Whig Party Quotes

Remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Whig far longer than he was a Republican. As a whole, the Whigs looked upon banks and corporations as a more efficient means of development; the Jacksonian Democrats thought they were the tools of the devil, but Whigs like Lincoln disagreed. During his presidency, Lincoln favored the re-construction of a national financial system, and his most important 'internal improvement' project was the Pacific railroad.

I have always said, the first Whig [Liberal] was the Devil.

From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

Democracy, Whiggery, and Cliquery, will attract their elements and foment divisions among the people, to accomplish fancied schemes and accumulate power …

We care not a fig for Whig or Democrat: they are both alike to us; but we shall go for our friends, our TRIED FRIENDS … DOUGLAS is a Master Spirit, and his friends are our friends—we are willing to cast our banners on the air, and fight by his side in the cause of humanity, and equal rights—the cause of liberty and the law

The right honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.

At the [U. S.] House [of Representatives], Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, the author of the majority report from the Committee of Elections, had taken the floor last evening, and now raved out his hour in abusive invective upon the members who had pointed out its slanders, and upon the Whig party. His face was convulsed, his gesticulations frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!

We went in ... Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats. We came out of it Republicans.

Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

I think it's important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

I am in favor of General Taylor as the Whig candidate for the Presidency because I am satisfied that we can elect him, that he will give us a Whig administration and that we cannot elect any other Whig.

I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

We Polked you in '44, We shall Pierce you in '52

The Whigs have cast me off, and they shall repent it.

I am not, nor ever have been, connected with the party called the Know-Nothing party, or the party calling themselves the American party.

They are mostly my old political and personal friends …. Of their principles I think little better than I do of those of the slavery extensionists. Indeed I do not perceive how any one professing to be sensitive to the wrongs of the Negroes, can join in any league to degrade a class of white men.

Lincoln was a modernizer, so to speak. He believed in economic development. As a Whig before the war he favored what we would call infrastructure spending, government appropriation for canals, railroads, river and harbor improvements, and a tariff to protect industry. He believed in this market revolution that was sweeping across Northern society. He himself benefited from it in his own life.

We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union.

We certainly cannot have any further political connection with the Whigs of the South; they have rendered such connection impossible. An impassable gulf separates us, and must here-after separate us.

After the April Conference we will have General Conferences all over the nation, and I will attend as many as convenient. Tell the people we have had Whig and Democratic Presidents long enough: we want a President of the United States. If I ever get into the presidential chair, I will protect the people in their rights and liberties.

John Quincy Adams ranks with Jimmy Carter on the roster of ex-presidential redemption. Instead of completing a biography of his father, he let himself be elected to the House, where he spent nine terms in Whiggish opposition to the Democrats, supporting a national bank and a protective tariff and internal improvements.

[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.

Having formed this new party for the benefit of deserters from Whiggery, and deserters from Democracy, and having laid down the Abolition platform which I have read, Lincoln now takes his stand and proclaims his Abolition doctrines