Southern Loyalties Research Articles

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...

Patrick H. Breen. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt.

In 1904, after being editorially deprived of writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois informed his editor that he wished to write about Nat Turner because “no single man before 1850 had a [more] giant influence on southern loyalties & feeling” than did the failed Virginia insurrectionist. “There is abundant material for his life & times,” he concluded (Du Bois to Oberholtzer, [January 30?, 1904], handwritten draft #00244, W. E .B. Du Bois Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries, University of Massachusetts, Amherst). While Du Bois unfortunately was denied this project too, Patrick H. Breen certainly has proven him correct by making good use of this “abundant material” on Turner, notwithstanding his own recognition that information about the revolt at times “is sketchy and often suspect” (13). Nevertheless, perhaps, no scholar has so deepened the research or so sagaciously and meticulously examined the available sources as we find done in The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt.

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

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...

Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

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

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

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

Michael Todd Landis.<i>Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis</i>.

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

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

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

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

Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

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

Northern Men with Loyalties: The Democratic Party and Sectional Crisis. By Michael Todd Landis. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. 334. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Yonatan EyalIn last two decades, historians such as Leonard Richards, Nicole Etcheson, Matthew Mason, and late Don Fehrenbacher have explored roles of doughfaces and the Power in antebellum American politics. They have documented remarkable public dominance of Old South's planter elite nationwide and importance of northern sympathizers in its creation, reminding us that slavery became a national institution affecting every aspect of American life. Michael Todd Landis's new book contributes to this literature by revealing partisan maneuvering through which northern Democratic politicians of 1850s promoted southern hegemony in Washington. In a detailed and highly readable account, he offers most complete picture now available of how northern Democrats used party customs and procedures to maintain southern sway in face of mounting northern unrest.Landis structures his indictment chronologically, starting with 1850 compromise debates and ending with presidential election of 1860. He recounts that decade's familiar events-Kansas-Nebraska, Lecompton, and so on-with an eye on northern Democrats' responsiveness to southern demands. He wisely pays attention to state-level politics as well, giving us glimpses of Senator Jesse Bright's Indiana political machine and New York Democrat William L. Marcy's chronic factional frustrations. He clearly shows how northern Democrats acted as accomplices of southern Slave Power, backing its bid for control of party and federal government. Northern Democrats became doughfaces who advanced South's slavery-expansion agenda in their quest to hold power within organization. In process, he argues, they actually formulated a doctrine of minority rule (reminiscent of John C. Calhoun's concurrent majority theory) that justified ignoring their own free-state constituents and voting with [sjouthern bosses (24) instead.Landis combines admirable archival digging with a brisk narrative style to take us deeper behind scenes of party intrigue and negotiation than any previous analysis. He covers careers of key northern Democratic leaders, from Lewis Cass to James Buchanan and many lesser lights, and demonstrates how conciliation of southern proslavery ideologues became a central means of gaining nominations and appointments. Landis's contribution is not in realm of partisan ideology and political thought (he belittles rhetoric repeatedly), but in workmanlike back-room operations of party apparatus (a la classic studies on this subject by Roy F. Nichols).There is nothing factually amiss in Landis's expose; it is a witheringly accurate and thorough depiction. But there are problems galore when it comes to framing, context, and interpretation. First, by implying that his is only story to be told about antebellum northern Democrats, he distorts nature of party by essentializing it. From Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to Jean Baker to Sean Wilentz, scholars have told many worthwhile stories about northern Democrats: their localist constitutionalism, which cannot be reduced entirely to race or slavery; their liberal views on European immigration, non-Protestant religion, and old-world republicanism; and their courageous stands on banks, monopolies, and trade unions. Landis rejects these features of organization as mere rhetoric (3, 225): all that is real, to him, is southern appeasement.Landis's misleading categorical statements, such as Southern power and slavery expansion were fundamental principles of antebellum Democracy (3), convey impression, again, that there are no other valid narratives about northern Democrats, that interpretations of Schlesinger and Jonathan Earle, Robert Johannsen and Charles Sellers, have no value. …

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

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

Northern men with Southern loyalties: the Democratic Party and the sectional crisis

Northern men with Southern loyalties: the Democratic Party and the sectional crisis

Flag Culture and the Consolidation of Confederate Nationalism

AS WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL'S TRAIN RUMBLED THROUGH NORTH Carolina on April 15, 1861, the celebrated diarist of the London Times spotted his first Confederate flag, waving atop a pine tree stripped of its branches. By the time he witnessed a similar banner floating over Fort Sumter Charleston, South Carolina, the Englishman had seen countless versions of the new Stars and Bars displayed forests, settlements, towns, and cities along his route. All was noise, dust, and patriotism communities readying themselves for war, he reported, observing that true revolutionary furor was in full sway. The activity that buzzed around the flags caused him to marvel how [t]hese pieces of coloured bunting seem to twine themselves through heart and brain. (1) Though Russell was impressed by the initial enthusiasm of such flag waving, he sensed that this Confederate frenzy was fueled by novelty rather than tree devotion. He suspected that loyalties to the new republic would face sterner tests the future, as the excitement of secession gave way to the grimness of war. Soon enough, the new republic's symbols would have to be judged by their ability to sustain morale on the battlefield and to capture the popular imagination, the same way that the American flag would be judged the North during the early 1860s. Russell went so far as to suggest that the rebellion might even succeed if southerners could endow their own banners with the same sort of mystical aura that clung to the Star-Spangled Banner. If ever there is a real sentiment du drapeau got up the South, he noted, will be difficult indeed for the North to restore the Union. (2) Russell's musings about Confederate flag devotion call to mind several recent attempts to reframe the perennial issue of the quality of southern nationalism during the American Civil War. His suggestive comments implied, as Drew Gilpin Faust would state more forcefully 1988, that Confederate nationalism was not merely a reserve of earlier loyalties, nor could it be quantified during the secession crisis by those who speculated about likely Confederate fortunes. (3) Russell anticipated contemporary scholarship his understanding of nationalism as an ongoing set of cultural innovations that would be undertaken by white southerners during the war itself. While Confederates would build their sentiment du drapeau upon earlier celebrations of flags American patriotic life, they would also invent a broad range of rituals, literary productions, and musical efforts. Such cultural activities, which Faust's Creation of Confederate Nationalism put on the research agenda for Civil War scholars, represented the sort of large-scale, identity-forming collective discourse to which modern scholars of nationalism have increasingly turned their attention. (4) In this context, earlier attempts to sketch the deficiency of southern loyalties at the time of secession have given way to studies concerned with how southern citizens became attached to the larger Confederate effort through the crucible of their own wartime initiatives. (5) In focusing attention on how the flag, specifically, might sustain the rebellion, Russell presaged an even more recent emphasis on the martial orientation of Confederate nationalism. Though Faust touched on this theme, Gary W. Gallagher has gone much farther toward offering a more explicit battle-centered perspective his The Confederate War. This volume, which appeared 1997, highlights the crucial importance of generals, and especially of Robert E. Lee, as symbols of motivation and inspiration for Confederate patriots. Taking issue with Faust at many points, Gallagher presents evidence of a healthy and vital Confederate nationalism, though his own evidence qualifies, at least part, some of his conclusions. (6) Even so, his study establishes beyond doubt the allure of military glory and sacrifice to Confederates and thus helps to explain the power that military symbols such as battle flags wielded war. …

Thomas Lanier Clingman: Fire Eater from the Carolina Mountains

Thomas Lanier Clingman: Eater from Carolina Mountains. By Thomas E. Jeffrey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 450. Illustrations. $50.00.) At minimum, Thomas E. Jeffrey deserves commendation for devoting a decade to compose a biography of such unlikable person. Egotistical, eccentric, and thin-skinned, Fire Eater From Carolina Mountains emerges from this book as at heart arrogant, self-serving politician. Never married, Clingman deliberately made his choice of ambition for his mistress, and fame for his reward (3) while his niece recalled that the prizes for which strove in every act of his political (2) were to be a senator then president. Clingman did become a force in antebellum era and remained a presence in North Carolina politics later into nineteenth century, and in this solid biography his career presents an interesting and useful window into political culture of that period in American history (319). Historians know Clingman as nonslaveholding congressman representing North Carolina's district who, notwithstanding slavery's minimal presence in highlands, led his constituents out of party into a Democratic organization committed to a strong defense of southern rights. As much as any other individual, Jeffrey notes, he was responsible for transformation of North Carolina from a bastion into a Democratic (2). Ironically, despite book's subtitle, Clingman actually was no eater. An intelligent, inquisitive, and opportunistic young man, Clingman first rose to prominence advocating policies, especially government-sponsored internal improvements, that believed would bring prosperity to mountains. In North Carolina legislature and in his first congressional term, Clingman persistently supported ultra Whig measures. Belying his later fire eater label, voted against reimposition of that prevented Congress from reading or debating antislavery petitions. Previous scholars, most notably John C. Inscoe and Mark W. Kruman, have pointed to Clingman's vote against gag rule as reason for his defeat for reelection in 1845, a defeat, they argue, that produced his later southern radicalism. Jeffrey instead demonstrates persuasively that important lesson Clingman learned from this loss was not southern loyalties of mountain voters but importance of Democrats as swing voters in his predominantly district. Remaining in party, Clingman regained and held his congressional seat by balancing his appeal as champion of western North Carolina's interests with his image as independent who refused to follow dictates of a Raleigh Clique at head of state party. He realized, too, that election to Senate depended upon Democratic votes in legislature. Thus, in 1850s intoned rhetoric of Southern Rights to curry favor (69) with opposing party. Yet Clingman never advocated secession, insisting that a strong defense of South provided best way to preserve Union. Even after formally switching parties in 1856, Clingman's initial support for Stephen A. Douglas's presidential aspirations and his advocacy of Young America movement's calls for further territorial expansion show that, as a Democrat, is better understood as nationalist than as a southern partisan. …

Three southern readers and southern oratory

At least three collections of “pieces” for recitation and declamation were produced to promote southern loyalties and to shield their young readers from encounter with abolitionists. None of the three, however, emphasized the sectional theme as much as loyalty to the Union and the Constitution.