamental assumptions about the country is to see them as reflections of a bourgeois or middle-class mentality. Pearson's Whigs were not all middle class in narrow economic terms but, more generally, in how they celebrated the virtues of thrift, prudence, and self-control. In contrast to many of their Democratic opponents, most Whigs were optimistic about the future of the young republic and were more at ease with the impersonal, contractual cash economy taking shape amid the market revolution. Pearson describes the Whig world view as “built from the past they sought to escape, the present that they hoped to improve, and the future that they hoped to build” (p. 8).