Northern Men with Southern Loyalties

Michael Todd Landis forcefully contends that a full understanding of the Civil War and its causes is impossible without a careful examination of Northern Democrats and their proslavery sentiments and activities.

Michael Todd Landis is Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University.

This is a very solidly researched, well written, and interesting account of the proslavery northern Democrats.... Landis provides our first comprehensive account of the doughfaces. But I cannot help wondering how typical his subjects were of the northern Democrats.

Paul E. Teed:

In this deeply researched, well-written book, Michael Todd Landis offers a scathing indictment of the northern Democratic Party in the decade before the Civil War.... Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis should be seen as an important contribution to the vast but evolving literature on antebellum politics and the coming of the Civil War.

Justene Hill:

In Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and theSectional Crisis, Michael Todd Landis fills a gap in the literature of the Democratic Party during the late 1840s and 1850s.

Eric H. Walther, University of Houston, author of William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War:

Michael Todd Landis thoroughly proves with primary sources that northern Democrats truly did sell their political souls to southerners. Amazingly to me, Landis includes the voices of politicians' constituents on these matters. From both the North and the South, these voices reinforce his arguments, his keen analysis, and his observations. Northern Men with Southern Loyalties covers an important topic, and the author's mining of archival sources is truly remarkable.

Elizabeth R. Varon, University of Virginia, author of Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859:

In this crisply argued book, Michael Todd Landis provides an exposé of the inner machinations of the Slave Power conspiracy: how proslavery Northern Democrats, in deference to the party's Southern grandees, used machine politics, bribery, patronage, fear-mongering and intimidation to try to purge the party of antislavery voices. Landis’s argument that doughface politicians willfully defied the wishes of their constituents is provocative and insightful.

Jonathan Earle, Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean, LSU Honors College, author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854:

Northern Men with Southern Loyalties is an archival tour de force informed by original and insightful research. Michael Todd Landis writes well and makes dizzyingly complex political struggles clear and straightforward. His accounts of the Buchanan administration's dealings with the Dred Scott decision and the Lecompton controversy are among the best I have read.