Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis by Michael Todd Landis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis by Michael Todd Landis James L. Huston Michael Todd Landis. Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2014. 322pp. $29.95. In this work about the Northern Democratic Party from 1848 to 1860, Michael Landis details the mechanics of party machinery, the maneuvering of the party’s leaders, and the agenda they pursued. For historians of the antebellum era, the cadence of topics is familiar: the Compromise of 1850, the elections of 1852, 1854, 1856, and 1858, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton Constitution quarrel, the Charleston Convention, and the fractured Democratic Party’s futile presidential campaign in 1860. There is no mistaking Landis’s thesis: The Northern Democrats “were willful, knowing collaborators in the Slave Power agenda of slavery expansion and Southern supremacy” (7). Indeed, by 1858 the Northern Democrats were anti-democratic, racist imperialists—the antithesis of what their name implied. In prose studded with unequivocal adjectives and adverbs, Landis pounds home the theme of the proslavery Northern Democrats—they were dough-faces one and all. This book provides much additional information on the party of Jackson in the 1850s, but overall Landis’s interpretations exhibit a host of flaws. Among the strong elements in this book are the investigations of Democratic Party machinery in the nominations of its presidential contenders. Landis explains the division between New York “Hards” and “Softs” with skill and clarity. His portrait of Jesse D. Bright, the Indiana Senator and party chieftain, is the best I have seen. His exploration of the Lecompton Constitution struggle reveals more of Buchanan’s dealings to get votes than previous histories. Buttressing Landis’s narrative is his astounding plunge into manuscripts to ferret out the internal workings of the Northern Democracy. Historians of the antebellum decade will be rewarded in the amount of new information this work offers. Now we come to the drawbacks of the work. Landis writes with a zero-sum attitude toward issues, people, and activities. A person is either proslavery or antislavery; contrary to revisionists then and now, there never was a middle ground. All southerners were fanatics for power and all southerners demanded slavery’s expansion. More specifically, Landis makes claims that go against decades of historical interpretation of the antebellum decades. Here are a few. Was Jesse D. Bright really the “quintessential Northern Democrat”? (2). Certainly James Buchanan had a favoritism toward the South, [End Page 99] but were his credentials “as unquestionable as those of any South Carolinian” (65)? Landis quotes Nicole Etcheson stating that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the “greatest attack on political liberties” in the nineteenth century, when she really had written was “what occurred in Kansas” was the greatest attack on political liberties, not the Act itself (Landis, 118; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era [Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004], 2). What can one do with this evaluation of the outcome of the Lecompton Constitution struggle: “The success of Lecompton was a tremendous victory for the Buchanan administration, the Democratic Party, and the South” (203)? Statements like these litter the pages of this book, and all repudiate standard evaluations of the politics of the antebellum era. When one gets done with this work, the only understanding one can possibly have of the Northern Democrats is that they followed the southern line because they wanted patronage and national advancement via the Democratic Party, and the only way to get it was to get down on all fours and grovel before their Southern masters. There are multiple reasons for the Northern Democrats’ support of some southern positions, but I will go to the heart of the matter. Northern Democrats did not believe that slavery was going to expand into the West (Cuba was a different matter) because they held that climate and geography ruled against it. The real trick for Northern Democrats was to get the South to accept the fact that they were destined to be a minority in the nation but to realize no attack on their peculiar institution was going to result from it. In addition...