Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn (review)

How did the American Democracy—a party once defined by Andrew Jackson’s championing of “the agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes” against the “money power”—within a generation become a party of southern slavemongers and their northern coadjutors? One conventional historiography sees the Democracy metamorphosing in the 1850s, renouncing its egalitarian and majoritarian roots for the defense of racial (and gender) hierarchy. Echoing northern voters and politicians who forsook the party in the 1850s, historians of this bent see the true Democratic ethos by 1860 residing mainly among Republicans, not Democrats.

Joshua A. Lynn has a different answer. Some men may have quit the party, but the party itself did not really change. The exaltation of white male mastery that typified Democracy by 1860 had really undergirded it all along—indeed, lay at its core. Democrats did not merely fail to challenge racial and sexual boundaries; they had deliberately erected them. Their democracy was not imperfectly inclusive but definitionally exclusive. From the beginning, they upheld the unfettered power of free white men to do as they please, including holding sway over everybody else. The universal values they proclaimed were universal for some only: values of “Enlightenment egalitarianism, natural rights, and racial essentialism” (2), of “democracy, equality, andwhite male supremacy” (5). And while party credos and allegiances have shifted over time, the conjoining of racial and sexual privilege with white male egalitarian individualism that was effected by Jacksonian Democrats remains central to American conservatism—and American democracy—today.

Rather than an abandonment of party ethos in the years leading up the Civil War, Lynn thus sees an evolution in circumstances and adversaries. Jackson’s founding generation had battled aristocracy and privilege, but by the 1850s the white republic was an established reality, and the threats to its safety now came from elsewhere—from reforming “fanatics,” proponents of novel social arrangements, temperance, women’s rights, and antislavery. To combat these foes, the party’s rhetoric and emphasis shifted; its core premises and values did not. The aim now was preservative, not revolutionary. Yet first, last, and always, “the white male individual lay at the heart of Democrats’ political ideology. Democrats built their notions of progress, social order, and, ultimately, the Good Society around this raced and gendered individual” (35).

Lynn explicates this thesis by examining Democratic rhetoric in the 1850s, the decade of party realignment, the Kansas debacle, Buchanan’s election, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. During these years, he says, the Democracy was threatened less by sectional disharmony—for on white male dominance all Democrats agreed—than by internal ideological conundrums. Lynn sees the “popular sovereignty” doctrine not as an expedient dodge around the issue of slavery in the territories, but as a declaration of universal Democratic precept: white men should decide slavery, as they should everything else, for themselves. The doctrine imploded in Kansas not because it exposed an underlying sectional cleavage over slavery, but because it triggered a crisis in the application of democratic principle, as the individual right of white men to hold slaves or not collided with the majoritarian right of a self-governing community of white men to set its own rules.

The question of what constituted Jacksonian Democracy’s true identity and legacy, and of who maintained and who betrayed it, is ultimately unanswerable. Secessionists, Douglasites, and Republicans all claimed the mantle of True Democrats in 1860, and esteemed historians have been found to uphold them all. It may be that preserving white male mastery had indeed been a constitutive element—a feature, not a bug—in the Democratic ethos all along. Yet, as Lynn himself stresses, it matters greatly how a party portrays itself, the words of self-definition and purpose with which it chooses to go before the electorate. The drumbeat word for 1850s Democrats was “conservative.” In his chapter on James...