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The Ideology of the Ante-bellum Northern Democrats

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Bruce Collins
Bruce Collins
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Extract

Why did large numbers of Northerners vote for the Democrats on the eve of the Civil War? This is a question which the most recent studies of Northern ante-bellum politics leave unanswered. Professor Formisano's pains-taking study of Michigan's party politics amply shows the eclectic character of the Republicans' appeal. Republicans combined a stern mixture of moral purpose and narrow puritanism with a powerful critique of the South. Republicanism emerges from Professor Foner's influential study as a species of stalwart, visionary parochialism quite irresistible to the northern electorate. It represented the self-satisfied affirmation that the proper maintenance of existing Protestant and entrepreneurial values in the socially harmonious North was essential to America's future growth. It also rested upon a belief in the need to resist Southern attempts to push slavery into the western territories. This belief stemmed from a defensive, slightly paranoid interpretation of the operation of federal politics. Congress and the federal administration in Democratic hands were, according to the Republicans, the merest tools of “ the Dominant Class in the Republic, ” the Southern slaveowners. Thus high faith in free society and deep fear of Southern expansion co-existed uneasily together. Republicans, in Eric Foner's view, articulated an ideology which merged together an over-arching notion of the good society (a basically non-class society, in which the ladder of status was short and its ascent easy, and in which the fundamental interests of labourers, farmers and small entrepreneurs were identical) with an immediate call to political action.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 1977 , pp. 103 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

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29 Weekly Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 2, 9 09 1857Google Scholar. See also: Stark County Democrat (Canton, Ohio), 28 09 1858Google Scholar: Chicago Tribune, 22 Oct. 1857: Democratic Pharos (Logan-sport, Ind.) 16, 30 09 1857Google Scholar; Rockport Weekly Democrat (Indiana), 18 11 1857, 20 02 1858Google Scholar; Union and Advertiser (Rochester, New York), 2, 6 10, 3, 24 11 1857Google Scholar. The same rhetoric was used by Southern Democrats. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, the Democratic newspaper depicted a clash of interests between the banks and “ the working man, the artisan and the mechanic.” “ It is labor, industry and honest integrity that constitute the poor man's capital, and often, after the employment of these for years, he wakes up some fine morning, and finds that his hard earnings have rotted in his pockets.” Memphis Appeal, 7 Oct., 1 Dec. 1857.

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33 Atlas and Argus (Albany, New York), 3, 27 07 1858Google Scholar.

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36 This statement is not meant to imply that slavery could not have been introduced into that region, as the proponents of the “ natural limits ” thesis argued. It is simply a description of what happened, or failed to happen, in the 1850s. In the western slave states of Missouri and Arkansas only 13% and 2% respectively of families owned slaves. Randall, J. G. and Donald, David, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston, 1969), p. 68Google Scholar.

37 At twenty-year intervals, these are the percentages of the total American population living in the two Dakotas, Nebraska, Washington and the entire Mountain Region:

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48 The actual percentages were:

The figures for 1858 include the votes given to all Democratic congressional candidates. Anti-Lecompton Democrats won 5·7% of the vote in New York, 3·3% in Pennsylvania and 48·5% in Illinois. These percentages are calculated from figures given in The Tribune Almanac and Political Register, 1856 (New York, 1856), p. 2Google Scholar, and The Tribune Almanac and Political Register, 1859 (New York, 1859), pp. 46–53, 57–61Google Scholar.

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50 Collins, “ The Politics of Particularism ”, pp. 37–40, 129, 174–76; Nichols, Roy F., The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1967), pp. 182–201, 284–86, 326–31Google Scholar; Klein, Philip S., President James Buchanan: A Biography (University Park, Penn., 1962), p. 327Google Scholar.

51 I wish to thank Professor Michael F. Holt, Dr. Nicholas Jolley, Dr. Edward Smithies, and Dr. John Turner for discussing various problems of relevance to this paper. An earlier version of this essay was read in 1975 to Dr. J. R. Pole's American studies seminar at Cambridge. I benefitted greatly from the lively discussion it provoked. I am especially grateful to Dr. Howard Temperley for the interest he took in this paper and for his help in improving an earlier draft.