Abstract:
The political careers of Nathaniel Macon and Willie P. Mangum, United States senators
in successive generations, offer a focal point for analyzing the ideology and politics of
North Carolina’s Southern Whigs, from their origins to their fall. From 1800 to 1852
Macon and Mangum were at the epicenter of both national and state politics. Both Macon
and Mangum emerged as leaders of political opposition parties – Macon among the
state’s Jeffersonian Republicans and Mangum among the Jacksonians and, later, the
Whigs.
These two southern parties, too little studied by scholars, were linked by a shared
opposition ideology. This dissertation traces the emergence of Macon’s “Old”
Republican opposition faction professing loyalty to the “pure republicanism” of the
“Principles of ’98” and the Revolution of 1800, the change of that ideology to an
ideology of opposition, and its adoption by Mangum and a new generation of North
Carolina Old Republicans, who, along with other opponents of Andrew Jackson and
Martin Van Buren, made that Old Republican ideology the foundation of the Whig Party
in the state. The opposition ideology of the North Carolina Whigs and older, but popular,
Republican political ideas allowed the party to organize rapidly and capture the state
from the Jackson Democrats. The Whigs' opposition to executive power was the most
important aspect of their ideology, emphasized in all their campaigns from 1836 to 1844.
Most important, the North Carolina Whigs evolved from a primarily Old Republican
states’ rights party to a party combining Old republicanism with Whig nationalism. This
evolution was critical to sustaining the ascendancy of such an opposition-oriented party.
At both the national and state levels of politics, though, success raised expectations of
governance, increased regional and personal rivalries, and revealed ideological conflicts
within the Whig party. Conflicts over President John Tyler’s strict constructionism and
President Zachary Taylor’s anti-party appeal emerge as key episodes in the state’s
political development. A political culture of opposition could not remain ascendant under
such tensions.
This dissertation, then, seeks to account for political continuities between the
decades of the early republic and the antebellum decades that most historians have
ignored, particularly the links between Old Republican ideology and Southern Whig
ideology. It also complicates traditional interpretations of antebellum Southern politics by
showing that North Carolina’s politics did not simply reflect a parochial regionalism but
was the result of a negotiation between state and national political ideals.
