Wages of Whiteness

The Dred Scott decision (1857) sought to enshrine white supremacy in constitutional law and vanquish the antislavery activists who opposed Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis’s Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the Davis-Douglas rivalry intensified in the late 1850s. Racism and anti-abolitionism were flimsy foundations for party unity because they could not resolve the tension between Douglas’s majoritarianism and Davis’s dedication to slaveholders’ property rights. This conflict exploded into intraparty war in 1858 as Democrats debated the admission of Kansas as a state under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. Embraced by Davis and like-minded Democrats for safeguarding property rights, the Lecompton Constitution was assailed by Douglas and his allies as a perversion of popular sovereignty. After clashing over Lecompton in the Senate, Davis and Douglas had to defend themselves back home. Davis veered toward more extreme positions on reopening the Atlantic slave trade and passing federal legislation to protect slavery in western territories. Meanwhile, Douglas ran for re-election against Abraham Lincoln, a formidable foe who forced him to prove that popular sovereignty could produce free states. By 1859, Democrats’ efforts to win state and local elections exacerbated their party’s internal sectional conflict.

Countries over Party

After playing conspicuous but ineffective roles in the final search for compromise in 1861, Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas faced the reality of their failure to maintain the Union while aligning the Democratic Party behind their competing agendas. Forced by secession and the outbreak of the Civil War to choose between party and patriotism, both embraced the latter, but this only widened the breach between them. Davis cast his lot with the Confederacy, over which he would preside during the most famous chapter of his long political career. Ironically, as Confederate president he would confront familiar problems of balancing property rights with majority rule. Meanwhile, Douglas rallied reluctant northern Democrats behind a war effort led by Abraham Lincoln, throwing his considerable influence into the war for the Union before dying in June 1861.

Jackson Men

This chapter surveys the early history of the Democratic Party and traces Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis’s paths into national politics. First, it charts the rise of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1820s and 1830s, using the career of Martin Van Buren to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the party’s cross-sectional coalition. Although successful in winning elections and notching policy victories, the Democratic Party suffered from ominous sectional divisions. These became especially alarming in the 1840s, just as Douglas and Davis entered Congress. Loyal to Jackson and devoted to the Democracy, Davis and Douglas entertained divergent visions for the party’s future. Douglas embraced the party’s populist rhetoric, muscular expansionism, and commitment to white men’s egalitarianism. Davis regarded the party as an instrument for protecting slavery by making preservation of masters’ property rights a national imperative. Friction between these rival Democrats shaped both men’s careers from the moment they stepped onto the national political stage.

Western Men

Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas both identified closely with the Mississippi River Valley, which they envisioned as the core of a sprawling continental empire. By situating them in time and place, this chapter illuminates their ambitions and ideals. Davis, born in Kentucky in 1808, moved to Mississippi as a child and, after a stint in the army, established himself as a cotton planter during the booming years of the mid-1830s. Born five years later in Vermont, Douglas moved west in 1833 and relished the upward mobility afforded him in Illinois. As hotbeds of agrarian capitalism, Mississippi and Illinois shaped Davis and Douglas’s clashing visions for the future. Life as a cotton planter confirmed Davis’s unyielding devotion to slavery—and to making its preservation a national priority. Douglas’s early experiences in Illinois shaped his determination to banish slavery from public debate and focus instead on territorial conquest, infrastructure, and other policies calculated to hasten the development of a Greater Northwest that sprawled from Chicago to Puget Sound.

Manifest Destinies

The U.S.-Mexican War propelled Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis to the pinnacles of power but triggered a new round of sectional conflict that shook the Democratic Party to its core. Davis’s celebrated military service won him a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he fought to protect slaveholders’ property rights throughout the nation’s massive new western domain. Douglas joined him in the Senate as the self-appointed spokesman for a vast western constituency stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. As they attempted to govern the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Territory, Davis and Douglas grappled with portentous questions about democracy, property rights, and the Union. Douglas embraced popular sovereignty as a means to preserve white men’s self-government, but Davis denounced it as a cloaked free soil doctrine and demanded positive federal protection for property in human beings. Their conflict escalated until Douglas helped broker the Compromise of 1850. Douglas hailed the compromise as a permanent basis for sectional peace, while Davis’s dogged resistance to the measure briefly upended his career.

Introduction

The introduction demonstrates how Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis’s intertwined careers can illuminate the sectionalism that split the antebellum Democratic Party. Both men moved west into the Mississippi River Valley, envisioned that valley as the nucleus of a burgeoning American empire, and regarded Democratic unity as vital to preserving a growing Union. But, pressured by their respective constituencies in Illinois and Mississippi, Douglas and Davis promoted incompatible programs for reconciling African American slavery with white freedom. Douglas championed whites-only majoritarianism and left African Americans’ status up to white voters in each state and territory. Alarmed, Davis sought to use federal power to protect slaveholders’ property rights against potentially hostile majorities. Rooted in a larger tension between property and democracy, this conflict shattered their party in 1860. Though ostensibly united by racism and anti-abolitionism, antebellum Democrats aligned into sectional wings and battled over the nature of American democracy itself.

Rule or Ruin

This chapter focuses on the 1860 presidential election and the final rupture of the antebellum Democratic Party. As Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis collided in a series of Senate debates over slavery, self-government, and the western territories, their Democratic Party self-destructed in its national convention held in Charleston, South Carolina. Unwilling to accept Douglas as a candidate or popular sovereignty as party doctrine, southern Democrats bolted the convention, nominated John C. Breckinridge for president, and campaigned on a frankly proslavery and anti-majoritarian platform. Northern Democrats rallied behind Douglas and popular sovereignty, completing the party fracture. The election of Abraham Lincoln and subsequent secession crisis pushed Davis and Douglas’s wings of the Democracy even further apart. Douglas denounced secession and urged compromise, while Davis tentatively pivoted toward Mississippi secessionists.

Down to the Crossroads

Southern Democrats wielded tremendous power over national policy in the mid-1850s, and Stephen Douglas’s efforts to harness his them to his program of northwestern development resulted in disaster. This chapter first reinterprets Jefferson Davis’s service as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), focusing on his use of camels for military transportation in the southwest. Far from a whimsical frontier tale, the camel episode became entwined with a shadowy network of slave traders and proslavery expansionists whose late antebellum schemes reveal the chilling consequences of slaveholders’ federal clout. This context elucidates Douglas’s infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act. Striving to align powerful southern Democrats behind his efforts to promote the Greater Northwest, Douglas pushed the Act through Congress—and unleashed a political cyclone that devastated the Democratic Party’s northern wing. By 1856, violence in Bleeding Kansas made a mockery of popular sovereignty and thwarted Douglas’s presidential ambitions, while Davis anticipated returning to his role as a proslavery sentinel in the Senate.