The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861 by Lauren N. Haumesser (review)

Reviewed by: The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861 by Lauren N. Haumesser Frank Towers (bio) The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861. By Lauren N. Haumesser. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 230. Paper, 27. 95. ) Lauren Haumesser’s thought-provoking study of the late 1850s Democratic Party makes an important contribution to the study of gender as an organizing theme of political discourse. Haumesser argues that “gender turned slavery in the territories, which for Democrats had been a political and economic matter, into an intractable cultural debate. . . that raised the stakes of every dispute and made compromise ever more elusive” (3). She advances this case by exploring gendered rhetoric in five critical episodes—the 1856 election, popular sovereignty in Kansas and Utah, Kansas’s Lecompton Constitution, the 1860 election, and the secession crisis. Throughout, Haumesser pays attention to the ways that ideas about gender first helped to unify northern and southern Democrats and then became the focal point for defining their differences. In 1856, Democrats attacked Republican presidential nominee John C. Frémont and his wife, Jessie, as radicals who “stood for women’s rights, free love, abolition, and disunion” (14). They alleged that John Frémont had feminine mannerisms, such as parting his hair down the middle, and called Jessie Frémont a “masculine and subversive” partisan whose activism undermined the authority of husbands over wives (17). This attack End Page 120 deflected criticism of James Buchanan, the Democratic nominee and a lifelong bachelor, whose failure to marry was characterized as the mark of a dedicated patriot wedded to his country. Democrats’ gendered attack on John Frémont as a threat to white men’s autonomy provided an ideological basis for cross-sectional unity. Just as the slaveholder was the patriarch of his plantation, the northern farm owner was the master of his own household, a trope also used in the South to bind poor whites to the planters. Northern Democrats adopted their southern colleagues’ idea that slavery was a “domestic institution” akin to the nuclear family that should be governed by state and local government (9), thereby negating federal regulation of slavery in western territories. By treating “domestic institution” as a synonym for “states’ rights, ” Democrats turned the slavery debate into an argument about the patriarchal household, something that had more support among nonslaveholders. Republicans used this metaphor to their advantage in the case of Mormon polygamy in Utah. Their 1856 campaign plank attacking the “twin relics of barbarism, ” slavery and polygamy, linked the institutions as threats to female virtue. Republicans insinuated that Mormon family heads and southern slaveholders sought to rape and prostitute innocent white women either through polygamy or through violent attacks on free settlers in Kansas. By leaving domestic law to local authorities, the Democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty would abandon women to these depredations. The ideal of white man’s household authority ultimately cut against Democratic unity. For northern Democrats, the fraudulent circumstances surrounding the ratification of the Lecompton Constitution, a proslavery charter for Kansas statehood, violated the spirit of popular sovereignty. Drawing on gendered rhetoric, Illinois’s Stephen Douglas claimed that Lecompton trampled on the right of white men to govern themselves free of coercion. Fire-eating proslavery Democrats viewed Douglas’s defiance as further proof of northern hostility, but moderates in the Upper South continued to argue for cross-sectional alliances that would preserve the Union. To win over moderates, fire-eaters advanced a gendered reading of John Brown’s 1859 antislavery raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They portrayed Brown and his supporters as a mix of effeminate men and manly women committed to the dangerous doctrines of women’s rights, free love, and interracial unions. In a rhetorical guilt by association, Democrats “alleged that all Republicans were abolitionists, and all abolitionists were gender radicals” (78). In the 1860 election and ensuing secession crisis, fire-eaters used these gendered arguments to present their cause as a defense of male honor. End Page 121 Compromise, they said, equaled submission to the will of other men. Conversely, Republicans argued that the slave power threatened white. . .