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

Revolutions never benefit all. Historiographical revolutions leave areas of the discipline in the dust and replace them with new methodologies or new targets of inquiry. The revolution of social history so thoroughly crushed what came before it that I cannot recall having read a single book on political history in graduate school. While the efforts of social historians bore incredible fruit, every modern American historian has a story about an adviser or colleague sneering about the old guard who spent their days lecturing about party politics, elections, and famous leaders. Fortunately, Joshua A. Lynn has ably used some of the sharpest insights of social historians to help bring a new level of understanding to the politics of the 1850s.

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism makes an elegant argument that successfully blurs the lines between political and social history. Arguing that "Democrats who introduced popular sovereignty in the late 1840s turned the radical tenets of Jacksonian Democracy toward the conservation of racial order," Lynn demonstrates that politics can never truly be removed from the society in which it operates (p. 12). The central theme of the book is that popular sovereignty was intended to be a means to protect the rights of white men, which were the only rights that concerned Democrats, but over the course of the 1850s their republican facade was removed because of what they saw as a worsening racial crisis. Antislavery ideology and other types of fanaticism threatened to use popular sovereignty to seize political power from white men. Thus, Democrats were forced to shift their political platform to the simple defense of white supremacy. Popular sovereignty, states' rights, and other cherished theories of Jacksonian Democracy had to be put in the service of preserving white supremacy. While reading this book in the political climate of the contemporary world, a reader might wonder if there have ever been any political theories that have not been cast aside for partisanship.

If there are any shortcomings of the book, they are only that it does not go far enough in merging political and social history. While much of the thesis hinges on white men, Lynn occasionally does not fully explore the meaning of whiteness over time. The book could use a more nuanced approach to explaining how European immigrants fit into the Democrats' racial ideas. Recent work on whiteness suggests that there is a deeper interpretation that merges critical race theory and political history than what Lynn presents. The book also wants to show that the Democrats' move to give up their republican ideals fused conservatism with white supremacy. Considering that other historians, such as Theodore W. Allen and Winthrop Jordan, have shown that white supremacy was a key force in American politics much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, it is not entirely clear that this is in fact a phenomenon appropriately dated to the 1850s. These shortcomings do not, however, take away from the book's achievements.

The writing style is easy to follow and maintains the reader's attention, even when broaching complex material. The book is well laid out and would be an intriguing choice for a graduate class on the Civil War era. Preserving the White Man's Republic may require too much of a foundation in the material for undergraduates, but it will likely be an influential book for future studies of politics in the era.