Democratic Collapse
About This Book
Between 1856 and 1861, the Democratic Party grew more divided, and this book argues that gender was central to that breakdown. For most of the 1850s, shared assumptions about gender had helped keep the party united. The Lecompton controversy and John Brown's raid, however, exposed how differently white manhood, and its obligation to guard home and nation, was understood in free and slaveholding societies. Those differences could not be bridged. Lauren N. Haumesser follows northern and southern Democrats, along with the partisan newspapers that spoke for them, as they used gendered language to argue about slavery while the sectional conflict deepened. The account runs from the rise of the Republican Party to the secession crisis. Along the way, charges and countercharges framed slavery as a matter of cultural identity, which raised the stakes of every dispute and made compromise harder to reach. The book shows how this rhetoric hardened positions that eventually helped lead the nation into civil war.
ISBN: 9781469671437
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