The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (review)

Wallace Hettle offers a useful corrective to the tendency to break analysis of Southern politics in 1861, to focus on explaining secession to the neglect of understanding Civil War politics. Combining social and cultural history with a sure understanding of state level politics, Hettle focuses on the region's dominant Democratic party. He argues that the Democrats, especially their leaders, were torn between the egalitarian roots of the party and the reality that it functioned in a hierarchical slave society. For Hettle, "equal participation in a system characterized by inequalities is not possible" (4). During a war that demanded an enormous sacrifice from common people, from nonslaveholding whites, the gulf between the ordinary citizen and the slaveholding leadership widened. As a result, "the South increasingly lacked a popular foundation for the struggle" (10). Hettle stops short of insisting that the South lost the Civil War because of politics but argues that the increasingly high desertion rates and the lack of will to continue the fighting in 1865 derived in part from a political system that could no longer balance defending slavery and individual rights.

Every chapter deals in one way or another with "the complexity of the interaction between planters and yeoman in the Civil War era" (39). Hettle begins with an extended discussion of the ongoing role of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson in the antebellum Democratic party. Jackson gave the party a highly gendered base—the image of an iron willed and independent man who dominated all others. Jefferson famously elevated yeoman farmers and the egalitarian society in which they lived to an ideal type. Few who came after Jackson, however, possessed his adroit balance of a defense of the yeoman with a display of manly strength and independence. Instead as secession approached and the Civil War unfolded leaders of the Democratic party often sought manly control and dominance at the expense of equal rights and equal participation by the yeoman. Hettle uses case studies of John C. Rutherford of Virginia, Joseph Brown of Georgia, Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, Jeremiah Clemens of Alabama, and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi to illustrate his point and to explain the variations and similarities between the Southern states.

In each of these case studies, Hettle deftly explains both high politics and low politics: the overarching tension between elite control and democracy and the particular feuds, divisions, and issues that divided the public in individual states. For example, Hettle attributes the creation of a dictatorial Executive Council in wartime South Carolina to prewar schisms caused by such issues as conflict over legislative apportionment and the connection of South Carolinians to the national Democratic party. Yet even in South Carolina, devotion to Jacksonian principles and the need to ensure up-country support of the war caused the state's political leaders to retreat from aristocratic control symbolized by the Executive Council.

In the end, however, Hettle's major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and of Southern politics is to remind us of the role of slavery in all aspects of Southern life. The tension between elite control and manly dominance on one side and democracy and egalitarianism on the other grew from this. As Hettle puts it, "The peculiar institution produced a peculiar democracy, distorted by a culture of mastery and social inequality" (171). This democracy as well as the Democratic party that expressed it disintegrated during the war, weakening the political will and the ideological foundation of Southern citizens and the Southern government.

By connecting wartime politics with prewar politics, by illuminating the distinctive features of each state, and most importantly by focusing on the political stress created by slavery, Hettle adds to our understanding of southern politics and to the debate over why the South lost the war.