Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis by Michael Todd Landis (review)

One could make the argument that northern Democrats were the only group of men in the 1850s who could moderate between proslavery forces and those who at least did not want the peculiar institution to spread into the territories. And yet, as Michael Todd Landis writes in Northern Men with Southern Loyalties, they did anything but. Driven by their own desires for higher office, political power, and personal gain, northern Democrats forced from the party anyone deemed soft on the slave question, insisted on rigorously proslavery policies, ignored the wishes of their own constituents, and recklessly helped drive the Democratic Party toward an ugly breakup in the 1860 presidential election and the South toward secession. Landis strongly suggests that even more than the southern wing of the party, northern abettors were responsible for the onset of the Civil War because “they carried the antidemocratic, minority rule crusade of the Southern grandees to the free states” (246).

This well-written book focuses exclusively on high politics—particularly those involving Congress and the president. Governors and party bosses get slight attention, and voters do not take the stage at all. However, it is in the Capitol and the Executive Mansion where national policy regarding slavery and the spread thereof was being made. Early in the book, which is to say in the wake of the Mexican War, southern men dominated Congress, as they had since the republic was founded, and had valuable allies in the form of the “doughfaces,” northern men with southern sympathies. By Landis’s account, doughfaces controlled the most critical elements of the party machinery in the North, including the committees that determined party policy at the state level and the patronage that rewarded the faithful and punished the strays.

Landis visits the expected stations of the cross: the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas/Bleeding Sumner, Dred Scott, the Lecompton Constitution, and the Senate debates between two promising Illinoisans, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Each step sees the Democrats become more rigid, more ideological—though Landis avoids discussing this progression—and more defensive. Doughfaces forced out the nonbelievers, or antislavery northerners quit the party on their own. By 1858, the party had distilled itself into a purely proslavery entity.

That is not to say that all was settled among the Democrats. Led by President James Buchanan, whom Landis portrays as among the most villainous in this gang of rogues, proslavery forces turned their might on Douglas for his discomfort with the Lecompton Constitution. Douglas saw the constitution for what it was, a fraud, and fought endlessly to preserve popular sovereignty. Despite its catastrophic failure in Kansas and its unpopularity in the North, Douglas continued to push his plan through the end of the decade, arguing that popular sovereignty was a solution to the slavery question—even as he acknowledged that it favored slave owners. Lincoln called Douglas out on this in Freeport, and Douglas’s answer, that antislavery forces in the territories could act against slavery by not passing the laws that undergirded it, served only to drive him farther out of favor with Buchanan and the slave power. Even so, Douglas held on to his Senate seat.

Douglas’s insistence on the promise of popular sovereignty, and his lame response to Lincoln, was emblematic of northerners in the party. If nothing else, Landis’s account is a jaw-dropping tale of men racing ever faster toward a cliff, running every red light, warning, and stop sign along the way. One wonders at the end how the Democratic Party survived past 1860, but Landis ends the book with that election and does not address the question even in his “after 1860” section. This leaves the question for an ambitious graduate student to take on.

While Landis’s story is well sourced (though the structure of the footnotes is highly confusing...