Book Review

Canada and the United States

"How democratic was the Democratic Party?" (p. 2) is the question that frames Wallace Hettle's engaging discussion of southern politics before and during the Civil War. His answer, essentially, is that it was not, because southerners could not sustain even limited democracy in a culture of inequality based on slavery and honor. Although southern Democrats promoted, and many truly believed in, the party's egalitarian image and message, its leaders were slaveowners determined to protect the institution and conditioned to seek, even expect, mastery over other men. Politicians bound by the public demands of honor conflated "political supremacy and masculine authority" (p. 58). In the end, Hettle concludes, the Democratic Party served the interests of planters at the expense of yeomen farmers.

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According to Hettle, southern Democrats embraced Thomas Jefferson's ideology, which historians often term agrarian republicanism: a community of independent farmers possessing exclusive political rights, but also duties, which bound them together as virtuous citizens. To this conception was added Andrew Jackson's aggressive masculine image that prized personal honor and the raw physical courage and loyalty of ordinary white men, exemplified by the citizens' militia. These democratic ideals, however, sank in the region's culture of inequality. Increasingly worried about white unity and pressured nationally by the growing free soil movement, Democrats endorsed repressive, conservative, "whiggish" policies in the 1850s. These included internal improvements that most upcountry yeomen opposed as threatening to personal independence. Ultimately, most planter-politicians feared that the nonslaveowning majority was unreliable and therefore refused to submit disunion to popular referendum.

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