Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism

Abstract

The word democracy appears in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution. Yet, by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, the transition to political democracy in the United States was complete. Thereafter, as Alexis de Tocqueville made clear, democracy became the essential characteristic of America. At the same time, Tocqueville admitted that the significance and implications of a democratic polity were often harder to appreciate. In Preserving the White Man's Republic, Joshua Aaron Lynn identifies the rudiments of modern conservatism in the populist democracy of the Jacksonians and their immediate successors. According to Lynn's conception of the Jacksonians' democratic ideology, the full expression of individualism and the full exercise of citizenship rested on patriarchy and white supremacy. The subjugation of women and Black people assured equality among white men. Unlike, for example, the Progressives of the early twentieth century, the Jacksonians did not believe that democracy could be strengthened by its extension to political outcasts. Nature itself had denied them individual rights. Government in the name of the people thus came to mean government in the name of white men. “The people” may have been a political abstraction; white men, Lynn insists, were not. Amid the intensifying sectional crisis and mounting reform ferment of the 1840s and 1850s, “democrats no longer aspired to enlarge democracy,” but to reserve its privileges “exclusively for white men” (p. 3). It was, he concludes, an inherently conservative and, in the end, reactionary undertaking.