Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy by Michael E. Woods (review)

In a book review written for a different scholarly journal in 2015, I took to task a fellow historian of the antebellum Democratic Party for "mak[ing] it seem less complex than it actually was" (Journal of the Early Republic 35 [Fall 2015], p. 514). The monograph now under review, by Michael E. Woods, brilliantly evokes the intricacy, diversity, evolution, and internal dissension of the fraught Jacksonian coalition crafted by Martin Van Buren in 1828 and torn apart in 1860.

Woods employs a joint biography of Senators Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi in order to illuminate intra-Democratic tensions between property and democracy. Specifically, Woods contrasts Douglas's pet formula of local majoritarianism with Davis's elevation of southern ownership protections over popular sovereignty. Douglas consistently relegated divisive policy questions to local free white male voting, in accordance with Jacksonian ideology, while Davis distrusted majority rule as a threat to southern rights in human property. Woods shrewdly zeroes in on this disagreement, mostly as expressed in their congressional debates of the 1840s and 1850s, in order to document the split that ultimately fragmented the Democratic Party and the Union.

Woods's well-organized history of the Democracy's sectional cleavage down to 1860 represents the first full reexamination of this topic since Roy F. Nichols's classic account, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948). Woods's treatment is interpretively updated and biographically focused, and starts in the 1820s. He presents Davis and Douglas as westerners devoted to Andrew Jackson's uneasy alliance of "planters and plain republicans," and he narrates their intertwined political careers from the 1830s through 1861 (p. 53). Throughout their time together in Washington, D.C., and at home among their constituents, they drifted apart on issues such as internal improvements and a Pacific railroad. But their epic clash surfaced with the U.S.-Mexican War, as Davis parroted John C. Calhoun's claim that conquered western territory belonged to all Americans, who could not be kept out alongside their slaves, while Douglas doubled down on the rights of frontier majorities to regulate bondage as they wished.

Woods's ingenious pairing of Davis with Douglas yields myriad insights and correctives. First, Woods underscores the comparative moderation of Douglas and his fellow northern Democrats, given the sheer hatred of popular sovereignty evinced by Davis and his ilk. Contrary to the fashionable assumption that "'squatter sovereignty'" functioned as a screen for slavery expansion, die-hard southern opposition toward empowering local majorities indicates just how un-doughface-like were Douglas and his allies (p. 3). Second, the book reinforces recent scholarship on the reactionary nature of southern society, which fought fiercely against the power of the ballot. Third, Woods refutes the argument that white supremacy provided a sufficient glue for the Democracy, since bisectional racism offered no relief from the intraparty impasse over Black property versus white democracy. Last, Woods completes our picture of Davis and the South as the true late-antebellum nationalists, egging on Congress positively to protect slavery in the territories against local legislatures, with Douglas remaining the localist who espoused white community self-rule.

Woods might have engaged more with Calhoun's concurrent majority theory, not just his common property doctrine, a surprising omission in a work about the southern fear of "'King Numbers'" (p. 91). Woods also never explains a puzzle at the heart of his story: Davis's durable devotion to the Democracy, distinguishing him from his unpartisan mentor Calhoun. I suspect that generational affiliation played a role, since Davis matured during the second party system's ferment whereas Calhoun learned politics during the protean earlynational era.

Overall, Woods's dual biography is elegantly written, clearly and persuasively argued, and filled with fresh and astute interpretations that restore the antebellum Democracy...