But instead of calling for northern free states to leave the American union, Republicans acceded to the
doughface James Buchanan while continuing their efforts to shape public opinion until the next presidential election.
(91) From 1789 until 1861, slaveowners and their northern
doughface (92) allies dominated Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
The father of the family, Abner Beech, is according to Kaufman "neither a
doughface nor a congenital contrarian: he is, rather, a Jefferson-Jackson agrarian in the Upstate New York Democratic tradition."
Most of New England, including the most prominent members of the Atlantic Monthly club, vilified the general as a "
doughface"--a southern sympathizer and compromiser--and, during the Civil War, even a traitor.
(13.) Buchanan as not only a "
doughface," a Southern sympathizer, but also an active participant of the "slave power," was certainly a commonly held Republican view.
Pierce and Buchanan were the preeminent "
Doughface" Presidents (Northern men with Southern principles).
(92.) "
Doughface" was a mid-nineteenth century term of derision for a northerner who voted with southerners on issues involving slavery.
"A Boston Ballad" replaces the
doughface Congressmen and pusillanimous Northern politicians, who had stood in for Southern villains in Whitman's early antislavery poems, with American Tories--shills for British values of monarchical rule and enforced social order.
Schlesinger Jr., in his 1949 classic The Vital Center, called a "fighting faith" An ardent New Dealer, Schlesinger was striving in the early Cold War years to keep his party from reverting to what he called its fuzzy-minded,
doughface tradition--the taste for sentimentality and utopianism embodied by the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry A.
Others had no regrets concerning the "peculiar institution." On the contrary, Andrew Jackson insisted that slavery was a positive good, James Polk built slave quarters in the White House, and Franklin Pierce was a staunch "
doughface"--a Northerner who was a dedicated supporter of the "slavocracy."(38) O'Reilly's book cascades with such vitriolic (and much deserved) criticism.
One mark of the continuity of his thought is the trace in the later work of his more combative assertions of freedom--in one paragraph of the preface he mentions both eponymous scourges of his Free-Soil poems, "bloodmoney" and "
doughfaces." (8) Yet in this preface, as throughout the subsequent poem, Whitman's motive is not to protest but to articulate his new ideal of poetry and its actual context in the United States.