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

In this insightful book, Joshua Lynn analyzes the ideology of the Democratic Party from the end of the Mexican-American War to the onset of the Civil War. Lynn follows a range of men, North and South, who remained committed Democrats down to 1860, in an attempt to portray "the political thought of a party" (7). Although disputes over the governance of slavery ultimately drove Democrats into sectional discord, Lynn is more interested in the ideas and commitments that held them together and enabled the party to reunify during Reconstruction.

The empowerment of white men formed the core of Democratic thought. Democrats, Lynn argues, united "Enlightenment individualism and democratic majoritarianism" with white supremacy (29). Democrats championed popular sovereignty, but they drew hard racial lines around who constituted "the people." They celebrated individual autonomy, but always considered the liberal political subject as "a raced and gendered being—abstract individualism took concrete form in the master of black and female dependents" (36). Here, Lynn's argument is a version of Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) writ large: not only South Carolina yeomen but white men across the nation identified with slaveholders because of their shared mastery over wives, children, or slaves. At other moments, Lynn instead emphasizes herrenvolk democracy as the binding force between Democrats North and South. "Northern Democrats," he argues, "showed as much solicitude as southerners for racism's leveling effects among white men" (29). To promote white freedom, Democrats gladly accommodated the oppression of enslaved people. As James Buchanan's 1856 campaign biography put it, "the peace, prosperity, and safety of twenty millions of the happiest, freest, and most advanced white men . . . should not be sacrificed—nay, not even jeopardized for the supposed interests of three millions of the African race" (3).

Within their white world, however, Democrats considered themselves liberal and tolerant. They opposed nativism and welcomed immigrants, including Irish Catholics, as fellow citizens and fellow white men. They rejected temperance and abolitionism as "fanatical" movements that would use the state to constrain white men's freedom to drink and enslave. Instead, they envisioned a decentralized republic founded on popular sovereignty, where local white male majorities governed themselves and all others. Such toleration of white men's liberty and power would resolve the sectional crisis, as Stephen Douglas promised, by allowing territorial settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their midst.

The question, of course, was whether this intersectional accord of white supremacy could survive the politics of slavery. Lynn acknowledges that the Democracy took form in order to suppress debate over slavery, but he tends to downplay the extent to which slaveholders embraced antidemocratic and illiberal politics to defend their power. We hear little in this book about the three-fifths clause and little more about the defense of property rights in enslaved people. By 1860, slaveholder resistance to majoritarianism had undermined even the resolutely white supremacist democracy championed by Douglas.

Lynn contends that late antebellum Democrats altered the course of American conservatism. Instead of a Burkean commitment to the organic development of political institutions through time, Democrats defended the extension of natural rights, egalitarianism, and majority rule through American space. They did so not to foment cosmopolitan revolution, however, but to conserve an exclusive republic for white men. As such, Lynn argues, they anticipated the late-twentieth-century New Right, who likewise made "individualism and democratic populism" core conservative values (178). While provocative, these claims need more work to defend. Democrats did invoke the adjective conservative to justify their opposition to abolition, but it is hard to find any substantive engagement with conservative political philosophy among Lynn's characters. A more traditional intellectual history, focused on a few key thinkers and texts, would complement Lynn's synthetic but somewhat diffuse portrait of Democratic thought...