The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (review)

With this book, Richards breathes new life into the claim that belief in a Slave Power conspiracy was both broad and deep; the book's sole explicit aim is to explain the "Slave Power thesis," which it does well. Concisely and chronologically, Richards traces the power that slave-holders were able to wield in Congress from the drafting of the Constitution through secession in 1860. In an accessible narrative style, Richards takes his readers step by step through the rise of the Slave Power in Congress. The three-fifths clause, he argues, combined with Senate parity, gave slaveholders an advantage from the outset. Richards' central point, however, is that pro-slavery interests, always a minority within Congress, could never have secured the votes to pass key legislation without the aid of Northern men who voted with the South. These "doughfaces," as "Northern men with Southern principles" were called, constitute the main focus of Richards' book.

Richards examined the votes on seven key measures regarding slavery, from the Missouri Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He presents the results in a series of tables by measure, by party, and by region, to trace the evolution of "doughfacism."

However, apart from their lending persuasive credence to the belief in a Slave Power conspiracy, Richards remains curiously reticent on the broader significance of his findings. His focus on the Northern doughfaces raises important questions about the long-term impact of sectionalism on the parties. Although Richards takes note of changes in party formation, he draws no explicit conclusions about correlations between the Slave Power issue and the realignment of the parties in the 1850s. On the one hand, he repeatedly asserts that Northern doughfaces were "more likely to be Jeffersonian Republicans than Federalists, and far more likely to be Jacksonian Democrats than Whigs" (109). On the other hand, at one point, he cautions that doughfaces did not necessarily represent the "mainstream of the northern Democracy" (112), though he later observes that the number of Democrats and of doughfaces in Congress "as always, went hand in hand" (194). After Democratic losses in the 1854 election, the pro-slavery forces were unable to marshal sufficient Northern support. Richards points out, however, that even so, "Half the northern Democrats still voted with the South. Indeed, the overall percentage voting with the South barely changed at all" (195).

If, as he suggests, doughfacism was a Democratic phenomenon, what difference, if any, did rising sectional tension over the antebellum decades make within that party? Some of this confusion might have been clarified had Richards explained his methodology in more detail. In a note, he states that his sample consisted of 1,300 men, whose affiliations he derived "from many sources, but mainly from" Congressional reference sources of recent compilation (110 n.). One might also wish Richards to have reflected on whether persistent doughfacism among Northern Democrats casts new light on the postwar competition between the two parties.

Nonetheless, Richards compels us to reconsider the Slave Power seriously, and scholars of antebellum politics will have to reckon with his findings of persistent doughfacism among free-state Congressmen throughout the antebellum era.