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The New World and Old World Blues: The United States and the 1850s
The United States, found itself blessed with two presidents in the space of a year as the inexperienced Zachary Taylor died in office [1] and was succeeded by his uninspiring deputy Millard Fillmore who saw out the rest of Taylor's term. The states were divided by the issue of slavery, and the question of whether it would be expanded to the newly acquired western territories of California, New Mexico and Nevada [2], and while a compromise was steered through congress to secure a brief truce between the north and the south, the tensions which lay between the two would be the dominant feature of American political life during the period.

If politically the country was only a few inches away from war, the country was experiencing a prolonged economic and demographic boom. In the Pacific northwest, the city of Boston, Oregon [3] was incorporated and thanks to its access to the Pacific Ocean through the its location at the confluence of two rivers, it would quickly grow into a major trade centre in the American northwest. The increasing expansion of American territory witnessed a boom in communications as mail order and telegraph companies (in part funded by the federal government) began establishing themselves in the western frontier. The largest of these was American Express, which in the two years since it's founding in 1850 as merger between three New York mail order companies, had expanded into California. [4] The economic boom was reflected in the increased economic co-operation between British North America and the United States, while an 1850 treaty signed with the British allowed for a joint claim over the Nicaragua Canal. [5] Meanwhile, demographic changes were occuring in both the Canadian territories and the American West, as gold was discovered in British Columbia, California and Oregon at the start of the decade, fuelling a boom in immigration (both internal and external) to the region. American foreign policy during this period focused almost extensively on the Pacific, as the successive Whig and Democrat administrations concentrated on maintaining Hawaii within the American sphere, and opening Japan to American trade. [6]

In 1852, the U.S. elected the Democrats to office, with Pennsylvania's James Buchanan's becoming the fourteenth president of the republic, defeating the Whigs and the Constitutional Union. [7] Buchanan's victory ensured that the union would endure for a few more increasingly fraught years, as his government compromised on the slavery question time and time again in order to preserve the union. While this tactic succeeded, in as far as the union remained intact, the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1853 [8] resulted in widespread violence between pro-slavery forces and abilitionists in the new territories, as they fought to determine whether the new territories would be slaveholding areas. Despite personal reservations, the act was passed, repealing the Missouri Compromise. [9]

James Buchanan, 14th President of the United States: "the man who let inaction become a byword for efficiency"

The violence was not merely confined to the issue of slavery. The rise of the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, nativist American Party (later led by former president Millard Fillmore) saw tensions between the local population and the recent immigrants from Germany and Ireland explode into riots in both Kentucky and Ohio. Electoral violence between Protestants and Catholics in Louisville, would result in thirty-two deaths and a complaint to the Buchanan administration from the German ambassador.

Buchanan, despite these problems would win re-election in 1856, despite a strong showing from the recently founded (and stridently anti-slavery) Republican Party. Nevertheless, despite his electoral victory, Buchanan's government continued it's "wait and see" approach, which led the satirist and journalist Samuel Clemens to dub him the man "who let inaction become a byword for efficiency." The tensions between both sides of the debate would continue to fester to the end of the decade, though they fell short of actual war, though the factionalism that was riven within the Democrats was exacerbated by the party losing control of Congress to the "Oppositional Coalition" of Whigs, Republicans and the Constitutional Unionists.

While the union was beset by problems, culturally it was undergoing something of a boom, with American authors enjoying widespread popularity in Europe, with Britain serving as the publishing centre for numerous authors such as Melville whose novel The Whale was published to great acclaim, as was abolitionist novel Life Among the Lonely by Harriet Beecher Stowe, though it should be pointed out that these authors first achieved success abroad before the Americans took notice of them. [10]

BRIEF NOTES

[1] Despite rumours that he had been poisoned Taylor died from cholera.
[2] California was quickly admitted as a state, but due to concerns over whether the new territories would become slaveholding areas, New Mexico (New Mexico and Arizona) and Nevada were maintained as federal territories.
[3] Boston, Oregon had it's name decided by a successful coin flip (OTL's Portland)
[4] The expansion into California, was at the insistence of John W. Butterfield limited in scope to post, rather than the establishment of railway network has had originally been envisaged.
[5] The treaty wouldn't resolve the lingering tensions that dogged Anglo-American relations, but ensured that Nicaragua wouldn't develop into a flashpoint between the two.
[6] The Americans did successfully, after numerous attempts open the Japanese ports to western trade, while an attempt by Napoleon III to annex Hawaii was stringently rebuffed.
[7] Buchanan defeated Winfield Scott of the Whigs and Sam Houston of the Constitutional Union.
[8] Same as IOTL
[9] Which ITTL, much like in ours, becomes a harbinger of the civil war brewing on the horion.
[10] Indeed many American writers were first published in Europe before becoming popular in their homeland, particularly in Britain, that the phrase "Yanks in Yorkshire" was coined to describe the writer's retreat built near the spa town of Harrogate, which became home to several American writers in it's early years.

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