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

Abstract

The collapse of the American political system in the decade before the Civil War has been thoroughly studied, including the rise of the Republican Party by Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970) and the collapse of the Democratic Party by Roy Franklin Nichols’s Disruption of the American Democracy (1948). One could cite many other works, but Michael E. Woods claims to be filling a gap left by Nichols. Woods maintains that while there is considerable literature about the split between Republicans and Democrats, there has been less analysis of the Democratic breakup. While Nichols covered only the latter half of the 1850s, Woods views the party’s disintegration through the lens of the life stories of those champions of the northern and southern Democrats, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. Both men, of course, have eminent biographers: Robert W. Johannsen on Douglas and William C. Davis on Jefferson Davis. Woods’s dual biographical approach, however, personalizes the story of sectional fissures within the Democratic party. Woods starts with their commonalities, especially their stories as migrants who sought upward mobility through westward settlement. In Davis’s case, his father brought him to Mississippi as a child and he benefited from his brother Joseph’s great success as a planter and enslaver. Douglas emigrated to Illinois as a young man looking to better himself. As Woods shows, Illinois was a free state but tolerated de facto slavery and accommodated powerful anti-black prejudice. Woods is very clear about the uneasy alliance between northerners and southerners within the Democratic Party from its founding. In fact, it is sometimes hard to see what Davis and Douglas had in common as Democrats. Davis and other white southerners were committed to protecting slavery, while Douglas emphasized the westward expansion his southern counterparts often blocked when it did not advance proslavery interests. While Douglas did not originate the ideology of popular sovereignty, i.e., that popular majorities should decide on slavery, he became its leading champion and was uniquely associated with it. Davis is not so much a progenitor of a distinctive ideology as representative of white southerners. In fact, he is often considered to be more adamant in protecting slavery lest he be seen as “soft” on the issue (175). In early 1860, Davis presented proslavery resolutions to the United States Senate, but he was regarded as a moderate rather than a fireater.