Jacksonian Democracy Research Articles

The Lost President: A.D. Smith and the Hidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War America

At the very outset of her deceptively titled book, Ruth Dunley admits that the subject of her biography, A.D. Smith, is a person of “secondary historical importance." Even so, she is drawn to him by the mystery involved in attempting to uncover his life story. Her journey of discovery, recounted in The Lost President, is a long and challenging one. Her persistence in pursuit of that story is impressive and unyielding. In the end, Dunley succeeds in uncovering a life dedicated to republicanism as a would-be president of Canada, a judge who declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, and a tax commissioner in the Sea Islands of South Carolina who sought to give land to former slaves during the Civil War. Throughout, Smith, argues Dunley, was a representative man of the Jacksonian era. He was moved by its vision of the possible and subject to its many contradictions. But, above all, he was a radical Democrat, committed to the principles of majority rule and opposed to the empowerment of the few.

Securing the Southwest: The Northern Pursuit of Texas, New Mexico, and California

Securing the Southwest:The Northern Pursuit of Texas, New Mexico, and California Daniel J. Burge (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution This image humorously depicts the Democratic Party's strategy to win the election of 1844. Northern Democrats saw the annexation of Texas as a winning partisan issue to use against their Whig rivals and a development that would be beneficial to the whole nation, not just the South. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a15078/ [Dec. 21, 2022]. [End Page 416] In September 1847 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Vice-President George Mifflin Dallas delivered an address on the U.S.–Mexico War defending President James K. Polk. After arguing that Mexico was to blame for starting the conflict, Dallas explored another question: "If, upon the conclusion of a treaty with Mexico, we should come into possession of one-half or two-thirds of her territory—what are we to do with it?" Although the outcome of the war was uncertain, Dallas remained confident that the United States would be able to seize a portion of Mexico—indeed that the United States was destined to obtain most of Mexico. "Of one thing we are quite certain," Dallas declared, "—the Yankees will in time overrun that portion of their territory; and though there is much Mexican blood upon it, we may look to the period . . . when a number of large States, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific ocean, will be distinguished in the constellation of our Union."1 Dallas was a northern man, speaking to a northern audience who believed that the future United States would include territory stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Although historians have spent a great deal of time examining why antebellum southerners dreamed of acquiring what became the American Southwest, they have not adequately explained why northerners held similar views. On the rare occasions when historians have examined northern expansionists, they have generally [End Page 417] studied Stephen Douglas and the Young America movement.2 In contrast, then, this essay explores expansionists from New York and Pennsylvania who were not allies of Stephen Douglas or affiliated with Young America. By focusing on prominent northern expansionists such as George Mifflin Dallas, Daniel Dickinson, and James Buchanan and drawing on New York and Pennsylvania newspapers, this essay shows that not only did enthusiasm for territorial expansionism exist outside of the South, it was also to be found among older members of the Democratic Party. Indeed, it was the men whom the Young Americans would deride as "Old Fogys" who helped shepherd through the annexation of Texas and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and who would introduce popular sovereignty into political discourse.3 Northerners played a key role in securing the Southwest for the United States, but they embraced expansionism for different reasons than their southern peers. First, northern Democrats such as James Buchanan and George Mifflin Dallas routinely stressed the economic benefits to be gained from expansion. Northern manufactures, they argued, would find new markets if the United States acquired the lands stretching from Texas to California. In addition, they denied that expansion would empower enslavers. Texas, they argued, would weaken the institution of slavery, as it would drain the enslaved population out of the border states. A few years later, these same northern expansionists cobbled together the idea of popular sovereignty and argued that slavery, even if permitted in territories seized from Mexico, would never flourish. Linking expansion to national greatness, they believed the United States could gobble up territory without increasing sectional tension. These northern Democrats were not "northern men with southern loyalties," or "doughfaces," but were rather [End Page 418] traditional Jacksonian Democrats who believed in the beneficial effects of territorial expansion. Unwilling to accept that North and South would ever come to blows over slavery, they unwittingly propelled the United States toward a conflict by helping to vastly expand the boundaries of the young nation. Nobody championed expansion more earnestly than Robert John Walker.4 Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Walker came from a well-connected family and graduated from the University of...

Claude Berube, On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Chris Costello

Claude Berube, On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Chris Costello

Jews for Jackson: Isaac Harby, Southern Politics during the Election of 1824, and the Rise of Jacksonian Democracy

During the 1824 presidential election, the journalist and southern Jew Isaac Harby of Charleston made his case for Andrew Jackson. Writing under the pseudonym 'Junius,' Harby joined with other pro-Jackson forces and argued that the "Hero of New Orleans" would be the best man to succeed President James Monroe. Though some scholars have commented on the place of Jews within the early Jacksonian coalition, few have explained how and why American Jews united behind "Old Hickory." Harby's political activism mirrors the style and substance of other advocates for Jackson, especially those in the South, but Harby's identity as a southern Jew offers a distinctive case study within early Jacksonian Democratic politics. Although Harby's Jewish identity did not explicitly inform his argument in favor of Jackson, his experience as a southern Jew did influence his support. Harby's anxieties for the future of the American republic reinforced his political convictions. Despite his minority status, Harby shared the same fears and aspirations as his fellow non-Jewish citizens. In the process of supporting Andrew Jackson, Jews like Isaac Harby not only carved out their space in the rise of Jacksonian democracy, but also cooperated in its conception.

Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval

Reviewed by: Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval Kenneth R. Coleman DANGEROUS GROUND: SQUATTERS, STATESMEN, AND THE ANTEBELLUM RUPTURE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by John Suval Oxford University Press, New York, 2022. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $35.00 cloth. In his first book, John Suval makes a novel contribution to the literature on settler colonialism (and Civil War causation) by replacing the term “settler” with a largely overlooked nineteenth-century term for the hordes of farmers, planters, and speculators who ventured west to occupy land without legal title: squatters. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party rebranded squatters from lawless interlopers to Indian-fighting heroes who enlarged the nation at little cost to the federal government. Democratic politicians promoted land-for-votes policies that allowed squatters to bypass auctions and purchase the land they occupied at fixed prices. This strategy, deeply rooted in White supremacy, allowed the Democrats to forge a national coalition of planters, farmers, and immigrants that transcended social class. But according to Suval, a specter haunted this squatter-statesman alliance: slavery. The emergence of the Free Soil ideology among many squatters put them at odds with pro-slavery Democratic politicians. Suval argues that this contradiction, at the heart of what he calls Squatter Democracy, led directly to Bleeding Kansas, the fracturing of the Democratic Party, and the Civil War itself. In the book’s early chapters, Suval describes how squatters transitioned from figures of scorn to veneration. In the early republic, most Federalists abhorred squatters for intruding on public land they envisioned as a future source of revenue for nation building. With the rise of Jackson, many elites promoted squatters as a cost-effective means to clear land for future settlements. Democratic politicians promoted pre-emption legislation that worked in conjunction with Indian removal policies, ensuring that White men would dominate Jacksonian Democracy and the American West itself. Even the Whig Party, founded in opposition to Jackson’s policies, had to embrace squatterism or perish at the polls. Chapters four and five describe how squatters in the 1830s and 1840s drove the national agenda. The Anglo-Americans who entered Texas and Oregon occupied land outside of U.S. public domain, risking potential conflict with Indigenous communities as well as Mexico and Great Britain. The Polk administration backed these squatters by annexing Texas, claiming Oregon via treaty, and invading Mexico. By 1848, U.S. possessions extended to the Pacific Ocean. Suval cites the acquisition of Oregon Territory and passage of the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act as the “high water mark of Squatter Democracy” (p. 113). Indeed, in Oregon (and later Kansas), squatters successfully claimed land before the federal government extinguished Indigenous title, a violation of U.S. legal precedent. Yet Oregon’s status as a free territory represented a turning point, as pro-slavery Democrats realized they had created a monster they could no longer control. The book’s final chapters chronicle the dis-integration of the squatter-statesman alliance. While southern elites hoped newly acquired California would legalize slavery, the scores of antislavery squatters who entered the region to claim Mexican land had different plans. Sectional temperatures rose further in 1854 when Stephen A. Douglas proposed popular sovereignty in Kansas, allowing squatters to decide the issue of slavery for themselves at the polls. The result was a violent clash between pro-and anti-slavery forces, triggering a backlash against what detractors [End Page 98] called “squatter sovereignty.” Unable to reach a compromise on slavery in western territories, the Democratic Party soon split along sectional lines and all but guaranteed the election of Abraham Lincoln and southern secession. Dangerous Grounds is an extensively researched, convincingly argued, and readable political history with a fascinating dash of cultural history. Readers of this journal will be particularly interested that Suval makes the U.S. colonization of Oregon a key moment in his narrative. The book might have been strengthened by more robust discussions of property rights and democracy itself. Indeed, Suval’s use of the upper-case Democracy in the title and elsewhere is somewhat confusing. By “Democracy,” Suval does not refer to a system in which the masses...

On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube

Reviewed by: On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube David Head (bio) Keywords U.S. Navy, Andre Jackson, Maritime history, Naval history On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era. By Claude Berube. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 248. Cloth, $54.95). Claude Berube once asked Robert Remini, the late Andrew Jackson biographer extraordinaire, what Old Hickory thought of the navy. "He didn't like it," Remini replied. "He didn't understand it, and he didn't use it" (xii). Remini's assessment reflects the conventional wisdom. Jackson was an army man, after all, a nationalist who was thrifty with a dollar—not the kind of person to project American power across the globe with expensive ships. But as Berube shows, this view of Jackson is inaccurate, a result of a lack of serious engagement with Jackson's relationship with the navy. It turns out that because of Jackson's support, the U.S. navy emerged from the 1830s as a larger, better organized, more technologically advanced, and more professional service than it had ever been. In six thematic chapters, Berube gives a full appraisal of the antebellum navy. He discusses how the navy differed from the army—cruising distant seas, for example, meant going months without orders from Washington and depending on foreign governments for port access to resupply. The book covers as well how the navy was governed, shipbuilding and the adoption of steam power, the development of a strategy that prioritized protecting commerce through the selective use of force, and the professionalization of an officer corps that participated in a self-conscious maritime republic of letters. Berube deftly uses traditional sources, such as presidential speeches, official correspondence, and magazines, in addition to less often used documents including records of the House and Senate Naval Affairs Committee, which show legislators hashing out policy before it got to the floor of Congress and into the Congressional record. Berube also mined some 16,000 pages worth of courts-martial records. Berube's background as a former Senate staffer allows him to offer insight on the budget process and the nitty-gritty politics of appropriations. Overall, Berube argues that Jackson's presidency was a vital period of growth that left the United States poised to take its place among the naval [End Page 634] powers of the Earth later in the century. The navy created international squadrons. It built ships—seventeen of them, the same number as under James Madison and behind only John Adams, both administrations that fought naval wars (69). It began the transition to a steam fleet, with small steam-driven vessels that would be especially effective during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) along the coast and through the rivers of Florida. Jackson's administration reformed the naval bureaucracy and brought order to issues of personnel, supply, construction and maintenance, logistics, and budgeting. The officer corps professionalized, particularly in educating new officers. The haphazard system of teenage midshipmen learning math, science, and literature from the ship's chaplain, who was often someone mostly interested in having a naval rank and not an actual clergyman let alone a teacher, gave way to more rigorous shipboard training and, eventually, the founding of the Naval Academy in Annapolis (1845). Though Jackson is present in some chapters more than in others, there's plenty for Jackson scholars to learn about his presidency. For example, Berube argues that the naval dimension of Jackson's foreign policy, centered on protecting American commerce, showed restraint dictated by America's position in the world. Berube discusses four incidents in which American ships suffered attacks in far-flung locales: in the Falkland Islands (1829–1831), Quallah Battoo in Sumatra (1831), Savai'i in Samoa (1834), and the Namorik Atoll in the Marshall Islands (1835). A belligerent Jackson would have authorized naval reprisals in all four, but as Berube points out, Jackson authorized force only for the Falkland Islands and Quallah Battoo, because he saw both as critical to U.S. trade. A naval officer acting on his own attacked Savai'i, which Berube doubts Jackson would have approved, and he ordered no response to the...

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

On Second Thought

On Second Thought

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

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.

Rock Trolls and Recovery

Rock Trolls and Recovery

From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840 by Brett Goodin

Reviewed by: From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840 by Brett Goodin Konstantin Dierks From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770–1840. By Brett Goodin. Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 224 pages. Cloth, ebook. Brett Goodin’s From Captives to Consuls presents a prehistory of the “self-made man” (1) in the era of the early American republic, before the symbol came to loom large in the nation’s cultural imagination. Though he credits Henry Clay with coining the phrase on the U.S. Senate floor in 1832, Goodin insists that “generations of American men had been inventing and reinventing themselves alongside the colonies’ own reinvention into a united nation” (1).1 Drawing inspiration from Linda Colley’s 2007 The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Goodin deploys a microhistorical approach “to chart an emergent United States in three lives and three lives in an emergent United States” (5).2 How, he asks, did individuals contribute their mite to the larger cultural project of American nation building? Goodin’s answer is that the pursuit of “self-making” (2) by nonelite white men was a crucial component in furthering American expansionary ambition in the first decades of the early republic. Goodin’s book weaves together three biographical studies of figures closely associated with geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Barbary States from 1784 to 1815: Richard O’Brien, James Cathcart, and James Riley. Each experienced captivity at the hands of the Barbary States, and the first two subsequently served as U.S. consuls in North Africa. Though they were united by this Barbary connection, their complete life histories were also remarkably similar: O’Brien, Cathcart, and Riley all worked as sailors in the 1770s before they became captives of the Barbary States, and in the 1830s, after their experiences in North Africa, all became involved in settlement of the “Old Northwest”—O’Brien in western Pennsylvania, Cathcart in Indiana, and Riley in Ohio. Though conceding that their experiences as captives and consuls were exceptional, Goodin maintains the full arcs of their lives were more typical of Americans during these formative years for the nation. [End Page 145] O’Brien, Cathcart, and Riley, Goodin argues, were confronted throughout their working lives by the same “forces of global conflict, commerce, and cultural exchange” faced by “many (if not most) Americans within the former colonies” (6). Indeed, Goodin sees the historical forces of the period spanning the “revolutionary era” and the “Jacksonian era” as converging especially “markedly” (6) in the cases of these three. Because of their roles, moreover, they produced a “trove of source material,” enabling Goodin to argue for the underappreciated contributions of these “non-elite” (6) historical figures to the national development of the young United States. Goodin recognizes from the long-standing lessons of social history that the three “(admittedly, white) American men” (6) cannot be treated as fully representative given the social diversity within the nation. But he views them as “exemplars of the era” (6) because of their circumstances—“volatility and insecurity in employment, finances, personal relationships, and safety”—and how they responded; they were “forced to cultivate a talent for adaptability and reinvention that was the hallmark of the self-made man” (1). This pattern of self-invention began for these men in the 1770s, Goodin maintains, when “early lessons in self-interested self-making at sea taught them to adapt to circumstances and routinely tack their identities and allegiances toward profit and security” (6). Building upon these experiences, he argues, they continued to find some measure of personal success “through their ability to adapt to circumstances beyond their control and to change and exploit identities and patrons while navigating a dizzying array of professions” (2). In their unexpected interactions with and then employment within the U.S. government, these nonelite men contributed to the international reach and western expansion of the United States. Moreover, in their claims to expertise about North Africa and then about the Old...

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

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

Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833: Unsettling the Mythic West

Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833: Unsettling the Mythic West

Populism, localism and democratic citizenship

This article articulates and explores a localist conception of citizenship that stands in contrast to more liberal, neoliberal and cosmopolitan conceptions. A localist orientation, and some real sympathy, is evident in specifically ethnographic accounts of voters who supported Trump, Brexit and populism more broadly, including such accounts by Arlie Hochschild, Robert Wuthnow, Kathy Cramer and Justin Gest. This localist orientation echoes the Antifederalist opponents of the American Constitution, Jacksonian Democrats, Tocqueville’s account of American democracy and the American populists. I consider both the virtues and vices of localism. The possible benefits include local practices of nested reciprocity, special obligations, specifically local ‘social bases of selfrespect’ – in the terminology of John Rawls – and feelings of belonging and home (what the Germans call Heimat). However, localism also has its downsides: its resources can empower prejudice and exclusion. I end with a reflection on localism and exclusion in Lorraine Hasberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

Populism, Localism and Democratic Citizenship

This article articulates and explores a localist conception of citizenship that stands in contrast with more liberal, neoliberal, and cosmopolitan conceptions. A localist orientation, and some real sympathy, is evident in specifically ethnographic accounts of voters who supported Trump, Brexit, and populism more broadly, including such accounts by Arlie Hochschild, Robert Wuthnow, Kathy Cramer, and Justin Gest. This localist orientation echoes the Antifederalist opponents of the American Constitution, Jacksonian Democrats, Tocqueville’s account of American democracy, and the American populists. I consider both the virtues and vices of localism. The possible benefits include local practices of nested reciprocity, special obligations, specifically local “social bases of self-respect” – in the terminology of John Rawls – and feelings of belonging and home (what the Germans call Heimat). However, localism also has its downsides: its resources can empower prejudice and exclusion. I end with a reflection on localism and exclusion in Lorraine Hasberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Reviewed by: Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn Padraig Riley Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. Joshua A. Lynn. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-8139-4250-6. 288 pp., cloth, $39.50. In this insightful book, Joshua Lynn analyzes the ideology of the Democratic Party from the end of the Mexican-American War to the onset of the Civil War. Lynn follows a range of men, North and South, who remained committed Democrats down to 1860, in an attempt to portray "the political thought of a party" (7). Although disputes over the governance of slavery ultimately drove Democrats into sectional discord, Lynn is more interested in the ideas and commitments that held them together and enabled the party to reunify during Reconstruction. The empowerment of white men formed the core of Democratic thought. Democrats, Lynn argues, united "Enlightenment individualism and democratic majoritarianism" with white supremacy (29). Democrats championed popular sovereignty, but they drew hard racial lines around who constituted "the people." They celebrated individual autonomy, but always considered the liberal political subject as "a raced and gendered being—abstract individualism took concrete form in the master of black and female dependents" (36). Here, Lynn's argument is a version of Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) writ large: not only South Carolina yeomen but white men across the nation identified with slaveholders because of their shared mastery over wives, children, or slaves. At other moments, Lynn instead emphasizes herrenvolk democracy as the binding force between Democrats North and South. [End Page 237] "Northern Democrats," he argues, "showed as much solicitude as southerners for racism's leveling effects among white men" (29). To promote white freedom, Democrats gladly accommodated the oppression of enslaved people. As James Buchanan's 1856 campaign biography put it, "the peace, prosperity, and safety of twenty millions of the happiest, freest, and most advanced white men . . . should not be sacrificed—nay, not even jeopardized for the supposed interests of three millions of the African race" (3). Within their white world, however, Democrats considered themselves liberal and tolerant. They opposed nativism and welcomed immigrants, including Irish Catholics, as fellow citizens and fellow white men. They rejected temperance and abolitionism as "fanatical" movements that would use the state to constrain white men's freedom to drink and enslave. Instead, they envisioned a decentralized republic founded on popular sovereignty, where local white male majorities governed themselves and all others. Such toleration of white men's liberty and power would resolve the sectional crisis, as Stephen Douglas promised, by allowing territorial settlers to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery in their midst. The question, of course, was whether this intersectional accord of white supremacy could survive the politics of slavery. Lynn acknowledges that the Democracy took form in order to suppress debate over slavery, but he tends to downplay the extent to which slaveholders embraced antidemocratic and illiberal politics to defend their power. We hear little in this book about the three-fifths clause and little more about the defense of property rights in enslaved people. By 1860, slaveholder resistance to majoritarianism had undermined even the resolutely white supremacist democracy championed by Douglas. Lynn contends that late antebellum Democrats altered the course of American conservatism. Instead of a Burkean commitment to the organic development of political institutions through time, Democrats defended the extension of natural rights, egalitarianism, and majority rule through American space. They did so not to foment cosmopolitan revolution, however, but to conserve an exclusive republic for white men. As such, Lynn argues, they anticipated the late-twentieth-century New Right, who likewise made "individualism and democratic populism" core conservative values (178). While provocative, these claims need more work to defend. Democrats did invoke the adjective conservative to justify their opposition to abolition, but it is hard to find any substantive engagement with conservative political philosophy among Lynn's characters. A more traditional intellectual history, focused on a few key thinkers and texts, would complement Lynn's synthetic but somewhat diffuse portrait of Democratic thought...

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

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

Spór o wybory powszechne na stanowiska sędziowskie w amerykańskim dyskursie publicznym w okresie „demokracji jacksonowskiej”

The article presents the debate that took place between supporters and opponents of popular election of judges in the United States during the so-called “jacksonian democracy” (also called populist democracy) from the early thirties of the 19th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. Starting from the presidency Andrew Jackson, the political fight between mere people represented by the Democratic Party, and the elites whose interests defended the Whigs Party took place in the US. The subject of the dispute has become a demand for a broader participation of the people to exercise power and democratization of the existing oligarchic republic, through the extension of electoral rights and widespread elections as methods of casting most public office. One of the subjects of the dispute during the state constitutional conventions was the issue of popular elections of judges. The implementation of popular election system demanded Democrats emphasizing the importance of democratic legitimacy for the independence of the judiciary and the development of the Judicial Review. Against the popular elections of judges were Whigs convinced that this will lead to the fall of authority of the judiciary and make it subject of Parties' competition. The author indicates that the debate ended with the victory of democrat postulates and introducing the popular election of judges in most states. However, lawyers participating in constitutional conventions, representing both Democrats and Whigs, have introduced a number of institutions ensuring the independence of the judiciary and the possibility of effective implementation of the judicial review. Political changes from the period of Jakcson’s democracy have contributed to raising the authority of the judges and strengthened the role of judiciary in the American political system.

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

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

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...