Lost in the avalanche of images that has bombarded us since last week’s Capitol insurrection, was one of a small, blood-smeared, white marble bust of our 12th president, Zachary Taylor.

He died in office from an attack of acute gastroenteritis brought on after gorging raw fruit and milk during 4th of July celebrations. His brief tenure was sandwiched between the larger-than-life Andrew Jackson, and the coming of the Civil War and the trial-by-fire leadership of our greatest American president, Abraham Lincoln. So what is it about Taylor and his blood-smeared bust that connects us to the present? Taylor was the second elected president of the long-forgotten Whig party. He just so happened to have presided over a party that was coming apart at its seams before collapsing within six years of his death in 1850. Prophetic? Whenever the nation undergoes political paroxysms, as an American historian I’m instinctively drawn to our past to look for parallels. The Whigs sprang into existence in the mid-1830s in opposition to Jackson’s heavy-handed politics. The Whigs were a blend of economic elites and the middle class in the North and South. Yet in the six presidential elections they managed to field candidates, only once did their candidate receive a majority of the popular vote — the Indiana war hero, William Henry Harrison. But misfortune hounded the Whigs throughout. Harrison contracted pneumonia during his inauguration and died within the month.

The party championed federally backed infrastructure, protective tariffs and opposed immigrants fleeing Ireland and northern Europe for a better life in America. Its northern faction grew alarmed about the nation’s expansion of slave-holding territory in the mid-1840s and opposed the war with Mexico in 1846.

The party appealed to idealistic moderates and was led in Congress by some of the towering political figures of the age, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Abraham Lincoln cut his political teeth as a Whig when he ran and won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1846.

In 1848, the Whigs nominated Taylor. He was also a southerner and he owned slaves, though personally didn’t want to see slavery spread. And thus the seeds of the Whig party’s demise were sewn. By the summer of 1850, the party was splitting at its seams over the issue. The non-slaveholding northern wing couldn’t support slavery’s spread into the newly acquired territory from Mexico. The southern faction, quite the opposite.

In 1852, the party nominated Winfield Scott. The Whigs were in a state of free fall, its northern and southern factions peeling off into third parties dedicated to nativism, or to blocking the expansion of slavery or to join the Democrats. By 1856, its openly nativist candidate, Millard Fillmore, could muster 21 percent of the popular vote. The party dissolved with barely a whimper. Back to the recent events at the Capitol. Was what we witnessed the first gasp of a national political party’s death rattle? The GOP is facing the fact it has won the national popular presidential vote only once since 1988, and its base is rapidly shrinking. Is the GOP headed the way of the Whigs? It is too early to tell. It’s also hard to remember now but out of the ashes of the Whig funeral pyre of 165 years ago rose a new, more morally focused party, one that attracted principled, visionary politicians like Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party. Perhaps the leaders of the GOP would do well to look at its roots. The party dedicated itself to blocking the spread of slavery and championed the nobility of work, and the virtue of honestly gained capital. Can the party inoculate itself from the Trumpism virus? Does it even want to? The health of the republic is at stake.

Epilogue: Within four years of the Whig’s last breath, civil war engulfed the nation.