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

In this deeply researched, well-written book, Michael Todd Landis offers a scathing indictment of the northern Democratic Party in the decade before the Civil War. Going beyond familiar narratives about party leaders like Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, Landis details the intricate process by which state and regional party bosses purged the Democratic Party of antislavery elements during the 1850s and created a political machine totally subservient to the interests of the slaveholding South. Resistant to popular sentiment, northern “doughfaces” like Jesse D. Bright of Indiana, Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, and Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts are presented as eager tools of a southern Slave Power determined to suppress dissent and nationalize slavery (p. 4). Landis argues that such men held on to power within the northern Democratic Party, despite their increasing unpopularity, because of the party’s pro-southern internal structure and their own ruthless manipulation of patronage. Yet in the end, Landis shows that the doughface strategy was catastrophic for both the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole. Despite huge electoral defeats in 1858 and serious signs of weakness in advance of the 1860 elections, northern doughfaces made support for the fraudulent Lecompton constitution in Kansas and the proposed federal slave code for the territories tests of Democratic loyalty. These unpopular policies pleased southern political bosses, but they paved the way for both party schism and electoral defeat in 1860.

Among the most striking elements of the book is Landis’s argument that in their defense of the Lecompton constitution, many northern Democrats repudiated their party’s rhetorical commitment to majoritarian rule and embraced overt antidemocratic sentiments. Having suppressed or ignored the nascent antislavery views of their own constituents, doughfaces like William Bigler of Pennsylvania and Graham N. Fitch of Indiana had little difficulty flouting the will of the large antislavery majority in Kansas. Rank-and-file northern Democrats were committed to procedural democracy in Kansas, even if the outcome extended slavery, but northern doughface leaders openly endorsed minority rule, insisting that majorities could be dangerous and that the protection of southern rights and the need for sectional reconciliation trumped the will of the people. Their argument, Landis writes, was that “[t]he people … should have no voice in government except at elections, and then only as long as the will of the people did not run counter to the interests of the Slave Power” (p. 203).

This book is quite traditional in its approach to the political history of the 1850s. Largely ignoring political culture, it focuses almost exclusively on the maneuvering of Democratic political insiders, their responses to elections, their complex bargaining at national and state conventions, and their intense personal animosities. While the extraordinary depth of Landis’s research on these subjects is one of the book’s greatest strengths, the world he describes is quite self-contained and insular. Whigs, Republicans, abolitionists, and even the South itself are presented in somewhat abstract, monolithic terms, far less significant to the story than the personal rivalries among the Democrats themselves. When Landis speaks of the South or the Slave Power, moreover, he does so without much attention to the ideological or geographical divisions in southern politics that historians like William W. Freehling have pointed out. Attention to such issues would not have lessened Landis’s highly persuasive indictment of the northern Democrats, but it might have placed their sometimes bewildering decisions in greater context. Yet just as it stands, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis should be seen as an important contribution to the vast but evolving literature on antebellum politics and the coming of the Civil War.