Preserving the White Man's Republic

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism is a book that examines how Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented their political identity. It traces how party leaders repurposed Jacksonian democratic traditions into a conservative movement.

The book details how Democrats reacted to fears of female and African American political agency by using local majorities to withhold rights. Party leaders translated white men's domestic household authority into broader political power, uniting white men across the nation through an assertion of white manhood.

Published in the series A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era, the work demonstrates how foundational Jacksonian principles were transformed into staples of American conservatism, setting conservative politics on a new populist path on the eve of the Civil War.