whig and tory

Dictionary of American Words And Phrases by John Russell Bartlett.

Names of political parties. The history of the origin of these names is thus given by Cooke: "According to Roger North, the country party were the first to brand their opponents with the name by which they were afterwards to be designated. The Duke of York naturally affected the society of those whose religion was the same as his own, and the Catholic Irish were, therefore, in great favor with him. This circumstance occasioned the popular party to call all the opponents of the Exclusion Bill, Irishmen. The hatred the majority of the English bore to popery, rendered this an opprobrious term; but it required to be strengthened before it could express the animosity of a hostile party. The epithet became successively "Wild Irish," and "Bog-trotter;" but it was yet imperfect until some zealous member of the opposition found invective and euphony united in the word Tory, a name applied to a set of ruffians in the disturbed districts of Ireland--according to North, to the most despicable savages among the wild Irish. The word Whig is of Scotch origin. It was, say some writers, used in that country for the curd into which milk was reduced previous to being converted into cheese; it was thence deemed applicable to the sour and curdled tempers of the persecuted Covenanters. The rebellion of that ill-used sect, of course, rendered them an object of the greatest abhorrence to the high church and high monarchical Tories, and they bestowed this name upon their opponents in England as the most reproachful they could discover.


"Bishop Burnet, however, gives another derivation of this word. He dates it from the year 1648, when the Scotch people, excited by their ministers, rose and marched to Edinburgh to oppose the prosecution of Duke Hamilton's attempt in favor of the captive king. The south-west counties of Scotland, producing little corn, were obliged to send to Leith for stores of that article, which were supplied by the superior facilities of the northern counties. The carriers who repaired to Leith for this purpose were then called Whiggamors, from the word wiggam, which they used in driving their cattle. The inhabitants of Leith and Edinburgh very naturally extended this epithet to the whole of the inhabitants of the counties whence these men came; and as the insurgents who occupied Edinburgh sprang chiefly from the West, that circumstance was called the Whiggamors' inroad. The name was afterwards applied to the whole body of Covenanters, gradually shortened into Whig, and thence, as already mentioned, the word was introduced into England."--Cooke's Hist. of Parties, Vol. I. p.138.

Let such men quit all pretence to civility and breeding,--they are ruder than Tories, and wild Americas; and were they treated according to their deserts from mankind, they would meet everywhere with chains and strappadoes.--Glanville, Sermons, 4.

During the war of the American Revolution, the terms Whig and Tory were applied--the former to those who supported the revolutionary movement; the latter to the royalists, or those who adhered to the British government. Tory was then a stigma of the most reproachful kind.

Dictionary of American Words And Phrases by John Russell Bartlett.

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