2. WHY WHIG PARTY FORMATION CAN BE STUDIED THROUGH PETITIONS

3. THE BANK WAR AND PARTY DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

The Bank War of the 1830s was both a moment of crisis for an industrializing economy and a moment of reconfiguration in national and state politics. The emergence of the Democrats as a party organization, united under Andrew Jackson but clearly capable of carrying their force beyond the general, meant that until the late 1830s, one party was hegemonic in American politics. The organization inspired by Duff Green's strategy, combined with the simultaneous expansion of the American electorate and the postal system, all united under Jackson's democratic and nationalist symbolism, rendered previous forms of opposition futile. The Democrats were particularly effective in organizing in the one true prize of nineteenth-century national electoral politics: New York. In the absence of city political organizations in New York and Albany, the Democrats would not have enjoyed the dominance they displayed until the Panic of 1837.

The BUS was one of the preeminent administrative institutions of the early American nation, and probably the most controversial by a wide margin. The brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, the BUS was created in 1791 and then suffered its first demise in 1811 after failing to achieve rechartering. In part because of the disruptions to state banking incurred during the War of 1812, national legislators reasoned that the BUS served a previously under-acknowledged regulatory function.Footnote ²⁰ President James Madison's premised his advocacy for a second BUS upon the need for uniform national currency, the need to efficiently finance national government operations, and the specter of “embarrassments” in the international arena in the absence of a unified monetary system. In the pivotal Fourteenth Congress, led by Speaker Henry Clay and with John C. Calhoun chairing the House Committee on the National Currency, legislators voted to reauthorize the institution in 1816.Footnote ²¹ By the 1830s, as state banks continued to proliferate, the regulatory role of the BUS gained in importance: “state banks issued circulating notes universally, and in consequence central bank pressure for their redemption was a regulatory measure universally felt. It was the United States Bank's chief regulatory device; the discount rate was not.”Footnote ²² The institution, headquartered in Philadelphia, also continued to serve as a depository home for vast wealth held both domestically and abroad. Its organizational development in the 1820s was marked by relative stability, not least because of the McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) decision legitimating the institution and because the disruptions of the early Madisonian period were behind it.

Andrew Jackson's plan to remove the deposits had both constitutional and partisan logics. Jackson invoked Jeffersonian principles in rejecting the BUS's constitutionality, and in his famous BUS veto message of 1832 he invoked his authority as president to weigh in on the issue separately from, and co-equally with, the Supreme Court.Footnote ²³ Politically, the deposits removed from the national bank branches would, according to Jackson's plan, be placed in state banks that were known to be loyal to the Jacksonian cause. Principles of “small-f” federalism thus dovetailed with electoral considerations to give Jackson rationale and incentive to remove the deposits. Treasury Secretary Roger Taney, later chief justice of the Supreme Court, played a key role in the removal of the deposits, outlining the Jackson administration's logic in a government circular and using his power as treasury secretary to effectuate removal of assets from the BUS.Footnote ²⁴

BUS president Nicholas Biddle had other ideas, and he was not about to let the BUS disappear without combat. He began systematically curtailing new loans and calling in old ones, and a minor panic set in. As historians have widely recognized,Footnote ²⁵ Biddle's plan massively backfired, generating resentment in the business community and all but proving President Jackson's point that the powers of finance were not to be entrusted to a single incorporated institution. By early 1835, Biddle had made a quiet and stunning volte face, recapitalizing the BUS to its pre-1832 levels. With the American economy in full swing in 1835 and 1836, the BUS expired quietly. Yet the forces given life by the BUS-related petitioning campaign of 1832–1834 would live on.

4. PETITIONING IN RESPONSE TO REMOVAL OF THE DEPOSITS

The petitioning campaign coincided with a new cohesion among Jackson's opponents in Congress in 1833. National Republicans, Nullifiers, and southern state-rights supporters all opposed Jackson's move against the BUS, even if for a disparate set of reasons. Henry Clay took the lead in orchestrating a response. He sought passage of two motions of censure, one rejecting Secretary Taney's report outlining the logic for removal of the deposits, the other rebuking Jackson for executive usurpation.Footnote ²⁶

Even one year earlier, this level of cohesion would have been hard to foresee. In 1832 Clay expressed a mix of pessimism and concern about the lack of organized opposition to the “tyrant of the White House.” The advancement of the Jacksonian agenda, culminating in the first bank rechartering veto of July 10, 1832, left a wide range of politicians dismayed. Many of these turned to Clay for advice and support. Erastus Montague of Waltham, Virginia, told Clay that the “wealth and prosperity of our people” and nothing less than the “very existence of republic institutions” rested on Clay's shoulders. Clay had tried to organize an anti-Jacksonian opposition to help support the recharter bill and to prepare for the upcoming general election. Yet as he took a survey of the country, he noted the profound challenges facing anti-Jacksonian forces. In New York, the electoral prize of the antebellum republic, Clay understood that the National Republicans were simply too weak on their own to combat the administration, and he hoped for “the progress of measures to produce cooperation between the anti-Masons and the National Republicans” in the state. If such a coalition could be forged, “the Jackson party could be defeated in New York, there is only wanting a perfect persuasion of that result, throughout the Union, to insure a signal overthrow of Jackson at the approaching election.” Nor was the need of alliance confined to the particular politics of New York. Clay and his allies were actively trying to facilitate cooperation between anti-Masons, Clay loyalists, and Calhoun loyalists in Kentucky and Ohio.Footnote ²⁷

The 1832 election demonstrated the futility of these attempts. As the adverse election results rolled in from state after state in November 1832, Clay displayed a mix of despondency and resignation. With palpable distress, he confided to friends and allies that American liberty, indeed the very foundations of the young republic, were at risk. Yet as the sorry weeks of November and December 1832 unfolded, Clay and his allies took political lessons from the election results. One of the most painful but obvious of these lessons concerned the weakness of the National Republican position, both its own organization and its alliances with the anti-Masons. In state after state—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio—National Republican hopes based upon alliances with anti-Masons were dashed as anti-Masonic voters went to Jackson. Anti-Masons could not be trusted to deliver votes. As Charles Shaler of Pittsburgh wrote to Clay, the 1832 election was a defeat for the entire National Republican party, and “its coalition with Anti-Masonry was its death warrant.” A new political coalition was needed, and Clay earnestly sought the bases on which to build one.Footnote ²⁸

The National Republican defeat of 1832 left but a congeries of anti-Jackson forces in the early 1830s, and individually and collectively, they faced the challenges of building new organizations and new alliances. Petitioning on the bank deposits gathered steam for many reasons, but key among these was that its practice facilitated the identification and recruitment of a new coalition. Coalition building was all the more important to anti-Jackson forces than to Jacksonian Democrats for three reasons. First, older lines of cleavage and organization were not reliable in the wake of the defeat of 1832. The National Republican coalition was falling apart, and in forging campaigns at the state level, anti-Jackson leaders often found it necessary to assemble coalitions with state-rights parties and anti-Masonic movements. After November 1832, however, Clay and his allies knew that state-rights and anti-Masonry alliances were stopgap measures insufficient to defeat Jackson's organization. Alliances based upon new principles and upon opposition to the administration would be needed. Second, and relatedly, the anti-Jacksonian opposition was weakly organized at the state level save for southern states like Virginia, where many state-rights enthusiasts organized against what they perceived as an aggressive executive imperative on the part of the administration, and South Carolina, where nullification energies were surfacing. Third and perhaps most important, the anti-Jacksonians lacked the partisan organization, and the opportunities to build such an organization at least partially through policy and patronage, that had been enjoyed and exploited by the Jackson administration for four years.

In short, as Holt recognized, the emergence of the Whigs entailed the emergence of a new kind of party organization, one that responded to, but did not mirror, the patterns of Democratic mobilization.Footnote ²⁹ In the new world of American politics after the expansion of suffrage, such a party had to engage in what we call the countability of voice, the necessity to identify salient “units” of public sentiment and public opinion and to enumerate them. Those who led the bank petitioning campaigns in the early 1830s also swam in broader currents of publicity and organized “public sentiment.” To begin with, mass petitioning on a range of issues had become more common since the late 1820s, particularly on issues of temperance, the removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands, and, increasingly, slavery.Footnote ³⁰ Second, the transformation of the press into a more polarized partisan tool meant print-based technologies of politics were increasingly serving partisan ends. The competing journals of legislative affairs—the Jacksonian Congressional Globe, which began in December 1833, and the anti-Jacksonian Register of Debates—started in 1825 and which would die out in 1837—serve as examples that reported news on national politics itself was subject to partisan production and refraction. Many speeches and reports from the administration were, simultaneously or afterwards, published and distributed as pamphlets. Hence Bank War petitioning emerged in the midst of a print-based publicity war over the deposit removal issue and over the terms and stakes of the Jackson administration more generally.Footnote ³¹

Comprising hundreds of memorials for and against the removal of bank deposits, bank petitioning in 1833 and 1834 bore similarities to and distinctions from other forms of petitioning in the antebellum United States. The issuance of petitions from meetings of interested citizens— whether those opposed to or in support of deposit removal—distinguished bank petitioning from the mass circulation and canvassing that characterized the temperance, anti-Cherokee-removal, or antislavery movements.Footnote ³² When the meetings called by Jacksonians or partisans of Clay and the BUS came together, moreover, they assembled not under the auspices of an existing moral reform society or an antislavery organization, but on an issue that united newer and more issue-specific interests and passions and that was part of a concerted effort to influence the votes cast by members of Congress.

Indeed, while Clay and his allies controlled the Senate—holding roughly an eight-person advantage over the Jacksonians—they found themselves outnumbered substantially in the House. The shortfall in votes in the House prevented passage of the proposed censures as well as any attempt to address removal of the deposits. Clay conceived an idea to pressure undecided House members and Jackson himself. He would encourage supporters to petition Congress, outlining their distress at the removal of the deposits. A forceful show of public opinion might break the gridlock preventing a meaningful response to Jackson's removal.Footnote ³³

Clay's letters reveal that he had an early hand in the organization of public meetings and the submission of resolutions and memorials. In a December 1833 letter to bank president Nicholas Biddle, Clay hinted that “it would be well to have a general meeting of the people to memorialize Congress in favor of a restoration of the deposites. Such an example might be followed elsewhere; and it would be more influential as it might be more general.” Biddle responded affirmatively to Clay's request and immediately set to work organizing meetings in Philadelphia. Several weeks later, in a letter to his son, Clay remarked that “Popular meetings are taking place everywhere, and our success in [the House] will depend upon the extent of the re-action among the people. Do you intend at Lexington to have a meeting? It might do good.” Clay also engaged in an ongoing correspondence with Littleton W. Tazewell in Virginia. Critical to Clay's strategy was the fact that Tazewell was not a National Republican but represented instead the emergent state-rights faction in the Virginia legislature (he would be elected governor by that faction and began service in March 1834).Footnote ³⁴

The timing of these appeals to friends and allies coincided with a subtle but powerful change in rhetorical strategy, one that emphasized directing attention away from the bank issue and toward the “usurpations” and purportedly tyrannical behavior of Jackson himself. Five days after writing Biddle, Clay took to the Senate floor and delivered a celebrated address on the floor. The addresses spanned two days (December 26 and 30) between which the Senate adjourned, and Southard would rise to give a similar address focused more directly on the bank deposits issue on January 8, 1834, but Clay's December 26 address was a clear shift in tone and subject.Footnote ³⁵

While some other Jackson opponents and partisans of the BUS focused upon financial questions, Clay began in December 1833 to connect a number of issues—the conduct of Indian wars, rotation in office, the behavior of Taney, and, more generally, the purported lawlessness and constitutional disrespect demonstrated by President Jackson. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” he began, “hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of power in the hands of one man.” Consistently deploying the old republican term “civil liberty” and making explicit and implicit reference to a Montesquieuvian vision of separated and shared powers, Clay argued that nothing less than the achievement of the Revolution of 1776–1777 and the founding was at stake. He interpreted Treasury Secretary Roger Taney's initiative to remove deposits as a larger pattern of executive liquidation of contracts and tantamount to the creation of an executive-centered partisan state: “Let this doctrine be once established, and there is an end to all regulated government, to all civil liberty. It will become a machine, simple enough. There will be but one will in the State; but one bed, and that will be the bed of Procrustes! Sir, such an enormous and extravagant pretension cannot be sanctioned.” In Clay's accounting, there was scarcely an aspect or actor in the American polity that was not victim to Jacksonian aggression. The aggrieved included not merely those who suffered directly from the president's decisions, but also the judiciary (with its power reduced and its legitimacy disregarded), Congress (whose authorities were, Clay claimed, violated by Taney's initiative in removing the bank deposits), the press (Clay made allusion to the Sedition Act of 1798), and American voters who would be subject, he claimed, to Jackson's wish to regulate the franchise from the federal level.

Concluding his remarks on Thursday, December 26, Clay poetically cast the issue as one of law and fidelity to the country's essential institutions.

In the early months of 1834, Clay came to see public outcry expressed through petitions as an increasingly important lever for swaying members of Congress sympathetic to Jackson. After the state legislatures in New Jersey and Ohio passed resolutions instructing their representatives to oppose restoration of the deposits, Clay remarked that “unless the popular demonstration should be very powerful and general the administration will maintain its majority in the House.”Footnote ³⁷ While Clay and his allies clearly encouraged and orchestrated the early public meetings, the wave of petitioning also quickly gained a momentum of its own, giving an outlet to citizen concerns about the crisis.

The volume of meetings and petitions submitted to Congress quickly expanded beyond Clay's immediate network of contacts. In fact, the leaders of public meetings—often a committee whose members' names were published—had few formal links to state or national politics. Rather, most meeting organizers appear to have been local notables, leaders of guilds or unions, and occasionally even military officers.Footnote ³⁸

Memorialists sent in a variety of different resolutions, though most shared some version of the common themes of decrying executive tyranny and deploring the “pecuniary embarrassment” following removal of the deposits. A sample petition from Philadelphia appears in Figure 1 (which displays the petition's prayer and its signatory list). The prayer calls attention both to the “distress … everywhere prevailing” caused by the threat of deposit removal and to a set of themes anchored in republican political discourse. Most of the petition's prayer is devoted not to currency and financial issues, but to the actions of the Jackson administration. “There is no warrant in the Constitution and Laws for the act of the Executive,” the memorialists complained, and they prayed that Congress would remove the deposits from “the arbitrary and uncontrollable disposition” of Taney. The signatory list suggests that, in fact and in self-presentation, the petitioners described themselves as laborers—painters and glazers, hardware merchants, piano makers, bricklayers, smiths. Clay would seize upon this point to note that the petitions were coming from a wide range of social interests and that it was not merely the deposits issue, but the inflammatory actions of “Jackson men,” that were sowing such broad discontent.

Fig. 1.

Example Prayer and Signatory List. This figure displays an example of the prayer of a petition (from March 24, 1834) asking for the restoration of the deposits as well as the signatory list that accompanied it. (Source: National Archives Record Group 233).

Petitions of this sort both reflected and attracted the action of a broad range of antebellum elites. Key allies such as Virginia's Littleton Tazewell joined in the action. As the Spectator of Norfolk reported in January 1834, Tazewell's leadership at a Norfolk meeting was centered upon the issue of executive usurpation: “Mr. Tazewell's gigantic mind was elicited on this important occasion—the flood of light which he shed upon all the topics connected with it, and the strong illustration which his facts and his arguments afforded of a dangerous assumption of power by the Executive—carried conviction to every mind present.”Footnote ³⁹ Some went further and expressed a lack of confidence in the state banks (now holding the deposits removed from the BUS), defended borrowing practices, warned against the risks of a metallic currency, thanked members of Congress for their actions against removal of the deposits, or even asked for a recharter of the BUS. Resolutions asking for a recharter provide additional evidence that the petitioning campaign expanded beyond the hands of members of Congress. Communicating with allies and taking stock of the situation in Congress and state electorates, Clay came to realize early on that a recharter would be impracticable and a strategic misstep. In early February, he wrote to Biddle that “the Bank ought to be kept in the rear; the usurpation in front. If we take up the Bank, we play into the adversarys hands [sic] … we may and probably would divide about the terms of the charter, and finally do nothing leaving things as they are.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Although comforted and energized by the wave of petitions, Clay began to express doubts over the prospect of success for the petitioning campaign in Congress by the end of March 1834. In a letter to his son, he noted that while no direct vote in either the House or the Senate had occurred, it was “well understood that a majority in the H. of R. still exists in favor of the measure of the Executive.”Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, he began mentioning upcoming elections in Kentucky, New York, and Virginia as alternative demonstrations of public opinion that might influence members of Congress. That is, it appeared to Clay that the petitions had not done enough, at least in the House. On March 27, Clay gave a closing speech on the removal of the deposits and his resolutions for censure. His measure for censure against Jackson passed in the Senate by a vote of 26–20. But with no movement in the House, he confided in Tazewell that there was “no prospect of Congress regaining its lawful custody of the Treasury, unless the president shall voluntarily loosen his grasp of it.”Footnote ⁴² Even as Clay had expressed reservations, petitions continued to stream into Congress through April, May, and June. Considering that prospects for restoration of the deposits had likely dimmed at this point, we view the fact that petitions continued to come in as additional evidence of mobilization that went beyond manipulations from elites in Congress.

Yet throughout the spring of 1834, Clay and his allies began to detect that the petitioning campaign was helpful in shaping and even measuring public opinion even as the House was a lost cause. At the dawn of a new year, New York ally Peter B. Porter could write to Clay that the state of public opinion looked hopeless: “The people of this country appear to be perfectly spellbound. Lulling at their ease, in wealth and luxury, they seem to be entirely unconscious of the causes of their prosperity, and insensible to the dangers which threaten it; and if they are not awakened to a sense of their true situation by the bold and prophetic expostulations of yourself and copatriots, nothing short of the actual adversity which must soon follow (and which, if not the best, is always the most infallible instructor) can teach them practical wisdom.” Yet just six weeks later, Porter wrote of his sense that the tide was turning against Jackson, and that the debate had exposed weaknesses in the administration. Clay himself began to focus less upon restoration of deposits and more on the immediate aim of shaping the “will” of the public, an entity that could be shaped, expressed, produced, displayed, and even enumerated. As he wrote to his ally James Brown of Philadelphia, restoration of the BUS's deposits “depends upon the People, and demonstrations of their will. They can produce it.” And to Littleton Tazewell, now on his way to taking office as governor of Virginia, Clay could write that “We are gaining ground, and I am not without hopes of final success in the H. of R. It will depend on the amount of public opinion brought to act upon it. And in that respect the movements in Virginia have been of inestimable service.”Footnote ⁴³

While expressing mixed opinions of his prospects for restoration in the House, Clay expressed his growing sense that the petitioning momentum was expanding, that anti-Jackson energies were appearing in several states, and that support for the petitioning campaign extended well beyond the anti-Jackson vote of 1832. In March, April, and May, Clay took repeatedly to the Senate floor to draw attention to the size of the individual petitions, the diversity of towns and states that were producing them, and to the breadth of support. Even “Jackson men” and committed “Administration men” were petitioning and remonstrating Congress against deposit removal, and many of the petitions mentioned the theme of executive usurpation. In late March and early April, Clay's focus turned more numerical, even statistical. After being alerted to an Erie County petition with between 4,000 and 5,000 signatures, Clay formally proposed that the Senate collect and summarize all of the petitions that had been received on the deposits issue. In April and in June, he took the Senate floor to draw attention to the Senate's tally (150,000) of signers of petitions and memorials critical of Jackson's fiscal policies and praying Congress for economic relief. He even chided the opposition for not seeing this as “one of the best tests of public opinion, next to the evidence which the ballot-boxes afford.”Footnote ⁴⁴

The character of the petitioning campaign suggests that two complementary conditions contributed to its wide reach. First, its origins came from above (i.e., members of Congress), which resulted in some distinct organizational advantages. While no party infrastructure existed to aid in collecting signatures, existing networks between members of Congress in Washington, DC, and local elites made a coordinated response possible. Furthermore, memorialists situated themselves within a broader anti-Jackson movement and would at times even refer in their own petitions to text produced in neighboring towns or counties. Second, there was sufficient public opinion against Jackson and his move against the bank to facilitate a petitioning campaign. The campaign could not have occurred if Jackson had held uniform support among citizens.Footnote ⁴⁵

The logic above helps inform our view of the significance of petitioning against removal of the deposits. Higher rates of petitioning reflected a set of local conditions favorable to future Whig Party organization—despite the fact that no developed party organizations existed at the time of the crisis over the bank. Studying the public meetings and the petitions that came out of them has allowed us to identify several factors that account for the correlation between anti-Jackson petitioning in 1834 and subsequent Whig Party success.

Anti-Jackson meetings demonstrated the relative strength of the links between national party leaders such as Clay and operatives at home who could be called upon to organize citizens. This is demonstrated not only by the correspondence between leaders like Clay and key organizers of the meetings, but also by the fact that it was common for local leaders of meetings on removal of the deposits to travel to Washington, DC, and hand-deliver their petitions. In some cases, local meetings can even be directly linked to attempts to organize for local elections and develop the beginnings of a state party infrastructure. For example, the resolutions from one meeting in Ohio explicitly stated that they would be appointing delegates to travel to an upcoming convention where a candidate would be chosen to run in the upcoming race for governor.Footnote ⁴⁶

Perhaps more importantly, the petitioning campaign itself played a role in developing capacity for later Whig Party organization at the state and local level. Indeed, the meetings provided an outlet through which to develop additional organizational expertise. Invariably, newspaper accounts of such meetings described the appointment of a committee or board to lead the event. For example, the Alexandria Gazette recounted: “On motion of R.H. Henderson, Esq. Col. William Ellsey was called to the chair and F. Hixon, Esq. appointed Secretary. Cuthbert Powell, Esq. addressed the Meeting, going into a general examination of the subject; and moved that a committee … be appointed to report resolutions.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Furthermore, committees drafted points of order and resolutions, and they were also responsible for the submission of the agreed-upon memorial to Congress. As noted previously, some committees went so far as to travel to Washington, DC, where they would deliver the petition directly to a representative and attempt to meet in person with those sympathetic to their position. The committees also sought coverage of their activities in local newspapers, which represented a concerted effort to gain publicity and spread their message. Resolutions drafted at the meetings often contained explicit instructions to distribute the meeting minutes for publication to nearby newspapers.

While the systematic tracing of nineteenth-century political careers is beyond the scope of this article, we occasionally observe that meeting attendees subsequently served as Whig Party politicians. Examining who was on leadership committees for just a handful of meetings (recorded in local newspapers) allowed us to identify several people who held office as Whigs, sometimes many years later. The Alexandria Gazette reported that one Cuthbert Powell, Esq., served on the leadership committee at a January 13, 1834, public meeting in Loudon County, VA.Footnote ⁴⁸ Powell later served as a Whig in the Twenty-Seventh Congress.Footnote ⁴⁹ David Crooker Magoun led a March 8, 1834, meeting in Bath, Maine;Footnote ⁵⁰ he later served as the town's Whig mayor.Footnote ⁵¹ That said, attending such a meeting by no means ensured a life of service to the Whigs. Nathan Beverley Tucker helped lead a January 9, 1834, meeting at New Kent County, Virginia.Footnote ⁵² But throughout the 1830s and later, he remained a state-rights proponent and never fully embraced the Whig Party.

All told, petitioning served a variety of purposes as a political tool after Jackson's removal of the deposits. It linked meeting attendees in states such as Maine or Ohio to the political maneuverings of Henry Clay back in Washington, DC; it allowed members of Congress to formally register the opinions of constituents at home, while also giving voice to newly mobilized groups roused by the economic downturn and suspicion of Andrew Jackson; it even played a role in the evolution of Clay's thinking as he tested different angles for his anti-Jackson appeal. Common to all these notions is the idea that this form of political communication served as connective tissue linking citizens and government before a party organization was in place. In this manner, petitioning played a key role in the development of the newly emergent Whigs. To test the empirical implications of this hypothesis more fully, we set out to gather data on the petitions systematically.

5. DATA

6. ANALYSIS

7. STATE PARTIES AND THE PREDICTIVE POWER OF PETITIONS

An important remaining factor in Whig Party development concerns the strength and vitality of state party organization.Footnote ⁶⁹ State-level Whig Party organizations are important to our findings for at least two reasons. First, the evidence presented indicating a link between petitioning and Whig Party development at the county level for the nation as a whole should also hold up for state party development. Second, state party development likely played a mediating role in the link between petitioning and party development at the national level: We hypothesize that the relationship between petitioning and Whig Party development reflected by Whig presidential vote share will be strongest in states with strong state party organizations.

The data on petitioning during the BUS conflict cannot, on their own, illuminate the critical factor of state party development in the late 1830s and 1840s. Yet it is possible to examine the predictive power of Bank War petitions across states with an eye to the structural integrity of state parties. While the measurement of state legislative party strength is difficult,Footnote ⁷⁰ data from state legislative contests can help provide clues: State legislatures where a party's candidates are more numerously represented indicate a party's ability to run candidates at the local level for a variety of offices. This was all the more so in the early to middle nineteenth century, before the nationalization of party organizations.Footnote ⁷¹ Holt himself describes “how important taking distinctive stands on state issues was to the development of competitive and coherent state Whig organizations.”Footnote ⁷² And, he continually employs data on state legislative elections to measure the variable strength of state party organizations and the force of the Whig Party label.Footnote ⁷³

Looking across states, the number of pro-restoration petitions in 1834 is positively associated with state Whig Party strength, as measured by years of control of the lower house of the state legislature. (See Figures A4 and A5 in the Supplementary Appendix for an illustration of the relationship graphically.) While aggregating the political activity to the state level makes it infeasible to estimate a statistical relationship as we did at the county level, the association we observe provides compelling additional evidence because measures of state party strength are perhaps an even more precise indicator of party development than presidential election returns. Examining party control of state legislatures further confirms the relationship between petitioning and subsequent state party strength. Table A10 in the Supplementary Appendix groups states based upon state party strength from 1836 to 1848. We classified a state in which the lower house of the state legislature was controlled by a Whig supermajority for more than six years (i.e., a majority of years) as one of the “strongest” Whig states; states with more than six years of Whig majority control were classified as “strong” Whig states; states with fewer than six years of Whig state party control were classified as “not strong.” Among these three groups, there are notable differences in the number of pro-restoration petitions. In fact, the median “strongest” Whig state sent twenty-nine pro-restoration petitions; the median “strong” Whig state sent fifteen pro-restoration petitions; finally, the median “not strong” Whig state sent only two pro-restoration petitions.

We also chose four states—Kentucky, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—to illustrate the state party dynamics at work in more detail.Footnote ⁷⁴ The narrative evidence in Holt suggests that among the four states, Kentucky had the strongest Whig Party organizations, Pennsylvania had the weakest Whig Party organization, and New York and Ohio were somewhere in between. Holt remarks that state Whigs' “unpopular stand on a specific state economic policy” put the Pennsylvania party “at a fatal disadvantage in the October 1836 elections.”Footnote ⁷⁵ On the other hand, because “Ohio's Whig Party successfully differentiated itself from Democrats on specific state policies, it had, by the end of 1836, developed much greater stability and a clearer partisan identity than its counterparts in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Mississippi.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Kentucky's strong Whig organization is derived in part, Holt suggests, from the carryover effects of National Republican organization there.Footnote ⁷⁷

Using the data on state legislative party seats (measured as the party's share of the legislative seats after given electoral campaigns), it becomes clear that by this measure too, Kentucky, followed in decreasing order by Ohio, New York, and finally Pennsylvania, harbored the strongest Whig Party organization. After the 1837 contests, Whigs held 71 percent of lower-chamber legislative seats in Kentucky and 56 percent in Ohio. Pennsylvania had a 44 percent Whig lower chamber. At this time New York saw the highest Whig electoral success with fully 78 percent of seats being taken by Whigs. Yet by 1840, this level had fallen by 26 percentage points to 52 percent in 1840. Meanwhile in 1840, Kentucky continued with 77 percent of its lower-chamber seats in Whig hands and Ohio had 71 percent. Pennsylvania's rose slightly, enough to “tie” New York at 52 percent.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, from 1844 to 1848, the Whig share of Kentucky's legislature went from 76 percent to 64 percent and never fell below 59 percent, while in Ohio, the Whig share went from 57 percent and remained ever a majority, ending the decade at 53 percent. Pennsylvania saw high variability, but only once in the years from 1844 to 1848 did state Whigs achieve a clear majority (1846, at 59 percent), their representation ranging from 32 percent (1845) to 45 percent (1848) in other years. New York Whigs again saw great variability, starting in 1844 with only 36 percent of the lower chamber, then rocketing to 71 percent in 1846 and further to 84 percent in 1848.Footnote ⁷⁹

In terms of pro-restoration petitions sent, Pennsylvania is an outlier among those states where the Whig Party never gained a strong foothold. Despite the 175 pro-restoration petitions—clearly a function of the location of the BUS headquarters in Philadelphia—the state Whig Party controlled the lower house of the state legislature in only two years between 1836–1848. However, Kentucky, New York, and Ohio also all ranked among the top five states in terms of pro-restoration petitioning and also all had state parties that controlled the lower house of the state legislature in a majority of years between 1836–1848.

If, as we have suggested, an outflow of petitions indicated fertile ground for subsequent Whig Party development, then we expect this relationship to hold up both within and across states. The results presented above along with the first specification (without state fixed effects) in our main results (Tables A3–A7 in the Supplementary Appendix) confirmed that petitioning predicted variation in Whig Party success across states, and the result held up within states as well when we included state fixed effects. State-specific analysis conducted on our four sample states (and presented in Table A11 in the Supplementary Appendix) further demonstrates that within state variation conforms with our expectations. In the state of Pennsylvania, where Whig Party organization was weakest throughout the period, the 1834 petitions are not consistently predictive of later Whig voting patterns. In Kentucky, New York, and Ohio, petitions against bank removal do predict Whig Party voting in general elections from 1836 to 1852, with the result holding up in Kentucky in four of five election years, in Ohio for three of five election years, and in New York for two of five election years. Thus, within state variation in pro-restoration petitioning appears to be correlated with subsequent election results in the states where stronger state parties developed. This finding suggests that the development of a state Whig Party may have served as a crucial mediating factor in translating political activity indicated by petitioning in 1834 into subsequent electoral success in presidential elections.