Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s.

From the early 1830s, Lincoln was a steadfast Whig and professed to friends in 1861 to be, " an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay ".

He was the only Whig in the Illinois delegation, but he showed his party loyalty by participating in almost all votes and making speeches that echoed the party line.

Realizing Clay was unlikely to win the presidency, Lincoln, who had pledged in 1846 to serve only one term in the House, supported General Zachary Taylor for the Whig nomination in the 1848 presidential election.

" Drawing on remnants of the old Whig party, and on disenchanted Free Soil, Liberty, and Democratic party members, he was instrumental in forging the shape of the new Republican Party.

Neither the Democratic or the newly formed Whig party was then well organized in that part of Tennessee.

In 1839, Johnson entered the race for re-election to his House seat, initially as a Whig ; when another Whig entry arose, to enhance his position in the campaign, he ran as a Democrat and was elected to his second, non-consecutive term in the Tennessee House.

With the party split, Whig nominee Zachary Taylor was easily victorious, and carried Tennessee as well.

The opposition was appalled, with the Richmond Whig for example, referring to him as " the vilest radical and most unscrupulous demagogue in the Union.

Time was also taken up in a controversy involving his Senate colleague from Tennessee, John Bell, a leading Whig.

The other great party, the Whigs, was anathema to Disraeli: " Toryism is worn out & I cannot condescend to be a Whig.

In the years after Grey's retirement the party was led first by Lord Melbourne, a fairly traditional Whig, and then by Lord John Russell, the son of a Duke but a crusading radical, and Lord Palmerston, a renegade Irish Tory and essentially a conservative, although capable of radical gestures.

The Third Reform Act also facilitated the demise of the Whig old guard: in two-member constituencies, it was common to pair a Whig and a radical under the Liberal banner.

By contrast, the British press were jubilant ; many newspapers sought to portray the battle as a victory for Britain over anarchy, and the success was used to attack the supposedly pro-republican Whig politicians Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

There is a debate in the historiography, because Hooker lived too early, Halifax did not belong to any party, Hume was not involved in politics, and Burke was a Whig.

Edmund Burke was the private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham and official pamphleteer to the Rockingham branch of the Whig Party.

Burke was a Whig, while the term Tory is given to the later Conservative Party.

However there was no consistency in Whig ideology, and diverse writers including John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were all influential among Whigs, although none of them was universally accepted.

Strongly entrenched in an organic but very English Catholicism, advocating culturally traditionalist and agrarian values, directly challenging the precepts of Whig history — Belloc was nonetheless an MP for the Liberal Party and Chesterton once stated " As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism.

However, in the UK, the symbolism ends there, since the real governing authority of the monarch was all but extinguished by the Whig revolution of 1688-89 ( see Glorious Revolution ).

In March 1840, Harrison pledged to serve only one term as President if elected, a pledge which reflected popular support for a Constitutional limit to Presidential terms among many in the Whig Party.

When new issues of nativism, prohibition and anti-slavery burst on the scene in the mid-1850s, no one looked to the quickly disintegrating Whig party for answers.

No one saw any prospects for the shrunken old party, and after 1856 there was virtually no Whig organization left anywhere.

The Whig Party, which had been one of the two major parties in the U. S., had disintegrated since the 1852 election over the issue of slavery, and new parties such as the Republican Party and American Party, or “ Know Nothing Party ” competed to replace it as a major party.

In his great Dictionary ( 1755 ) Johnson defined a Tory as " one who adheres to the ancient Constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig.

He did retain a hard core of supporters however, known as Peelites, and at one point in 1849 was actively courted by the Whig / Radical coalition.

The Whig Lord John Russell brought forward one such measure in 1820, proposing the disfranchisement of the notoriously corrupt borough of Grampound in Cornwall.

Two rival delegations — one Whig and the other Democrat — had been certified as elected by different branches of the New Jersey government.

Harley attempted to entice him to join the Tories, but Walpole rejected the offers, instead becoming one of the most outspoken members of the Whig Opposition.

Webster's increasingly nationalistic views, and his effectiveness as a speaker, made him one of the most famous orators and influential Whig leaders of the Second Party System.

But the spirit of union was still strong in the region and fewer than 40 % of the southern congressmen signed the address, and only one Whig.

He was one of the last nationally prominent Whig office holders.

William " Parson " Brownlow, the radical publisher of the Knoxville Whig, was one of the region's leading anti-secessionists ( although he defended the practice of slavery ).

Perhaps one great testament to Fox's character is that subscriptions to the old Whig club of Brooks's would decline on the rare occasions when he was called away to government office, because one of the prime entertainments would no longer be available.

The Russell family had been one of the principal Whig dynasties in England since the 17th century, and were among the richest handful of aristocratic landowning families in the country, but as a younger son of the 6th Duke of Bedford he was not in line to inherit the family estates.

The Whig party further split over the French Revolution, with Burke writing to Fitzwilliam on 4 January 1797: " As to our old friends, they are so many individuals, not a jot more separated from your Lordship, than they are from one another.

He was one of the leaders of the Whig party in Scotland in its days of darkness prior to the Reform Act of 1832, and was a close friend of Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.

The noted historian E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition.

He quickly gained a reputation in the House of Commons, where he was one of the most frequent speakers, and was regarded by some as a potential future leader of the Whig Party.

However, Brougham ’ s career was to take a downturn in 1812, when, standing as one of two Whig candidates for Liverpool, he was heavily defeated.

He became a part of the Whig circle of Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Prince of Wales, and soon became one of the major leaders of the Whig party.

He served as Governor of Mississippi from 1835 to 1836 as a Whig and again from 1850 to 1851 as a Democrat and one of the leading Fire-Eaters.