A failure to reach a majority consensus signals the doom of an American political party, writes Thomas Balcerski.
Editor’s note: Thomas Balcerski teaches history at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King” . The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN. The United States has been without a speaker of the House of Representatives since October 3, and the situation doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
The anti-slavery Whigs felt that the party had not gone far enough to resist the expansion of slavery, and they eventually coalesced into the Republican Party. Southern Whigs, for their part, joined an anti-immigrant party or switched to supporting the Democrats. Whig partisan William Henry Seward, who would go on to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, was content to let his party die: “Let, then, the Whig party pass. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it.
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