The plebs are coming to kill us, isn't far off from the slaves are coming to kill us.
Also remember the Haitian Revolution in living memory. The State's Rights Whigs and nullifiers were also part of the Whig coalition.
The Southern Whigs were certainly planter heavy.
Compare to say someone like Andrew Johnson the epitome of a Jacksonian Democrat, who while certainly racist, represented a classist anti-planter view that led to his militant opposition to the Confederacy and desire to hang Robert E. Lee (it was Grant that saved Lee by the way). Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens (CSA VP) were both Whigs.
Not saying that all Democrats wanted to hang the plantation elite, but it would be a mistake to view the Democrats of this period as a party of slave owners with no relation whatsoever to modern day. Populism and anti-elite/wealthy politics has been around since the beginning.
Ok, but let me make a counterpoint. The state most representative of the planter elite class, even more so than the nullifiers’ home state of South Carolina, was Virginia — and it was solidly Democratic (in fact, so was South Carolina for the most part). Kentucky and Tennessee, on the other hand — arguably the two states most representative of the backcountry yeomen farmers — were quite Whiggish.
I don't think Yankee is arguing the Democrats were an anti-slavery party —far from it, especially in the South. You cannot accurately characterize a state based only on its elections, however, and in any case the significance of electoral politics in this discussion is more complex than simply observing state-level winners. Just as Virginia had a significant Whig minority, both Tennessee and Kentucky registered large Democratic votes throughout the 1840s and 50s. Polk managed nearly 46% against Clay in the latter's home state in 1844, and Tennessee went Whig by only just over a hundred votes the same year, while Lewis Cass garnered nearly 48% in 1848. So while the Whigs were unquestionably the governing party in both states, they were not universally loved; and if we consider the prominent Whigs who emerged from these states during the Whig era —Clay, Crittenden, Bell, Hugh L. White —all were prominent slaveholders whose wealth and social standing was derived from their plantations.
Furthermore, while her proximity to the Ohio River renders Kentucky doubtlessly a "Western" state, that indispensable relationship with the river was a source of strength both for Whiggism and for slavery —and inseparable so. Slavery in Kentucky has been viewed as perhaps milder than that which existed in the lower South; but it is very important to note that
while in the lower South and the Virginian Tidewater, the profitability of slavery was tied to the production of cash crops, in Kentucky its profitability was tied to the slave trade itself. Kentucky's climate was not conducive to the kind of massive plantations that existed in the Gulf region and along the Atlantic coast. This fact nearly led Kentucky to abolish slavery in its early years of statehood; but after 1807, Louisville, Kentucky became one of two poles of the domestic slave trade (the other, of course, being New Orleans).
This was a thriving business —the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade after 1807 dramatically increased the commercial value of slaves already in the United States —and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were the major avenue of the domestic slave trade. Not only slaves, but also tobacco and other products produced on plantations run by slave labor, were transported along the Ohio as far as St. Louis, and from there down the Mississippi for transport to domestic or foreign markets. In the early nineteenth century, however, this was no easy undertaking: snags and sandbars routinely sank boats on the Ohio (as many as 40% of crafts bound for New Orleans were lost in this manner), and there was no easy way to circumvent the Falls of the Ohio, which acted as a barrier to trade between the upper Ohio and the all-important port of New Orleans. Support for internal improvements to remove these impediments was near universal on both sides of the river; but efforts to execute these at the state level failed, as no state wanted to pay for improvements that would benefit any other —so federal funding became the solution. The General Survey Act of 1824 and two federal bailouts of the Louisville–Portland Canal cemented Kentuckians' support for federal improvement projects. Thus, far from being separate from or hostile to the interests of the planter elite, Kentucky's commitment to Whiggism was a reflection of the needs of slavery in that region. In the Tidewater, by contrast, their close proximity to the Atlantic meant exporting the produce of slavery was easy, and thus the priority of the planter elite was not internal improvements, but free trade, a goal better served by the Democratic commitment to low tariffs.
