Ouch! Well, I'll try to take your criticism like a man and respond to any valid points you make. Glad you liked "Mound of Spring" though. Hope to get back to it soon.
You're a big boy and a veteran. No one is going to break your heart with a stern critique.
What got me thinking along these lines is that the 1860 elections were incredibly lopsided in the distribution of the Electoral college Vs popular vote. If the Democratic ticket had remained united, and all the states would have voted as OTL the sheer imbalance of the legal and popular parameters of legitimacy, combined with the polarized political discussion would have created an unprecedented, and non-repeated constitutional crisis.
I think you're a little confused here. Bear in mind that the vote for the Bell-Everett "Constitutional Union" ticket were basically all former Whigs. Bell-Everett drew 12.6% of the vote nationally; 40.4% in the slave states.
That's according to the nominal figures usually quoted. However, those figures don't account for the "fusion" tickets which were on the ballot in several states.
Those votes would not be consolidated with the regular Democrat vote.
Agreed- absent an earlier POD. The vote went the way it did because of it's timing. Pro-slavery voters preceded northerners in immigrating into Kansas (it does, after all, abut Missouri). Had they made a larger and earlier impact on the states demographic they might have pulled off a Leecompton in 1854, or 1855.
Dave Tenner has looked at this in detail on soc.history.what-if. Southerners were a narrow majority of the first wave of settlers in Kansas, but at that time (1855) Kansas was far short of the number of inhabitants considered necessary for statehood. Over the next several years, the population grew about 10-fold, and about 3/4 of the newcomers were from the free states of the North, mainly Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.
So there never was any demographic window for Kansas to be a slave state.
All this does not mean that southerners would necessarily form the majority in Kansas- but a majority would not be needed. Since they were better and earlier established, wealthier, and enjoyed the backing of fraudulent voters from Missouri and large minority could pull off a Leecompton without transgressing sufficiently for congress to investigate.
I guess another way of sidestepping the whole issue would be keeping Kansas as part of the Indian territory for another decade.
I don't think that's really practical. After the Mexican War, there was a stream of settlement to the Far West, and eastern settlement spreading west from the Mississippi and out of the states and territories that abutted
the river.
Agreed- this was the first watershed moment where Douglas lost the sympathies of southern democrats while retaining those of the North. And it's the reason he failed to secure the Democratic nomination at the Charelston convention. And that's why I'm focusing on this juncture.
So for Douglas to win the Democratic nomination and still be a viable candidate north of the Ohio, the clash between southern sympathies and popular sovereignty needs to be finessed.
Keeping Kansas part of Indian territory sounds like a better and better solution to that dilemma.
Must crash. More later.