Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832-1861

Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832-1861. By Jonathan M. Atkins. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. xviii, 371 pp. $38.00. ISBN 0-87049-950-5. Beginning with the publication of J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), historians in the past two decades have produced several outstanding sociopolitical studies of individual states in the Old South. Jonathan Atkins's Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Gonflict in Tennessee, 1832-1861 now joins that cadre as a significant examination of an important, though understudied, border state. Although intended for a scholarly audience, Atkins's monograph might appeal to lay readers with serious interest in politics or Tennessee history.

Atkins analyzes Tennessee's political culture from Andrew Jackson's presidency until the Civil War, revising earlier assessments of Tennessee politics as the province of electoral machines unconcerned with ideology. He insists that vigorous two-party competition characterized the state's antebellum political culture and that the ideology of republican liberty stood at the center of political discourse. Both Democrats and Whigs championed republican principles, but the two parties held conflicting assumptions about government authority, economic development, and individual rights. Each party labored to convince the electorate that it could best safeguard voters' liberties while reifying its rival's ideology as a palpable threat to American freedom. Irrespective of party orientation, however, virtually all white Tennesseans agreed that liberty involved the right to own slaves.

Economic issues defined party competition from the 1830s until 1845, when territorial expansion-with the attendant slavery questionbecame the centerpiece of partisan debate. Whigs opposed expansion as a menace to republican liberty because the slavery problem threatened to disrupt the Union, whereas Democrats maintained that an empire for liberty bolstered the integrity of the Republic. Thus, in different ways, each party wedded the values of liberty and the Union and sought to preserve this marriage during the 1850s by steering a middle course between both sectional extremes. But the rupture of the national party system, the Black Republican triumph, and the secession crisis placed liberty (slavery) and Union at odds, forcing Tennesseans to choose between them. Ultimately, they sided with the southern vision of republicanism over the Republic itself. -ERIC TSCHESCHLOK, Auburn University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Apr 1999
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