| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War. By Wallace Hettle. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xiv, 240 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-8203-2282-2.)

The question at the heart of this study is a simple one. How democratic was the Democratic party in the Civil War era? To answer it, Wallace Hettle has elected to focus on five individuals: John C. Rutherfoord, Joseph Brown, Francis W. Pickens, Jeremiah Clemens, and Jefferson Davis. A collection of the famous and the obscure, the sum of their individual stories, according to Hettle, illuminates "the paradoxical nature of democracy in a society dominated by the peculiar institution." Specifically, Hettle argues, in the careers of those five men one can witness on a personal level the ideological clash within the Democratic party between "the competing legacies of [Andrew] Jackson and [John C.] Calhoun." The South's peculiar institution, Hettle concludes, 1

produced a peculiar democracy, distorted by a culture of mastery and social inequality. When Civil War came, democracy crumbled, and Democratic Party leaders proved unable to contain the divisions in white society.

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