Railroads, Revenue, and Reform : Decline of the New Jersey Whigs

The demise of the Whig party is one of the most significant developments in nineteenth-century American history. The system of national political competition between Whigs and Democrats provided a powerful institutional safeguard against sectional extremism. The party's collapse created a vacuum within which sectionally oriented parties came to the fore, leading ultimately to secession and Civil War. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the reasons for the Whigs' decline in New Jersey, a state in which a relatively old and stable party system disintegrated in a period of four years.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.