doughface

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dough·face

(dō′fās)

A Northerner who sided with the South in the US Civil War, especially a member of Congress who supported slavery.

[Coined by John Randolph (1773-1833), American plantation owner and Congressional representative from Virginia who condemned the cowardice of Northern politicians who abetted the spread of slavery despite their abolitionist principles by likening such politicians to people wearing masks of dough who are frightened by their own appearance : dough (in reference to the masks made of dough worn by mummers in traditional American celebrations) + face.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

doughface

(ˈdəʊˌfeɪs)

1. a mask made of dough

2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) derogatory informal US someone who is easily moulded, esp a Northern Democrat who sided with the South in the American Civil War

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

dough•face

(ˈdoʊˌfeɪs)

n.

(before and during the Civil War) a Northerner who sympathized with the South, or a Northern politician who was not opposed to slavery in the South.

[1825–30, Amer.]

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Doughfaceism

References in periodicals archive ?

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.

Lincoln's thought and rhetoric

(91) From 1789 until 1861, slaveowners and their northern doughface (92) allies dominated Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

Frederick Douglass' Constitution: from Garrisonian abolitionist to Lincoln Republican

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."

Civil war comes home: "copperhead" dramatizes the '60s antiwar movement--1860s, that is

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.

Hawthorne's ephemeral genius: the Septimius manuscripts as a defense of Jacksonian authorship

(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.

Two bad kings and two bad presidents

Pierce and Buchanan were the preeminent "Doughface" Presidents (Northern men with Southern principles).

Dred Scott revisited

For his stand, Cass was derided by northern critics as a "doughface," that is, a northern politician who was dominated by the southern wing of the party.

Chapter 15: politics in mid-nineteenth-century Michigan

(92.) "Doughface" was a mid-nineteenth century term of derision for a northerner who voted with southerners on issues involving slavery.

Frederick Douglass' Constitution: from Garrisonian abolitionist to Lincoln Republican

"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.

Useful antagonists: transatlantic influence, sectionalism, and Whitman's nationalist project

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.

Action liberalism

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.

Affirmative Action and the Presidential Role in Modern Civil Rights Reform: A Sampler of Books of the 1990s

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.