The Alabama Whig Party was the affiliate of the American Whig Party in the state of Alabama. The Whigs benefited from the late 1830s economic depression and from the support of small hill-country farmers in Northern Alabama against the political and economic power of the Democratic-leaning large planters. The political sway of the planters and bankers of the Broad River Group created perceptions among Alabamians that the state was run by an elite moneyed class. Supporters of Henry Clay and states' rights activists like Dixon Hall Lewis (who opposed Jackson's strong stand against South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis and his use of the military to remove Alabamian squatters from Muscogee lands before they were open for white settlement) coalesced to form the state's Whig Party in 1834.
The Panic of 1837 led to Whigs improving their showings at the 1839 state elections, while failing to win the governorship and legislature. The Whigs attracted support from river valleys throughout the state and in coastal regions where men were more involved in commerce with the outside world. In 1840, the Alabama Whigs won 45% of the vote in the presidential election while making gains against the Democratic majority in the state legislature. The Democrats responded with a "white basis" gerrymandering system in 1842, making it so that only whites counted towards electoral district populations and thus eliminating or adjusting boundaries to the Democrats' benefit. By the mid-1840s, the Whigs were split between Henry Clay and John Tyler's factions of the party, and it was confined to the Black Belt region until it made a comeback in 1846. The Whigs narrowly lost Alabama in the 1848 presidential election, but the rising slavery issue led to a downturn in the Whigs' fortunes. The party's economic expansion and moral reform platform was undermined by the prosperity of the 1850s and the rise of the sectarian divide. While Democrats split between secessionists and Unionists supportive of the Compromise of 1850, they still gerrymandered electoral districts ahead of that year's election and further reduced Whig power in the state. After Winfield Scott was nominated for President in 1852, many Whigs either defected to the Democrats or Know Nothings. The Whigs failed to repeal the "white basis" system in 1853 and grew increasingly marginalized in state politics. Attempts to reorganize the party prior to the American Civil War were unsuccessful and the party ceased to exist by the end of the 1850s.