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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy by Michael E. Woods Paul D. Escott (bio) Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy. By Michael E. Woods. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 338. Cloth, $34.95.) The coming of the Civil War is a topic that has received enormous attention from historians, while also attracting many of the profession’s best minds. Books written about Abraham Lincoln surely hold the record as most numerous, but studies of the war’s approach and its causes would contend strongly for second place. The secondary literature is extensive [End Page 105] and deep, and the careers of prominent political leaders are well known. Thus it takes both courage and dedication to undertake a study that reexamines in depth familiar events, people, and interpretations. Michael E. Woods has done that in his study of the rivalry and conflicts between two principal leaders of the Democratic Party: Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis. The clashes between these two leaders of the Democracy may not be as celebrated as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but they were frequent, important, and revealing. At times, too, they were dramatic and much publicized, so they make for an account that has human interest as well as great historical significance. Woods is to be congratulated for a study that is grounded in extensive research, both in primary sources and in the enormous secondary literature. His methodology is that of the traditional political historian writing in the respected tradition of David Potter. That is, Woods takes the reader deeply into the speeches, correspondence, and plans of the two principals, as well as into the important reactions of their colleagues and constituents. He does this with sensitivity to major lines of interpretation and historical arguments, and the absence of sociocultural and quantitative methods does little to harm his story, focused as it needs to be on the two leaders. The result is a very readable, informative, and judicious account showing how the rivalry of Douglas and Davis reflected divisive forces within the Democratic Party and between North and South. Woods’s findings could hardly be completely new given that this is a much-studied topic, but they are valuable not only for their occasional challenges to others’ viewpoints, but also, and especially, for the overall perspective that the book provides. Woods shows clearly that the conflict between the interests of North and South was deep, was original within the Democratic Party, and was expressed with increasing clarity and asperity through the careers of Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis. Woods sets the stage well for the major clashes between these men in the 1850s. He reminds his readers that when Martin Van Buren undertook to build a new party uniting “‘plain republicans of the north’ and the ‘planters of the South’” (46), he hoped to suppress sectional tensions but could not escape them. The careers of Douglas and Davis developed within a Democratic Party that increasingly felt the tensions between North and South. Both Davis and Douglas saw themselves as westerners, intent on expanding the interests of their sections into a western empire. But “Douglas would make the hemisphere safe for white men’s self-government; Davis would make it safe for slavery” (7). Jacksonian Democrats were united by “zealous expansionism, shrill racism, and strident nationalism” [End Page 106] (41), but the conflict between the goals of North and South steadily became more acute. Woods proves that by 1848 the split between Douglas’s vision and Davis’s goals was complete and unshakable. Popular sovereignty for Douglas was “a means to sidestep congressional controversies and empower his extended constituency. For Davis, it was a threat to property rights” (94). By 1850 Davis was ready to make “northern acquiescence to proslavery policy . . . the price of union” (102). Of the two men, Douglas had the more challenging position, since he had to “deliver for northern voters while working within a southern-dominated party,” and Woods makes a strong case that “the central story of late antebellum politics was not southern resistance to federal overreach but northern reactions to minority rule...