In Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis, Michael Todd Landis fills a gap in the literature of the Democratic Party during the late1840s and 1850s. Few historians, he contends, have unraveled the conundrum of why Northern Democrats worked so diligently in the late antebellum period to rid the party of antislavery members. Scholars have largely homogenized Democratic politicians and, in so doing, they have failed to fully appreciate the political allegiances forged between Northern and Southern party members. To remedy the tendency in the literature to elide “Democrat” with “Southern Slave Power”—or the propensity to ignore Northern Democrats’ distinctiveness altogether—Landis situates Northern Democrats at the center of his analysis of late antebellum party politics in America.

By interrogating the ways in which Northern members of the Democratic Party worked to prove their loyalty to Southern Democrats, Landis examines the Democratic Party's demise as the slavery question destroyed it from the outside in. He argues that Northern Democrats worked diligently in the 1850s to expunge party members with any antislavery inclinations. To establish Northern Democrats’ proslavery bona fides, Landis shifts focus from “great men” exemplified by Kentucky's Henry Clay, to less well-known doughfaces such as William Richardson of Illinois and William English of Indiana. In making this shift, he shows the extent of Northern Democratic adherence to proslavery doctrines during crises such as the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, and the fraudulent passage of the Lecompton Constitution in 1857.

Landis begins by discussing how Northern Democrats—led by senators Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Daniel Dickinson of New York, and Jesse Bright of Indiana—made crucial political moves, which ensured that the Compromise of 1850, a series of laws the most controversial of which was the Fugitive Slave Law, would be passed. Northern Democrats’ contributions to this proslavery legislative platform during the late 1840s included backroom congressional deal making and privileging Southern demands over Northern political concerns. “The Compromise of 1850,” Landis asserts, “from inception to implementation, was the product of Northern Democrats’ looking to please the Southern party leaders” (36).

Landis then moves to the political struggles between Northern and Southern Democrats over the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854. In a spree mirroring the sectional divisions that characterized the Compromise of 1850, Northern Democrats’ political maneuverings in 1853 and 1854 exposed their unabashed support of Southern Democrats’ legislative agendas. In particular, doughface cooperation with Southerners was visible on highly contentious issues that Northern constituencies opposed, such as slavery's spread to newly admitted states.

Inevitably, the tension between Northern and Southern Democrats arose most prominently in the realm of presidential politics. Landis attests that although the elections of Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce eased friction between the Northern and Southern Democratic wings in the short term, the partisan strain came to a head in the violent aftermath of the Lecompton Constitution debacle. Spearheaded by President James Buchanan, the Lecompton Constitution's passage devolved into a political catastrophe in Kansas that brought popular sovereignty to the forefront of debates about new states’ admission to the Union. Fraudulently perpetuated by the Buchanan administration in 1856 and 1857, the Lecompton Constitution's controversial approval pitted Senator Stephen Douglas against the Democratic majority. According to Landis, it marked the Party's demise in congressional and presidential electoral politics. In the years between the 1858 midterm elections and the presidential election of 1860, Northern Democrats faced challenging re-election campaigns that drained the Party of its Northern members.

In the final chapters, Landis reframes the election of 1860 from one that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party won to one that the Democratic Party lost. That is to say, Lincoln's victory in 1860 was as much about the crumbling political reputations of the Democratic Party's Northern members, such as Stephen Douglas, as it was about Lincoln's political momentum. Landis maintains, “The mere election of a Republican, despite the fact that he was dedicated to protecting slavery where it already existed, was too much for Southern militants, and the winter of 1860–61 saw the secession of seven slave states” (246).

One of the strongest aspects of Landis’ work is that he deftly avoids falling into the teleological trap of Southern Democrats’ march toward sectional conflict, and the demise of the Democratic Party, in 1860. His analysis does not foreshadow the election of 1860 or the establishment of the Confederacy. Instead he compellingly examines Northern Democratic efforts to consolidate Northern support for Southern Democrats’ legislative programs.

However, in Landis's deft analysis of Northern Democrats political fidelity to their Southern slaveholding allies, new questions arise. Specifically, why did Northern Democrats join ranks with Southern Democrats? If Southern Democrats’ political goals revolved around preserving federal support and protection of slavery, then why did the Northern wing of the Democratic Party back these proslavery legislative agendas? Moreover, did Northern members of the Democratic Party support proslavery legislative platforms to advance their own careers? Perhaps doughfaces championed Southern Democratic causes because they believed that advocating for proslavery platforms would secure their place on the national political stage. Recent literature on the connections between slave labor in the South and American economic growth in the mid-nineteenth century by Edward Baptist, Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, and others might provide one possible answer to the aforementioned questions. It would be interesting to consider if Northern Democratic politicians supported Southern Democrats because they benefited financially from slave labor and the rise in international demand for American cotton during the late antebellum period.