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I am still having trouble with “dough” meaning a nervous “doe” deer, but whatever you say. I can more easily see “dough faced Northerner” being a pasty faced white guy from the North. (in other words, I am not convinced) :)

I can more easily see “dough faced Northerner” being a pasty faced white guy from the North.

I assumed it meant they were pliable and moldable.

I can see Randolph, a hunter, saying "doe face," but really, that might describe Randolph himself. Of course one would have to have been around two hundred years ago to be sure, but by all accounts John Randolph had a rather ghostly, spectral appearance himself.

A Doughface or a Copperhead was a "Northern man of Southern principles." I believe there was also a term for a "Southern man of Northern principles," but don't remember what it was. "Scalawag" came along later, of course. Maybe they were just called "unionists."

The term "doughface" lives on. Arthur Schlesinger used it to attack Henry Wallace and the Communist-influenced Progressive Party of the 1940s. Peter Beinhart used it when he wanted to stir up liberal support for the War on Terror. A commentator named David Greenberg trotted it out (unfairly) to attack Eugene McCarthy and (apparently -- it's unclear) to condemn Obama as weak-kneed and insufficiently partisan during the Clinton-Obama primary campaign.

The term originally applied to practical politicians who would always cave in on principle. "Doughfaces" were the RINOs or DINOs of the day. Schlesinger wanted to apply it to liberals or progressives who were too weak stand up to the Communists, but following his usage it came to be applied to head-in-the-clouds idealists who were inept at practical politics, something that doesn't apply well to Fillmore, or Pierce, or Buchanan.

The first time I heard the term that's exactly what I thought it meant.

Ditter: "I am still having trouble with “dough” meaning a nervous “doe” deer, but whatever you say."

Yet further googles turned up this link with a great explanation.

The original discussion came from Theodore Dwight Weld's 1839 book: American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.
Weld wrote:

" 'Doe face,' which owes its paternity to John Randolph, age has mellowed into 'dough face' – a cognomen quite as expressive and appropriate, if not as classical."

But Weld and all other historians commenting on this question end up punting and straddling both sides.
Leonard Richards (Slave Power) put it this way:

"Not everyone understood Randolph’s reference, and no one dared to ask for an explanation.
A few apparently thought the sardonic Virginia aristocrat had a female deer in mind and the word he used was doe.
Others thought he was referring to a child’s game where children put dough on their faces, worked it into strange configurations, and then looked at their reflections.

"Whatever Randolph had in mind, his words stuck."

The key point is that "Doughface" was a derogatory term, used by Southerners to insult Northerners who were trying to please them by giving into Southern demands.

Of course, in my context on this thread, I mean nothing of the sort.
Instead, I mean Northerners who share the South's commitment to true conservative principles.
So I'm not trying to insult anyone, but perhaps to rehabilitate the term "Doughface" in a modern, positive sense.