A House Divided: A TL

Utgard96 · Aug 5, 2016

Well, this lull has gone on quite long enough.

A House Divided #1: Beginnings and Ends

“I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.”

***

This is a story of North America, as it could have been if certain events had gone differently. In our world, the United States of America, though faced with a barrage of problems foreign and domestic, was fortunate enough to experience a long series of extremely lucky breaks abroad and endure its internal problems, and rose to become one of the world's premier great powers – perhaps indeed the very greatest. There are countless occasions where the country's path to world hegemony could've been upturned, and even the cursory student of U.S. history could no doubt name a few off the top of his or her head. The British could've defeated Washington in the Revolutionary War. The country could've been sundered in two by the Civil War. The conquests of Mexican and Indian lands that facilitated the country's growth could've been aborted. The streams of immigrants who provided a constant cheap labor force for the country's industries could've been turned off somehow, leaving the United States primarily a land of white Protestant yeoman farmers. The New England states could've seceded in a huff over a now-obscure trade dispute, leaving the remainder of the U.S. a slaveholding empire of racism that certainly covers large tracts of land, but is a pariah to nearly everyone else on Earth. And so forth.

This timeline seeks to explore none of these possibilities, at least not in the forms named here. Its focus, instead, is a rather more obscure possibility, which I nonetheless find a surprisingly interesting one. In order that some degree of suspense and excitement should be maintained, the nature of this possibility will not be immediately disclosed. Instead, we will jump straight into the fray, and begin telling the story at its divergence from real-life events. This takes place across the water, in a country that founded the modern idea of liberal democracy and conquered a very sizeable portion of the globe, but which is now mainly known for its rigid class system and a near-maniacal obsession with tea…

***

St George's Chapel
Windsor, United Kingdom
17 January 1827

As the sun set over London in the east, a casket was brought into the royal chapel. It was no ordinary casket, for the man who lay inside it had been both one of the United Kingdom's most distinguished military men and, far more importantly, heir presumptive to her throne. His given name was Frederick Augustus, of the House of Hannover, but to most of Britain's sons and daughters he would pass into history as the man who had ten thousand men whom he marched up the hill and down again. He had been the second son of the King, then the eldest brother of the new childless monarch. As always happens at the death of a royal, his death had been mourned across the realm, his remains lain in state at Westminster Abbey for the prescribed length of time before being brought to Windsor for burial. Invited to the funeral was a veritable who's who of London's high society – the royal family, high noblemen and women, foreign ambassadors and public officials. There were the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons, the leaders of Parliament and highly respected men on the political scene. There was the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, who had loyally served the Crown in that position for almost fifteen years now, but who by now was very much a man at the end of his life. Within a month, he'd have a serious health scare which would force him into retirement, and within two years he'd be dead. There was the Foreign Secretary, Mr Canning, who was almost as distinguished a statesman as Lord Liverpool, and was thought likely to succeed him into the premiership – that was if he could keep his own health in check. He seemed to be getting better now though. Perhaps he would be able to use the office for good after all. He'd certainly waited long enough for it… [1]

***

From “The Men of Downing Street: The Lives of Britain's Prime Ministers”
(c) 1967 by Adrian Menzies
London: Macmillan Publishing

20. George Canning (1827-34)

…On the whole, Canning can be seen as one of many "missed opportunity" Prime Ministers – though in his case it was not so much about missed opportunities for the country as for Canning himself. His duel with Castlereagh [2] had cost him significant standing and possibly the premiership at that time, as the King passed him over for the ill-fated Spencer Perceval. He would largely not pursue the office over the next two decades as he built up Britain's relations with the new American republics and expanded her rule in India, but when Lord Liverpool resigned the premiership in 1827 after a health scare, the King saw fit to appoint Canning as his successor. This was perceived as a snub by the more intransigent wing of the Tory party, who would go on to sit on the opposition benches during Canning's period in office, creating a realignment of the political system…

…One of Canning's first concrete achievements in office, though overshadowed by the later actions of his government, was to settle the border with the United States all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific, by means of the 1828 Clay–Vaughan Treaty…

***

From “The History of British Columbia, 1828-”
(c) 1971 by Samuel Tweed
New Westminster: BC Press

The joint US-British occupation of the Columbia District was established by the Treaty of 1818, which established the 49th parallel as the border up until the Great Continental Divide – the US negotiators had offered to continue this line all the way to the Pacific, a proposal the British found unacceptable as it would shut out the Hudson's Bay Company from the lucrative fur trade on the Columbia River. The issue was not considered pressing given that the territory was almost completely free of settlement, and so being unable to come to agreement on it, the parties agreed to a ten-year joint occupation, at the end of which a border would hopefully have been decided [3]…

…The second round of negotiations began in 1824, when Richard Rush, the American minister in London, was instructed to communicate a proposal for a "provisional border" at the 51st parallel, with no American settlements to be allowed north of this line and no British settlements south of it. This was an extremely optimistic proposal from the American point of view, and to nobody's surprise, the British government rejected it out of hand – even after shifting the provisional border south to the 49th parallel, there was little enthusiasm for Rush's ideas in London. The British pushed instead for a border along the Columbia River, which was rejected just as flatly by Washington, and the negotiations were at a stalemate…

…The two people who marked themselves out for being particularly protective of British interests in the dispute were Sir John Pelly, the governor of the HBC, and George Canning, the then-Foreign Secretary. The two corresponded regarding the dispute over the course of 1825, with Pelly arguing for a border along the Snake and Columbia Rivers as being favourable to his company, and Canning gradually coming around to the importance of securing the entire territory for Britain. Although the 1824 negotiations had resulted in Britain claiming only the 49th parallel and the Columbia as their preferred border, neither Canning nor Pelly viewed this as a definite concession of territory south of that line. Canning spoke of the necessity of preserving British rule over Astoria, the oldest British trapping post in the region, despite its location on the south bank of the Columbia, and though his attitude was hardly shared by most of the rest of the government, it seemed unlikely that the British would concede the disputed area to the United States [4]…

…The fourth and last round of negotiations, unlike previous ones, was initiated by the British. In February of 1828, Canning, now Prime Minister, instructed Sir Charles Vaughan, the British minister in Washington, to present the American government with terms that amounted to placing the border at the Snake. The Americans rejected this offer, as expected, but President Adams saw value in the idea of defusing tensions with Britain in case Andrew Jackson were to enter office the following year. Secretary of State Henry Clay took up the negotiations himself, and Vaughan was empowered to serve as the main British negotiator, with firm instructions from Canning not to yield a square inch of land north of the Columbia.

Clay's terms were equally simple: the 49th parallel, he declared, was the only border the US could accept. For some time the parties were locked in a stalemate, and it seemed as though the issue would fall through just as it had the previous times – at that point, however, someone suggested that the US and Britain had a second border dispute that could perhaps be used as a bargaining chip: the Maine-New Brunswick border. The 1783 treaty had left this border extremely vaguely defined, and while both sides claimed interpretations favourable to them, it's generally held by historians today that the American claim was the stronger one. Vaughan's offer was simple: in exchange for recognition of the Columbia and the 46th parallel as the border in the Columbia District, Britain would cede the disputed area in Maine to the U.S. After being given approval by the Foreign Office, these terms were presented to Clay, who decided after some prodding to settle by Adams that they were good enough to accept. The treaty was drafted and signed by the two men, and after approval by the U.S. Senate and the British government, went into effect in November of 1828…

The Columbia border settlement as per the Clay-Vaughan Treaty of 1828.

***

[1] IOTL, the Duke of York's funeral was held at night, and on a notoriously cold and windy night at that. Canning contracted hypothermia after attending, which worsened his existing health problems, and he eventually died within a couple of months of assuming the premiership. Here, the funeral is scheduled slightly differently, and Canning's health takes less of a hit.
[2] In 1809 (which is of course well in advance of our PoD), Canning (then Foreign Secretary) and Lord Castlereagh (then War Secretary) got into a heated dispute over the conduct of the war against Napoleon, which led to Canning making a pact with Prime Minister Lord Portland to remove Castlereagh from office. When the latter found out, he challenged Canning to a duel, which promptly took place at Putney Heath on 21 September of that year. Canning, who was completely inexperienced with firearms, lost the duel handily to the expert marksman Castlereagh, but nonetheless escaped death, and both men lost office within a few weeks anyway with the resignation of Portland's government.
[3] This paragraph is all OTL, but IOTL it would take twenty-six years before a border settlement could be made, and even then it almost completely matched the 1818 proposal.
[4] Everything up to here was OTL. The negotiations beached after both sides found themselves unable to accept each other's terms (and after a British offer to make the Olympic Peninsula an American exclave made it obvious how ridiculous the whole thing was getting), and with Canning's death there was no one left in government on either side of the Atlantic who cared enough to press the issue until Benton and Polk came around.

Utgard96 · Aug 12, 2016

A House Divided #2: No Country for Literate Men

“May our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.”

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1828: The Rematch

The 1828 presidential election marked the start of a pattern that would continue in presidential politics until the Mexican War and the rise of the “Young Americans”. Incumbent President John Quincy Adams, a scion of one of Boston's oldest and most prominent political families (indeed, his own father had been President – see 1796), had served a controversial four years since the even more controversial 1824 election, and the belief that he and Henry Clay had conspired to steal the election lingered despite all evidence to the contrary. Andrew Jackson, the winner of the popular vote (though loser of the contingent vote) in 1824, had spent Adams' term building up support for a second run at the presidency, and from as early as 1825 (when the legislature of his home state of Tennessee passed a resolution nominating him for President) his candidacy was seen as a given. Adams, being the incumbent, was an equally obvious candidate, and though both men's supporters had congressional and electoral organisations (still unnamed by this point – the labels “Democratic” and “Republican” [1] would only arise in the 1830 midterm campaign), no formal nominations were actually carried out – the only time in post-Washington American history that this has occurred [2].

The campaign was extremely spirited, in contrast to most previous ones, and saw Adams supporters attack Jackson for being a barbaric illiterate unfit to govern the country, and Jackson supporters strike back against Adams for being an out-of-touch Massachusetts elite who was closer to the British than his own people. Undoubtedly they were helped in this by the signing of the Clay–Vaughan Treaty just a month before the election, which angered the West in particular for giving up rightful American soil – however, Maine hailed Adams as a national hero for successfully pushing their territorial claim. The other main achievement of the Adams administration, the Tariff of 1828, was opposed sternly by many Southern Jacksonians (notably incumbent Vice President and Jackson running mate John Calhoun), although Jackson himself ominously neglected to take a stand either way…

…The 1828 election was undoubtedly the most democratic ever held in the United States at the time. New York, Vermont, Georgia and Louisiana having moved from having electors chosen by their state legislatures to having them elected by general suffrage since 1824, only Delaware and South Carolina now neglected to hold direct presidential votes. And suffrage rights were expanding as well – the only states that retained absolute property qualifications for white men were Rhode Island, New Jersey and Tennessee, although several more states had harsher voting requirements for free blacks. Overall, some two million people had the vote in 1828, and of them, roughly three fifths turned out to vote for President – well over three times as many as had voted in 1824.

[3]

The result of the 1828 elections was relatively unsurprising – Adams' backing in the Northeast wasn't enough to save him, and on the back of strong support from the South and West, Andrew Jackson entered the White House as the first US President not born into wealth, and the first whose home state was neither Virginia nor Massachusetts… [4]

***

From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

Jackson's inauguration was quite unlike that of any previous President. For the first time, the inaugural ceremony was held on the outside of the Capitol, on the East Portico, and the east lawn was filled with over twenty thousand eager spectators. Jackson, who had already entertained crowds of supporters along the three-week steamboat and carriage journey from Nashville to the capital, arrived on foot and entered the Capitol through a side door to avoid the crowd, before emerging on the portico, taking the inaugural oath administered by Chief Justice Marshall before giving his inaugural address. Although spectators describe the crowd as reverently silent throughout the speech, in this period before electric sound amplification, any attempts to pick up his words outside the immediate vicinity of the stairs would have been utterly in vain.

By the time Jackson was finished speaking, the crowd was beginning to break through the barrier placed on the Capitol stairs, and the President of the United States was forced to flee his own inauguration by running through the Capitol rotunda, mounting a horse readied for this purpose on the west lawn, and riding post-haste toward the White House. However, he would find scant calm there either. Seeing himself very much as a man of the people, Jackson had made a symbolic decision that his inaugural festivities should be open to everyone regardless of social status, and issued an invitation to the general public to visit the White House after the inauguration. A great many people had taken him up on his offer, and to the delight of many Republicans, the crowd quickly descended into a drunken mob that caused several thousand dollars of damage to the building, mostly in broken china. Jackson himself was forced to escape through a window and beat a hasty retreat across the Potomac to Alexandria, where he spent the night at Gadsby's Hotel… [5]

…In his inaugural address, Jackson had set out “the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands” and added that he would “endeavor to select men whose diligence and talents will insure in their respective stations able and faithful cooperation, depending for the advancement of the public service more on the integrity and zeal of the public officers than on their numbers”. What this meant in practical terms was that Jackson tried to prevent institutional corruption by rotating officeholders and making sure no federal civil servant held any one position long enough to build a power base. Ironically, this intended anti-corruption measure, in giving rise to the tradition of presidential appointments to the federal civil service, did more than any other single act to give rise to the “spoils system” that characterized American political life for much of the 19th century...

***

From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers

In terms of his policy toward the Native nations, Andrew Jackson remains something of an enigma. It's highly likely that he held our kind in low regard – for evidence to this effect one need look no further than the Seminole War of 1818, when then-General Jackson exceeded orders to drive the Seminole out of U.S. Soil, massacring a large number of people and proceeding to invade Florida and create a diplomatic incident with Spain. Moreover, he made his opinion of Native culture fairly clear when, in an address to Congress in 1830, he asked “what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than twelve million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”

However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Jackson appears to have felt some degree of concern toward the impending doom of the Southeastern Native nations, for while President he championed not their extermination, but their relocation to lands west of the Mississippi – given the geography of the US at the time, this likely would've meant what is today the state of Cimarron – in the vainglorious hope that they might escape white violence there. In the spring of 1830, Senator White of Tennessee introduced legislation endorsed by Jackson that would've permitted the federal government to undertake such an expulsion, causing a long-drawn Congressional debate that hinged largely on the limits of federal authority…

…While the bill sailed through the Senate, over the objections of men like Frelinghuysen, the House of Representatives, which was more weighted toward the more populous northern states, was a different matter. There was great consternation in the House over the provisions of the bill, particularly the article that would've allowed the President to call up state militias to escort those natives who would move, with a strong implication that they might also be used to coerce those who would not [6]. This elicited strong opposition from the North in particular, and the bill ended up failing by a margin of two votes… [7]

…As feared by proponents of the Indian Removal Bill, its failure to pass resulted in the states taking matters into their own hands. In August of 1830, Governor Gabriel Moore of Alabama signed a law dividing the remaining Muscogee lands in his state up into counties and opening it to white settlement – when the Muscogee protested, their case was not heard, and when white settlers started moving in, hundreds if not thousands of Muscogee were massacred…

…Georgia attempted to push similar measures against the Cherokee, who occupied land Georgians felt important to connect their state to the burgeoning West, and to that effect issued legislation in 1828 depriving the Cherokee of their rights to autonomy in the state [8], clearly aiming to have them removed wholesale – however, the Cherokee were more adept at defending themselves than the Muscogee, and brought a case before the Supreme Court to indict Georgia for transgressing on their treaty rights. The Court declined to hear the case, citing their belief that the Cherokee were not a “foreign nation” and as such could not sue a state in a direct sense, but reserved itself by stating that “in a case with proper parties”, it might be sympathetic to the Cherokee's case. Such a case would not appear until 1832, when a missionary by the name of Samuel Worcester sued the State of Georgia for its law that forbade any non-native from entering native lands without permission from the state. Chief Justice Marshall, supported by five out of six associate justices then on the bench, ruled that this was a violation of tribal sovereignty, and that no individual state had the authority to make rulings over Native nations. However, for all that this appeared to be a victory, the Court had no way to enforce it in practice, and repression against the Cherokee would continue for several years…

***

[1] The Republicans are largely the OTL Whigs, though their membership is somewhat different from OTL. See future updates.
[2] It's true that the 1824 election was largely fought on a nonpartisan basis, but the Democratic-Republican Party did hold a nominating caucus, which was sparsely attended and ended up nominating William Crawford, who came third and was promptly trounced at the contingent election.
[3] The changes from OTL here are mostly cosmetic – Adams gains slightly in the Northeast while Jackson gains slightly elsewhere – but because the states pushed toward Adams are largely bigger, this means Adams actually gains almost thirty thousand votes. The only state that actually flips as a result of this is Maryland, but since they chose electors by district rather than statewide, this means only three of the state's eleven electors change allegiance, and three electors flipping the other way in New York and Maine means that the electoral vote divides exactly as IOTL.
[4] Obviously this is also true of OTL – it would also be entirely legitimate to say Jackson was the first president to neither be a Virginian nor have the surname “Adams”.
[5] This all happened IOTL. You can imagine the contrast against Adams' inauguration, which took place inside the House of Representatives and was followed by a relatively low-key ball for federal employees and the DC social register.
[6] This was implicit in the OTL Indian Removal Act, but here it's explicitly stated.
[7] IOTL, the bill passed 101-97, with 11 members abstaining. ITTL, a few more northern members who abstained IOTL were persuaded to side against the bill, and the split is 100-102.
[8] This legislation predates the PoD.

Utgard96 · Aug 16, 2016

A House Divided #3: South of the Border

“America is ungovernable; all those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.”

***

From “Mexico Between the Wars, 1820-1850”
(c) 1976 by Manuel Guzmán
Monterrey: University of New Leon Press

The Empire

When Mexico's independence was finally secured, it was only through the defection of much of the Spanish troops in the country, whose commander Agustín de Iturbide had far from the best relations with the mainland and – along with most of the criollo class – was beginning to lose confidence in Spanish rule. Iturbide joined forces with rebel leader Vicente Guerrero to formulate the Plan of Iguala, also known as the ”Plan of the Three Guarantees” for its main points – the signatories would fight for independence (a Mexico free from Spanish rule), unity (an end to the caste system that had dominated Mexican society up until then), and crucially, religion (the preservation of Roman Catholicism as the sole religion of Mexico). This plan managed to unite most of Mexico behind it, and Iturbide and Guerrero were able to raise an army of some 17,000 men…

…The viceroy of New Spain, Juan de O'Donojú [1], was of a liberal persuasion, and had been appointed by a liberal government in Madrid to oversee a transition to greater Mexican autonomy; when faced with an armed revolt, however, he eventually conceded independence to Mexico. The Treaty of Córdoba, signed in August of 1821, saw Spain relinquish sovereignty to a monarchist Mexican state, whose crown would be offered first to King Ferdinand VII of Spain and then to his brothers in order of seniority should the King refuse.

Ferdinand VII was decidedly not a liberal or a Mexican independence sympathizer, and not only did he reject the crown, he declared the treaty invalid and refused to recognize Mexico's independence. Nonetheless, with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence a little over a month after the treaty's signing, supported by all sides of Mexican society, independence was more or less a fait accompli. Any hope of getting a European monarch was exhausted when King Ferdinand presented credible plans to reconquer Mexico; the Spanish monarchy may have lost much of its power by this time, but the princely houses of Europe were still loath to cross them so visibly. So it was that a junta was set up to govern Mexico on a provisional basis until an emperor could be found; this was presided over by Iturbide, who was soon floated as a potential monarch…

…On May 18, 1822, the Regiment of Celaya led a mass demonstration outside Iturbide's residence in Mexico City, demanding he take the throne ”for the good of the nation”. Iturbide appeared before the crowd and repeatedly insisted that he did not want to be emperor, however, he cannot have been terribly sincere this time around, for the very next day the Congress unanimously invited him to take the throne, and he accepted. There has been much debate over whether Congress made this invitation under duress, as Mexico City saw a significant amount of tension instigated by the Regiment of Celaya and other pro-Iturbide groups; generally speaking, liberal historians have portrayed Iturbide's ascension as him staging demonstrations in support of himself and then manoeuvering Congress to ”invite” him to take power, while conservative historians have taken the view that he was legitimately popular for his efforts in securing independence and that Congress willingly and enthusiastically elevated him to the monarchy. However this may have been, Iturbide was now in power, and Mexico appeared for the time being to have some stability…

…While eventually supportive of independence, Iturbide cannot be called a liberal by any means, and as he entrenched himself in power this became strikingly obvious. His ascension was backed by the clergy and the landed classes, but Congress was dominated by liberals, many of whom were of republican persuasions, and while in theory it gathered to draft a constitution, in practice it produced no such draft in the eight months it sat, and mainly issued statements of protest against Iturbide's rule. The situation came to a head in October of 1822, when rumors circulated of a plot against the Emperor by several members of Congress; Iturbide seized the opportunity to declare the body as a whole guilty of treason, and to dissolve it indefinitely…

…With the signing of the Plan of Casa Mata, the Mexican Empire's fate was sealed; nearly all the provinces supported the Plan, and Santa Anna was able to raise an army to march on Mexico City in support of it. With Iturbide unable to pay his soldiers [2], very little in the way of resistance was put up, and in early March he summoned Congress back to the capital. On March 19, he presented his abdication to the legislature, and the executive power was handed over to a new junta composed of Nicolás Bravo, Guadalupe Victoria and Pedro Celestino Negrete. The Mexican Empire was dead, and the Mexican Republic born.

The First Republic

…The government junta sat for some eighteen months, until the new Congress announced terms for a presidential election to be held in October of 1824. A federalist model inspired by the United States was agreed upon, whereby each state legislature would nominate two candidates for President, and whoever got the most nominations would win, with the runner-up becoming Vice President. Thirty states nominated Guadelupe Victoria, putting him first ahead of Nicolás Bravo, and the two became the first President and Vice President of Mexico…

…President Victoria wasted no time in taking up the task of economic reconstruction, badly needed after fifteen years of war. He created the first unified Mexican merchant marine in 1825, to alleviate the poor supply situation caused by Spain's continued refusal to recognize Mexico's independence. In addition, he secured loans from British banks to cover up the budget shortfall caused by war recovery. The abolition of slavery, long promised as part of independence, was declared in September of 1825; in the same year, however, Victoria had signed into law a highly favorable colonization law, which gave foreign nationals who settled Mexico's northern territories the right to claim land and hold it tax-exempt for a period of ten years. Enticed by this, a steady stream of Americans began to cross the border into Tejas (as it then was), and most of them openly flaunted the ban on slavery and brought slave-based plantation agriculture with them. Moreover, several of the American empresarios contracted by the Mexican government to find settlers more or less openly refused to recognize Mexican sovereignty over their land; one of them, Haden Edwards, went so far as to rebel in December of 1826, forming the ”Republic of Fredonia” around Nacogdoches in east Texas, which was put down by Mexican troops within a month.

Meanwhile on the homefront, conflict was rising between the different factions in Mexico City, symbolized by the two dominant Masonic lodges: the Scottish Rite, whose members were politically moderate and had hitherto dominated political life, and the York Rite, whose members were generally of a more radical persuasion. For want of formal political parties, these groups formed the main political organization in Mexico at this time [3], and their members were at constant loggerheads. Vice President Bravo, a member of the Scottish Rite, grew more and more fearful that his influence was shrinking, and in December of 1827 he issued a pronunciamiento calling for the abolition of secret societies and the expulsion of American minister Joel Roberts Poinsett, who was thought to pose an undue influence over the York Rite. Bravo's rebellion was very quickly defeated by federal troops under Vicente Guerrero, and its ringleaders imprisoned, apart from Bravo himself, who was exiled…

…In the autumn of 1828, presidential elections were held to replace Victoria, who had communicated his desire to step down upon completion of his four-year term in April of 1829. The main two candidates were Vicente Guerrero, nominated by backers of the Scottish Rite, and Manuel Gómez Pedraza, who was nominated by backers of the York Rite and supported by President Victoria. Guerrero's supporters, who included several other prominent army commanders, were enraged by Victoria's backing of Gómez Pedraza, and are reputed to have threatened a revolt to install Guerrero as president by force; however, the rebellion proved unable to gather traction, and Victoria was eventually able to kill it in its cradle by calling out the Mexico City garrison and issuing a proclamation to the effect that “the task of the President is to defend the Constitution and the democratic process, and in particular to defend them against those who would impose their will on the nation by force of arms”. Gómez Pedraza was eventually able to gather the support of enough states to win election, and took office in 1829, but his presidency would not be without controversy… [4]

***

From “The Liberator: The Life of Simón Bolívar”
(c) 1985 by Adolfo Hernández
Translation (c) 1988 by Luis Castillo
Caracas: Ediciones Quirós

Bolívar returned from Peru in early 1827 to find Colombia in a state of chaos. Both in Venezuela and in Quito [OTL Ecuador] there were open revolts in progress, the latter against the government's free-trade policies, which were beneficial to agriculture in Venezuela and New Granada but damaging to the proto-industrial Quito economy. The Venezuelan revolt was a more straightforward federalist revolt against what was perceived as the overbearing central authority of Bogotá, similar to innumerable other such movements in early independent Latin America. The federalist viewpoint held significant sympathy in New Granada and Quito as well, with Vice President (and acting President during Bolívar's absence from Colombia) Francisco de Paula Santander among its chief advocates. However, it was strongest in Venezuela, where José Antonio Páez, the Military Governor of Caracas, had led the La Cosiata rebellion [5] in 1826 against the central government (…) Páez was unwilling to recognize Santander's rule over Venezuela, but when Bolívar himself returned to power, Páez agreed to end the revolt in exchange for retaining his position as governor…

…Having re-established his authority in Bogotá, Bolívar decided that since the existing state of affairs was clearly untenable, a second constitutional convention should be held to amend the Cúcuta constitution and provide a new settlement that would make Colombia governable. The convention was called to Ocaña, assembling in April of 1828, and conflict immediately broke out between federalists and centralists. Bolívar wanted to use the convention to push for his ideal form of government, as expressed in the Bolivian constitution of 1826 [6], believing that this would bring stability to the country's government and allow him to take control over the separatist regions [7]. However, this sentiment was opposed by the majority of the delegates, notably Vice President Santander as well as nearly every single provincial leader, who argued that the size of the country and the poor state of communications would make the country ungovernable from a central location. Bolívar's determination and stubbornness was the main thing preventing the federalists from imposing their will on the convention, and with the president of the nation shoring up the minority side with all the ferocity that had driven the Spanish out of most of a continent, the convention remained deadlocked for weeks.

Then, on May 15th, something unexpected happened. During a negotiation session, Bolívar suddenly slumped down in his seat, his head banging against the table, and remained still for several minutes as the room went into a blind panic. The nearest physician was sent for, and took the Liberator into a separate room where a bed was set up. A quick examination appeared to confirm that Bolívar had suffered a severe heart attack, and that with the relatively spartan medical resources in the provincial town, it appeared likely that this would be his deathbed…

…In the end, as feared, the physicians of Ocaña proved unable to save the Liberator. He spent the following day on his deathbed going in and out of consciousness, during which time he saw Santander and several other leading figures of the convention. He did not, of course, have any close relatives who could be summoned, but his mistress Manuela Sáenz was by his side throughout. His final words were spoken to her, minutes before slipping back into unconsciousness, and have been lost to history; we do, however, know what the last thing he told Santander was, because the latter used the words in his address to the convention on the 17th – “Keep the nation together, keep the revolution alive” – although we obviously have no way of knowing whether this was actually true or if Santander fabricated the statement for dramatic effect… [8]

…The convention assembled hastily on the following day, and with little debate, agreed to proclaim Santander as the new President of Colombia for two years, with regular elections to be held in July of 1830. The federalists now decisively held the upper hand, and the convention could soon agree on a new constitution, which was in effect mainly an amendment of the Cúcuta constitution. The main change was that the departments would be significantly more autonomous, with the intendants abolished in favor of governors elected by the assemblies of their department [9]. Otherwise most of the provisions remained in place, and the twelve existing departments [10] would remain in place for the foreseeable future…

***

From “Colombia: The Early Years”
(c) 1988 by Garrison Fernandez
Philadelphia: United Press

…By the time Santander replaced the departed Bolívar as chief executive, the situation, although less troublesome than previously, remained precarious. The regional revolts had simmered down for the time being, but as long as the war against Spain continued to rage, the economic situation would mean continued unrest. Fortunately for Santander and for Colombia, the situation in Spain would soon change. The overthrow of Charles X of France in July of 1830 meant that Ferdinand VII had lost his most important foreign ally, thus weakening his position considerably. Implored by his advisors not to overextend his empire, King Ferdinand decided to shift focus to consolidating the remainder of it. To this end, a ceasefire – not a formal peace, nor formal Spanish recognition of independence – was offered to Colombia, and President Santander accepted it wholeheartedly. The nation was at peace, and the crisis appeared over. Colombia appeared to be on the path to stability…

***

[1] A large number of Irish Catholics took up service under the Spanish crown; O'Donojú's ancestor was one of them, but he himself was a Spaniard by birth.
[2] I've skipped over a significant part of Iturbide's rule, including when the gradually worsening economic situation got to the point where he was unable to pay his men.
[3] Not making this up, early Mexican politics were quite literally run by warring groups of Freemasons. The more I read into this the more I'm convinced that the Anti-Masonic Party was on to something.
[4] IOTL, the army did launch a rebellion in support of Guerrero's candidacy, and eventually got Gómez Pedraza to concede the election, starting a long tradition of military interference in presidential politics which would result in no president between Victoria and José Joaquín de Herrera (1848-51) completing a full term in office. ITTL, with the peaceful transfer of power between Victoria and Gómez Pedraza, this is somewhat nipped in the bud, although I wouldn't be able to change the nature of Mexican politics enough to stop the army being a factor altogether without a much earlier PoD.
[5] Cosiata is a local Spanish colloquialism meaning something like “thingamajig” (or so I'm told).
[6] This was a rather weird form of quasi-republican parliamentary government, inspired by what Bolívar saw as the most stable democracies thus far created, namely ancient Rome and Great Britain. The system would've had a President appointed for life and able to choose his successor, with very limited powers except over national defense and overseeing the other executive officials. Power would instead be vested in a tricameral parliament, consisting of an elected Chamber of Tribunes who would hold power over matters of fiscal policy and have the sole right to declare war, a hereditary Senate appointed by the President who would oversee the judiciary and appoint regional officials, and a body of Censors who would act as a check on the other two houses' power in the name of the people – Bolívar was unclear on how these would be selected, but their neutrality would've been essential to the operation of government. Naturally, the book covers this system during its chapter on the Bolivian constitutional convention, which is why I need to explain it in a footnote here.
[7] Bolívar was, to say the least, a bit of a control freak.
[8] IOTL, Bolívar's health was in decline at this point, but he survived until the end of the convention, which would've produced a federalist constitution had he not ordered his supporters to withdraw from it, leading to its disbandment. He subsequently tried to push his centralist agenda through regardless, but was frustrated at every turn, and resigned in April of 1830, intending to go into self-imposed exile in Europe. However, he died in Cartagena before he could set sail.
[9] The Cúcuta constitution (which predates the PoD) provided for most federal offices to be elected indirectly by an assembly of electors in each province, who were elected by voters in each canton (a level between the province and parish). The departments, which consisted of several provinces each, were to be governed by intendants appointed by the President; here that provision is replaced.
[10] One department (Istmo) corresponding to OTL Panama, three (Ecuador, Guayaquil and Azuay) corresponding to OTL Ecuador, and four each corresponding to OTL Colombia (Boyacá, Cauca, Cundinamarca and Magdalena) and Venezuela (Maturín, Orinoco, Venezuela and Zulia).

Utgard96 · Aug 19, 2016

Oh FFS, I knew there was something I forgot to do today!

A House Divided #4: The Art of Governing

“Do they think that I am such a damned fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.”

***

From “A History of U.S. Presidential Scandals”
(c) 1990 by Jennifer McNeal
Richmond: Tidewater Press

The Petticoat Affair (1829-30)

Peggy O'Neill was unlike most other Washington women of her time. Beautiful, charming and gregarious, she turned more than a few heads in her life, including those of many prominent men in the capital. Her father owned an inn a short distance from the White House, which was a favored haunt of many a Washington gentleman, and more than a few of them probably came to see the innkeeper's daughter, who was known for her conversational skills and adeptness at the piano. In 1816, the 17-year-old Peggy married a 39-year-old naval purser named John B. Timberlake, who was in deep debt at the time. At about the same time the two became acquainted with a newly-elected Senator from Tennessee by the name of John Eaton. Eaton eagerly helped Timberlake pay off his debts and got him a posting with the Mediterranean Squadron, which was prestigious, well-paid, and just coincidentally happened to force Mr and Mrs Timberlake to spend long periods of time apart from one another. Eaton proceeded to establish a rapport with Peggy – to such an extent that she apparently had a miscarriage in 1828, when her husband had been away at sea for over three years.

In 1828, while away with his ship, Timberlake died of what was reported as pneumonia – however, there was a rumor that he'd found out about his wife's miscarriage and proceeded to commit suicide. Whatever the facts, Eaton and Peggy proceeded to marry within weeks of receiving news of Timberlake's death. This shook Washington society to the core, and matters were not helped when Andrew Jackson, newly-elected President and one of Eaton's closest friends and political allies, named Eaton to head the War Department. Peggy now had to take part in social functions as a Cabinet wife – a role entirely unsuited to her temperament. Wives at the time were expected to be gracious, reserved and moral. Peggy was outspoken, too clever by half, and had apparently had an extramarital affair for years before being widowed and remarried to her lover. Particularly opposed to Peggy's entry into the highest society was Floride Calhoun, the Second Lady, who organized a “coalition” of wives to shun the Eatons at all social functions and refuse to receive or visit them.

There were really only two men in Washington who continued to stridently support the Eatons. One of them was the President of the United States, and when it all came down to it, he was the only one whose support was needed. Jackson sympathized with the Eatons because his own wife had been the subject of speculation regarding whether her first marriage had actually ended before she married Jackson. These rumors had grown particularly rampant during Jackson's election campaign, and Mrs Jackson's death weeks after the election was blamed by Jackson on related stress.

The other man was Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who was also a widower and uninfluenced by the views of the Cabinet wives. Van Buren also saw in the conflict a chance to annoy John Calhoun, who was a rival of his, and prevent Calhoun from using the scandal for political leverage. It was ultimately he who provided a resolution to the scandal in May of 1831, by tendering his resignation from the State Department and thus allowing Jackson to fire the rest of his cabinet and appoint differently inclined individuals. Jackson was able to resolve the conflict to his satisfaction, Eaton avoided losing face, and Van Buren was rewarded with the post of Minister to London, a role he would serve in until 1837. [1]

***

From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

…Far more than the Indian wars or the Petticoat Affair, Jackson's defining challenge in his first term came to be the Bank War. The Bank of the United States which existed in Jackson's time was the second institution of that name, and had originally been chartered in 1817 for a twenty-year period. The Bank had fluctuated in reputation over its existence, but by the time Jackson took office it was generally well-regarded by most Americans. The Bank's purpose was to restrict the issuing of paper money by private banks and lenders, providing stability to the dollar as a currency and limiting the sort of overspeculation that might potentially lead to a financial panic. In this task it was supported by the proto-Republicans – indeed, the Bank was one of the three pillars of Henry Clay's “American System” along with protectionist tariffs and internal improvements – but Jackson's coalition of supporters nearly all opposed the Bank for different reasons. Jackson himself was a staunch hard-money advocate, who believed that the only “pure” form of currency was gold and silver bullion, and that the issuing of paper money created artificial wealth and gave excessive power to the banks [2]. Several of his prominent allies agreed with this, but many others were soft-money men, who believed that unrestricted issuing of paper money would spur growth and that the Bank was restraining the economy for the benefit of the wealthy East. In order to bridge this difference of opinion among his followers, Jackson did not make a major campaign point of the Bank in 1828, but once in office, opposition to it would be one of the major themes of his administration…

…After the Eaton affair, Jackson appointed Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland as Treasury Secretary; Taney was a former Federalist, and had been essential in bringing his home state into Jackson's fold. Taney was also a staunch opponent of the Bank, and formulated a plan to withdraw federal assets from it, which he correctly predicted would reduce it to irrelevance whether Congress voted to recharter it or not. Jackson agreed with this plan in principle, but in the interests of appearing moderate and preventing a crisis, instructed Taney to scale down his initial proposal from immediate withdrawal of funds to gradual withdrawal over the next five years; this was expected to coincide with Jackson's time in office, which meant he could still oversee the dismantling of the Bank without the shock that its immediate collapse would no doubt create.

Taney's plan might have succeeded, but in December of 1831, the newly-elected 22nd Congress convened, and the new Senate had only a razor-thin pro-Jackson majority. Immediately it set about trying Jackson's new cabinet appointments [3]; most of them passed as mere formalities, but the anti-Jackson forces in the Senate made Taney's removal a priority, and his confirmation failed by a vote of 26 to 22, with two Jacksonians dissenting against the hardline secretary [4]. The defeated President saw a need to moderate his position somewhat, and appointed Louis McLane of Delaware, the former Minister to London, as Taney's replacement. McLane was also a former Federalist turned Jackson supporter, but unlike Taney, retained something of a belief in the old Federalist platform, including supporting the Bank's continued existence. To this end, he and Jackson agreed to leave the customary attack on the Bank's integrity out of the annual presidential message to Congress, fearing that any mention of it would trigger a drive for recharter…

…In January of 1832, with the presidential elections on the horizon, Henry Clay and his allies in Congress decided the time was right to push for the Bank's recharter. The newly-christened Republican Party had already started its pro-Bank campaign around the nation, with major figures like Clay, Daniel Webster and indeed the Bank's own President Nicholas Biddle warning that Jackson's reelection would mean the death of the Bank and “an end to the good financial order of this country for the foreseeable future”. They named their party to underline the view of Jackson's policies as an abandonment of “good republican principle” - similarly, the alliance of Jackson supporters coalescing around the removal of the Bank named themselves the Democrats to signify that they were on “the side of the people”. Their message was equally dramatic: the alliance of Clay and Biddle was a collusion of the aristocracy's interests against those of the common man, and Biddle's involvement in partisan politics was condemned in particular as evidence of the Bank's moral bankruptcy [5]…

…It is probable that Clay worded the Congressional recharter bills in such a way as to provoke a veto from Jackson; he deliberately refuted requests to moderate the tone of the proposals, and undoubtedly his own presidential ambitions stood to gain from such a blatant exercise of executive authority on Jackson's part [6]. As expected, Jacksonians reacted to the launching of the recharter bill by launching inquiries into the Bank's practices, which were sure to delay the vote considerably and which, furthermore, Congress could very easily be pressured into voting for, as a substantial number of congressmen on both sides of the aisle had received donations from the Bank [7]…

…It would take until June before the recharter measure finally came up to a vote in the Senate, and by this point, Biddle had personally arrived in Washington to conduct a defense of the Bank on all levels of society. Pro-Bank congressmen were pressured by Biddle into writing tracts in support of recharter, which were distributed nationally using the Bank's resources. This, however, only served to energize the Bank's opponents, who saw it as a particularly blatant case of the Bank using its assets to unfairly influence the public. Francis Preston Blair of the Washington Globe, the capital's main pro-Jackson newspaper, made a nationwide name for himself by writing editorials in support of Jackson's measures against Bank renewal, and would soon take a prominent place for himself in the nation's politics, without ever holding elective office…

…In the end, despite the Jacksonian efforts, the recharter bill passed both houses of Congress with narrow majorities. However, a week after its passage in the House, Jackson issued a statement to the nation, proclaiming that as the sole government official with a direct link to the entire American people, the President was empowered to take action when the other branches of government seemed to act against the best interests of the people. To this end, he argued that the presidential veto, which had previously been very sparsely used and seen largely as a reserve power to prevent abuse of the Constitution, should be exercised to prevent such legislation as counteracted the “national interest” (i.e. the President's opinion of what the national interest was). This message was published in the Globe and other Jacksonian newspapers across the nation, and sent to Congress attached to a statement in which the President declared his refusal to sign the recharter bill into law. The bill had thus been vetoed, and while Clay immediately rallied his forces to overturn the veto, he failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majorities in either house, and the bill thus died. [8]

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1832: The Dawn of a System

The 1832 presidential election was the second under the new Jacksonian party system, and the first to feature organized national parties in the modern sense. Jackson's opponents, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, were beginning at the time to coalesce into a unified “Republican Party”, which was united by opposition to Jackson's continued rule as well as support for internal improvements and the National Bank. Jackson's supporters similarly united behind the “Democratic” banner, and although the parties would not be fully organized in all federal elections until 1836, battle lines had been drawn that would last until the Western Compromises and the…

…A curious newcomer to the political scene was the Anti-Masonic Party, a single-issue party devoted to fighting the influence of the Freemasons, who party supporters believed had formed a cabal that ruled the US covertly in violation of democratic principles. The disappearance and presumed death of William Morgan, a New York writer and (ironically) bricklayer who was reputed to be about to publish an exposition of Freemason secrets, led anti-Masons to fear the Freemasons were now murdering their opponents, and to organize politically in opposition to the practice. The party became surprisingly strong at state level, particularly in the Northeast, and for the 1832 presidential election it decided to mount a federal campaign, for which it called the first ever national party convention at the Athenaeum in Baltimore in September of 1831. The convention's initial choice for the nomination was Richard Rush, but he refused the nomination, and while some considered nominating John Quincy Adams (a passive supporter of the party), his lingering unpopularity made him a poor choice. So, in one of the great ironies of American history, the convention settled on William Wirt, a former Attorney General who was himself a former Freemason and openly told the convention that he found Freemasonry unobjectionable in principle – nevertheless, he took the nomination by an almost unanimous vote… [9]

…After the success of the Anti-Masonic convention, the Republicans decided that a similar gathering would be in their interest, and called a convention of their own at the same venue in December of 1831. Unlike that of the Anti-Masons, however, the nomination of the Republican Party was never in doubt – Adams having taken his turn, and remaining unpopular in large sections of the country, the time had come for Henry Clay to take his shot at the presidency. The convention nomination was largely a formality, and only one delegate ended up not voting for Clay – even then, he didn't propose an alternate candidate, but simply abstained as he felt that Clay would be unable to win and should wait until 1836. The convention selected John Sergeant of Pennsylvania for Vice President, and adopted a platform calling for higher federal spending, continued high tariffs and the renewal of the National Bank.

The Democrats, for their part, also held a convention and also held it at the Baltimore Athenaeum – and also nominated their candidate unanimously, in their case President Jackson. It was however clear that Vice President Calhoun would not be renominated, and the delegates ultimately settled on Philip Barbour of Virginia – it was suggested that Jackson's running mate should be a northerner for regional balance, but this was ultimately disregarded by the convention… [10]

…The campaign was every bit as spirited as 1828 had been, and hinged on the be or not to be of the National Bank, whose charter was set to expire in 1836, and which Jackson made his dislike for very well known. Jackson, who fundamentally mistrusted paper currency (and indeed any currency not pure gold bullion), wanted to restore monetary policy to the states, and ultimately the precious metals market itself, which his opponents argued would lead to financial ruin. In particular, Jackson's repeated vetos of Congressional bills to renew the Bank earned him the scorn of his opponents, who derided him as a tyrant. One well-known cartoon of the era, captioned “KING ANDREW THE FIRST – LONG MAY HE REIGN” depicted Jackson in royal regalia, treading on the Constitution and other pieces of paper labeled “National Bank” and “Internal Improvements”. Jackson's supporters argued that he was trying to reduce the power of bankers and politicians over the common man, and this stance earned him a large amount of popular support, despite the anti-Jackson campaign being better funded and organized.

The 1832 election saw the continuing of the trends established in 1828 – only South Carolina now retained legislative appointment of electors, and all other states except Maryland chose electors on a statewide general ticket. No new states had been admitted since 1828, but the Fifth Census reapportionment had resulted in 25 seats being added to the House of Representatives, and the electoral college grew accordingly. Most of the new electoral votes were in the West and the non-New England North, areas where population growth was strong as a result of settlement and immigration respectively. These changes came to benefit Jackson for the most part, as he carried the large states of the North by narrow margins and were able to take all their electoral votes. His electoral victory proved even more crushing than his popular-vote one, and thus he became the first candidate ever to gain over 200 electoral votes in a contested election… [11]

…The South Carolina legislature, dominated by Nullifiers, chose a slate of electors who cast their votes for John Calhoun for President and John Floyd of Virginia for Vice President – Calhoun and Floyd refused to let themselves be nominated, but were still voted for by the electors. This makes them the last presidential ticket ever to receive more electoral votes than they did votes from the people… [12]

***

[1] The Petticoat Affair happened largely in the same way IOTL, but Van Buren's confirmation as Minister to Britain was torpedoed by Calhoun, who believed failing to pass the confirmation vote would kill Van Buren's career. It ended up victimizing him in Jackson's eyes, and coincidentally, bringing him back to Washington just in time to be nominated as Jackson's Vice President.
[2] If Andrew Jackson had lived today, you just know he would've been running one of those redpill blogs with titles like “THE FAKE MONEY CONSPIRACY EXPOSED!” on every post.
[3] Under the Constitution, appointments to the Cabinet require the approval of the Senate; if the Senate is in recess when a cabinet office becomes vacant, the President may fill the vacancy unilaterally, but the Senate must approve the appointment as soon as it comes back into session for it to be valid.
[4] IOTL, Jackson appointed Taney to the same post in 1833, after the Bank's recharter had already been vetoed, and the Senate (which had an anti-Jackson majority as of that time) rejected his appointment by a much wider margin.
[5] A bit rich coming from the people who literally invented the spoils system – hell, even more so considering that Jackson initially tried to turn the Bank into a spoils institution much like the Postal Service before Biddle made his opposition to this clear – but there you are.
[6] Before Jackson, the veto was largely seen as an emergency measure, akin to the monarch's reserve powers in the Westminster system – one of Jackson's most enduring legacies was expanding its use to any situation where the President felt Congress was acting against the popular interest.
[7] In American politics, the more things change, the more they stay the same…
[8] The “Bank War” thus went largely as OTL, with one major exception – Taney's stay at the Treasury Department did not happen IOTL, and Jackson didn't try to defund the Bank until after its recharter had already been defeated.
[9] This is, of course, all OTL (could I make this stuff up?).
[10] IOTL, of course, Van Buren was nominated, but a splinter group of Virginia Democrats nominated a Jackson/Barbour ticket, which Barbour publicly distanced himself from and which largely failed to carry traction.
[11] Jackson's Electoral College victory ITTL is actually slightly less than OTL, partly because of New England being more solidly Republican ITTL and partly because of Jackson choosing a southern running mate. It's still an enormous landslide though.
[12] Also true IOTL, although there Floyd was the choice for President with Henry Lee of Massachusetts (yes, really, a Nullifier from Massachusetts) for VP.

Utgard96 · Aug 23, 2016

A House Divided #5: Swinging Britain

“Sir, This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly we shall commence our labours.”

***

From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press

In 1830, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was among the last of Europe's anciens régimes to survive. The rumblings of the French Revolution were unfelt in Britain, and the old system retained supremacy – indeed, as revolutionary France had been an enemy, its ideas of secular government and popular sovereignty were viewed as unneeded at best and stepping stones to mob rule at worst. The governance of the UK was in the hands of the King and his Parliament, with one chamber representing the hereditary nobility and the other the non-noble landed and merchant elite.

Even in the nominally-elected lower house, the House of Commons, the franchise was restricted and deeply unequal. With a few exceptions, each parliamentary borough in England elected two members and each one in Wales and Ireland elected one; Scotland grouped its burghs into districts which elected one member each. Franchises varied widely from one borough to the next; a few allowed all freeholders to vote, while others restricted it to taxpayers or potwallopers (people who owned a door and a pot). In another group of boroughs the members were selected by the corporation (the borough's governing body) itself, while another group restricted the vote to owners of specific properties known as burgages. Combined with the small size of some boroughs (several held less than a dozen voters, and in one memorable case, Old Sarum had no resident voters at all, allowing the holder of the burgage property to nominate voters freely), this allowed a single person to wield complete control over who filled a seat in Parliament – this was known as a “pocket borough”, one of the diverse practices grouped together under the term “rotten borough”. The reason for this was the inflexibility of the system; the most recent enfranchisement of a borough was that of Newark-on-Trent in 1661, and the only change that had taken place since was the disfranchisement of Grampound in Cornwall, a particularly notorious rotten borough, in 1821.

Areas outside the parliamentary boroughs were represented by county members, two of whom were elected from each English and Irish county and one from each Welsh and Scottish county. This gave Rutland and Lancashire the same representation, and until 1826 even Yorkshire had only two members – in that year it was expanded with the two seats taken away upon Grampound's disfranchisement. Scotland also held a number of exceptions to the rule, as the 1707 Act of Union allowed it to send fewer county members than it had counties – ergo, in a very 18th century solution to the problem, six of its counties were grouped into pairs, which sent members to alternate Parliaments. The county franchise was set centrally, but varied between each of the Home Nations, so that in England, everyone who owned land worth forty shillings at the current standing of the currency could vote, whereas in Scotland the franchise was restricted to landowners whose land had been worth two pounds Scots when the Scots Parliament was originally created in the 14th century. Ergo, the English electorate numbered around 190,000 by 1830, while that of Scotland was less than 3,000. The English rules applied in Wales and Ireland as well, and because of the different land situation there, Ireland had roughly the same number of electors as England; the Welsh electorate, however, was barely a tenth of either's number. [1]

In any analysis of the early reform period, it's worth understanding precisely what the motivations of the different groups were. Only the Chartists and their predecessors, as well as some radical Whigs, actually believed reform should be a stepping stone to full democracy, and that this was in itself a good thing. The majority of the proponents of reform were instead concerned with securing good government, and by extension, eliminating the corrupt practices used to elect Members of Parliament around the country. It was in this spirit that the Canningite Ministry was first formed in 1827, and carried out its setpiece reforms, beginning with Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and culminating with the 1833 Reform Act… [2]

***

From “The Men of Downing Street: The Lives of Britain's Prime Ministers”
(c) 1967 by Adrian Menzies
London: Macmillan Publishing

The Canning ministry's first major reform was Catholic emancipation, which was prompted by the events of the Clare by-election in 1828, after William Vesey-Fitzgerald was chosen to become President of the Board of Trade. The resulting ministerial by-election, in contrast to most such exercises, was contested by Daniel O'Connell, a leader of the Irish Catholic emancipation movement, and in an upset result, O'Connell won election despite the restricted franchise and open ballot [3]. O'Connell's election sent shockwaves through the political establishment, since he was unable to take his seat in Parliament without swearing an oath declaring the King's religious supremacy and foreswearing his allegiance to the Catholic Church. It was feared that Ireland would rise in revolt against British rule for the third time in as many generations [4], and as a result of this, many political figures who'd previously opposed Catholic emancipation turned in favour of it as the alternative to heightened civil strife. A compromise settlement was pushed through Parliament, and in April of 1829, King George IV signed the Roman Catholic Relief Bill into law. The bill removed restrictions on the franchise for Catholics throughout the UK, and in order to stave off fears of electoral dominance by Catholic smallholders, the property requirement for Irish voters was raised from the forty shillings used in England and Wales to ten pounds.

This was among the final acts of King George's reign, as the King's indulgent lifestyle was beginning to catch up with him; he suffered from gout so severe that it rendered his right arm immobile, and dropsy that caused him to suffer regular breathless spasms; by the summer of 1829 this had advanced to the point where he was forced to sleep upright in a chair to keep him from suffocating in his sleep [5]. In August, the King burst a blood vessel inside his stomach, causing him to excrete large amounts of blood; medicine at the time was unable to cure this without significant risks to the patient, and so the King came to realise that the end was near for him. He dictated his will from his bed at Windsor Castle, and started to pray for forgiveness for his earlier ways; his last words were spoken to a priest on the 16th – “Goodness, what is this? I fear it's death” [6]. And so it was; notice was given across the United Kingdom the next day, and a nation mourned its monarch. At this time, the demise of the Crown necessitated the dissolution of Parliament, and the resulting general election was held over the course of the autumn [7]. The result was a victory for the Canningite-Whig coalition, although in a sign of things to come, a number of the Tory members campaigned against the government and continued to sit on the Opposition benches in the new Parliament…

***

From “The Cambridge Dictionary of British Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press

SWING RIOTS, THE: Series of agricultural worker riots in the summer of 1830, beginning in the Elham Valley (Kent) and spreading across south-eastern England. The immediate cause of the riots was the poor harvests of 1828 and 1829, as well as the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines, which replaced the labour of several men and threatened to undo the entire social structure of the English countryside; more indirect causes include the enclosure of common lands (although this has become disputed, see ENCLOSURE ACTS) as well as the increasing financial burdens placed on the rural poor by the Crown and Church of England. The methods of the rioters varied from place to place, but a common modus operandi can be distinguished: letters would be sent to local notables (landowners, parsons, magistrates, poor law guardians), signed by the semi-mythical figure Captain Swing (the origin of the common name for the riots) and requesting higher wages, lower tithes and the destruction of the threshing machines, and threatening that the workers would take matters into their own hands if the demands were not heeded. At this point agricultural workers would meet in groups of 2-300, threaten the notables with violent action if the calls continued to be ignored, and eventually physically smashed threshing machines and other agricultural implements to pieces.

Despite using the slogan “Bread or Blood”, the Swing Riots were notable for their lack of physical violence; while many thousands of pounds worth of property was destroyed by the riots, only one man actually died at any point, and that was a rioter killed by either a guard or policeman during a raid on a farm. The overwhelming majority of the riots were concerned solely with inflicting property damage, specifically to the hated threshing machines; a number of barns were also burned, however. The riots prompted a brief panic in the ruling class, with some blaming them on agents-provocateurs sent from France, just gone through its second revolution [8]. There is no evidence that this was the case, but nonetheless, the riots did lead to significant results, with the wages of rural workers seeing small but needed increases over the course of the 1830s… [9]

***

From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press

Canning's ministry carried on through the comparatively quiet 1831, but in the year after, rumblings for reform again began to make themselves felt. Renewed agitation on the part of the rural poor coupled with increasing urban unrest to make the situation in the country increasingly hard; prominent Whigs took the opportunity to call for reform in parliamentary debate, with Lord Lansdowne strongly implying that were the current state of affairs to go on, he and his colleagues would resign from government and force a general election. Canning, anxious to keep his fragile coalition together and prevent early elections, heeded Lansdowne's call and appointed William Huskisson, a fellow moderate Tory, to draft a Reform Bill for entry into the House of Commons.

The document that was eventually proposed was a more moderate one than the Whigs would've liked; cynics quickly claimed Huskisson had made the bare minimum of changes needed to appease the Whig side of the government. It disfranchised 38 particularly egregious rotten boroughs, while another 56 had their representation cut to a single member; a substantial number of boroughs were also expanded to cover bigger areas, as had been the usual practice for corrupt boroughs during previous years [10]. The seats removed from rotten boroughs were transferred to the growing industrial cities, and to ensure that the resulting new boroughs were not dominated by the working-class vote, the franchise was restricted to those residents owning properties worth more than ten pounds. The same limit was set for suffrage in county constituencies, which was in line with Tory thought of the period [11]. In addition, all previous borough electors retained the franchise for life, but this was not extended to county electors whose property was worth between two and ten pounds…

…Overall, the Reform Act that was passed through Parliament in 1833 was a disappointment to the reform campaigns of previous years, who had hoped that a substantial expansion of the franchise would accompany reform and now found the opposite to be the case. A demonstration against the “phantom Reform” was held in Westminster, a radical stronghold and former seat of power of Charles James Fox, the longtime Whig leader, in September of that year, and the Reform Associations founded in the 1820s to promote parliamentary reform vowed to carry on their work. The age of upheavals was beginning…

***

[1] The description of the unreformed Parliament is entirely OTL.
[2] IOTL, Canning was a very moderate Tory, but not quite moderate enough to want parliamentary reform – when he formed his coalition cabinet with the Whigs, they agreed not to broach the topic as both sides could feel the divide between them, but it's going to catch up with them just as it did IOTL.
[3] Traditionally, British elections were conducted by open ballot: in each polling station there would be a poll book with a section for each candidate, and voters would sign their names under the relevant candidate. This meant that voters were open to intimidation since the way they voted would be known, and so even the Catholic voters in Ireland could be counted on to vote however their landlord wanted them to.
[4] The 1798 United Irishmen revolt, which was inspired by the French Revolution and sought separate nationhood for Ireland, and the brief 1803 Rising being the two previous ones.
[5] I've accelerated King George's health problems somewhat, but they were all present in OTL; the Blackadder depiction of him as Prince Regent got a lot wrong, but they were completely right about him being a massive wastrel and spendthrift.
[6] IOTL his last words were very similar, but spoken to a bedside page (“Good God, what is this? My boy, this is death”).
[7] British elections, as was commonplace across the world at the time, were held on different dates in different constituencies – although the spread lessened throughout the 19th century, it took until 1918 IOTL before it was all standardised to a single day.
[8] This entire section is all OTL up to this point.
[9] IOTL, King George IV died during the latter half of the Swing Riots, and an election immediately called. This was utterly chaotic, with both parties heavily split and agitation for reform as a permanent solution to the agricultural crisis commonplace; ITTL, with George IV having died the previous year, the riots certainly don't go unnoticed, but don't directly lead into reform in quite the same way.
[10] This was done four times, in New Shoreham (West Sussex), Cricklade (Wiltshire), Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) and East Retford (Nottinghamshire), all of which were extended to cover large tracts of nearby countryside and had their franchise expanded to include the forty-shilling freeholders of the area, making them county constituencies in all but name.
[11] IOTL, the Reform Act also extended the franchise to some tenant farmers, but this does not happen ITTL.

Utgard96 · Aug 26, 2016

A House Divided #6: Nullification Blues

“The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised.”

***

From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

…The greatest test to Jackson's administration came on the issue of tariffs, which would come to be a dominant theme in economic policy during his period in office. The 1820s were a decade of general economic stagnation for the US, and to protect domestic industry, John Quincy Adams had signed into law the Tariff of 1828, which set the highest import rates in US history on industrial goods as well as a number of raw materials. This helped the North recover somewhat – the nationwide GDP grew significantly between 1828 and 1832, mostly spurred by northern industrial growth – but was a complete economic disaster for the South, whose economy was dependent on access to foreign trade. Where the North was able to rise from the ashes, the South appeared to spiral further into economic malaise, and during Jackson's election campaign in 1828, a number of southern Jackson supporters pledged to repeal the tariff once Jackson had been elected. Jackson himself appears not to have noticed or cared about these pledges made on his behalf, because in his first year in office, no action whatsoever had been taken against the tariff…

…It was particularly in South Carolina that anti-tariff sentiment ran high. Incidentally, it was of course South Carolina that was home to the Vice President, John Caldwell Calhoun, who penned the “Exposition and Protest” in December of 1828. The Exposition argued that the tariff was unconstitutional, because its purpose was not to provide general revenue but overtly to favor one sector of the economy (industry) over another (agriculture). Moreover, the Exposition argued that it was perfectly within the bounds of legality for a state, having discussed the matter at a duly elected convention, had the right to nullify within its boundaries any federal law it felt violated the Constitution. This nullification doctrine had previously been set out by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their protest against the Alien and Sedition Acts, and was a cornerstone of the political philosophy devised by Jefferson and John Randolph, among others. Calhoun saw to it that the Exposition was published anonymously, fearing a break with Jackson might hurt his cause more than it would help, but word of the author's identity soon got out.

The publication of the Exposition reignited the debate over nullification in Washington and across the country. This debate essentially hinged on one's view of the origins of the Constitution and by extension, the federal government – nationalists like Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams argued that the Constitution was the product of the American people as a whole, while men like Calhoun and Randolph argued that it was a compact between sovereign states, which could decide for themselves what was and wasn't constitutional. Its clearest iteration can be found in a Senate debate between Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne, held in January of 1830, which began when Hayne rose in opposition to a resolution proposed by Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut, that would have severely restricted the states' power to sell frontier land. This, Hayne felt, constituted a transgression of states' rights, and he attempted to create a South-West alliance against the Eastern states by linking the issue to that of nullification. Webster rose in opposition to this, and the two men had a long series of exchanges that have been recognized as “the most celebrated debate in the Senate's history”. Webster notably created something of a slogan for the nationalists when, in his second reply to Hayne, he referred to the federal government as being “made by the people, made for the people, and answerable to the people”…

…President Jackson first began to hint at his views on nullification when, at the traditional celebration of Jefferson's birthday held by the Democratic Party every year in April, a “battle of toasts” erupted between the party's factions. Hayne proposed a toast to “the Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States”, to which Jackson replied by toasting “our Federal Union: it must be preserved”. Then-Senator Benton would write in his memoirs that Jackson's toast “electrified the country”, and from that moment, battle lines appeared to be getting drawn. Certainly Jackson did not try to back down from his position – when asked if he had a message for the people of South Carolina by a visitor from that state, he replied: “Please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach”… [1]

…Perhaps understandably, tensions continued to rise in South Carolina, where the October legislative elections would prove something of a turning point. The increasingly organized “Nullifier party” made it known that they would use any mandate gained in the elections to call a state convention to debate nullification, and anti-nullification groups united in opposition to this. The Nullifiers won a fairly strong majority, and were able to elect the radical Nullifier James Hamilton, Jr. to the governor's office. However, the Nullifier majority fell short of the two thirds required to call a state convention, and so the issue lingered for two more years…

…The 1832 South Carolina elections were held just weeks before that year's presidential election, and saw the nullifiers and anti-nullifiers (or “Unionists”) campaign as organized parties for the first time. The Unionists campaigned to re-elect Jackson to the presidency in tandem with their state campaign, but the Nullifiers did not put much effort into national politics, only letting it be known that a Nullifier legislature would send an electoral slate supporting neither Jackson nor Clay. Ultimately the Nullifiers ended up winning a landslide, and took control of both houses of the legislature with supermajorities large enough to call a convention. Promptly, the legislature was called into session to authorize the convention, and the latter assembled in November of 1832 to hear the case for and against nullification and make a decision for the people of the state. With a large majority of delegates being committed Nullifiers, there was little doubt which way the vote would go. The resolution approved by the convention stated that the tariff of 1828 was in violation of the Constitution, that its enforcement within the state was prohibited from 1833 onwards, and that in case the federal government should attempt to impose its will by force, the governor was authorized to raise and arm a militia of 25,000 men. [2]

Before then, however, Congress had reassembled in Washington, and preventing nullification was the first point on its agenda. Henry Clay and John Calhoun, both now Senators (after Robert Hayne's election as Governor, Calhoun had resigned from the Vice Presidency to take his seat, leaving the latter office vacant), managed to find rare common ground in the desire to embarrass Jackson by resolving the crisis without his intervention, and together the two drafted a new tariff bill which lowered export duties on agricultural products from an average of 45% in the 1828 tariff to an average of 30%. This was rushed through Congress and passed by broad margins in both houses, including the South Carolina Nullifiers (who likely would've preferred to see the duties go down even further, but deferred to Calhoun) and a substantial number of Jacksonians as well as the Republicans who Clay managed to whip with great acumen. Within two weeks of the new year, the tariff was passed, and while Jackson could have vetoed it, he saw no need to look a gift horse in the mouth. The Tariff of 1833 went into effect on March 1, and South Carolina promptly demurred. The Nullification Crisis, at least for the time being, was over… [3]

***

Excerpts from a discussion at fc/gen/uchronia, labeled “WI: South Carolina secedes during Nullification Crisis?”

1990-04-02 18:19 EST, @MikeOfThePlatte wrote:

I recently read a biography on Andrew Jackson, and I came across an interesting potential divergence: As most of us no doubt know, South Carolina tried to nullify the Tariff of 1828, and it took Calhoun and Clay working together to pass a new compromise tariff before they backed down. But did you know that South Carolina actually had plans to secede and raise a militia if the government didn't let them go ahead with nullification?

1990-04-02 18:21 EST, @YosemiteSam wrote:

Oh, it went above and beyond that. Jackson was clearly raring to fight them all throughout, and in fact, at the time the Compromise Tariff was going through the House, he was planning to introduce a bill that would've let him send federal troops into South Carolina to enforce the tariff and strike down opposition to it. If the Compromise Tariff had even been delayed by, say, three months, then things could've turned very ugly indeed.

1990-04-02 18:29 EST, @MikeOfThePlatte wrote:

Fascinating. So if Jackson had stood his ground and Clay his, could we have seen a southern secession?

1990-04-02 18:33 EST, @AgentBlue wrote:

Not this goddamn southern secession trope again. The South was clearly favored by Washington throughout the First Republic – just look at the way it kowtowed to slaveholding interests over Mexico, or *New* Mexico, or the transcontinental railroad, or Kansas. They'd have very little to gain by seceding from a country that let them be on top when the North had twice their population.

1990-04-02 18:36 EST, @YosemiteSam wrote:

Well @MikeOfThePlatte, I don't know about the South as a whole, but South Carolina very definitely could've seceded. Feelings were running very high on both sides throughout the affair, and as you say, the nullification convention did enable the governor to raise a militia to defend the state from any and all comers (read: any federal troops Jackson might send their way). Any attempt by South Carolina to leave the Union on its own would've led to a very short war, and most of the other southern states, while they weren't happy about the tariff, didn't go so far as to try to nullify it, and probably wouldn't have been inclined to walk out of the Union on South Carolina's word. So their only hope in case of secession would've been if Washington would've let them go peacefully, which knowing Jackson… yeah, no.

1990-04-02 18:43 EST, @sonofliberty wrote:

Even if South Carolina couldn't have *successfully* seceded, there's still an interesting scenario to be had here. Say they do secede, Jackson does send in the troops, and the tariff of 1828 is forcibly imposed on the South. IOW, the issue died down pretty quickly after South Carolina managed to more or less force its will on Washington by way of threats, and the federal government more or less demurred from protectionism until […] But if the federal government had instead established a precedent of forcing its will on individual states, I imagine things could've turned out very different. Imagine if Jackson, spurred by his successful defense of the Union, would've used the occasion to push forward with the abolition of the Electoral College, as he wanted to do. I think the whole Southern dominance of Washington that @AgentBlue spoke of (not wrongly) could've been… not averted, but very much lessened in such a scenario. Hell, if the North gets its act together and produces a consolidated political platform, we could even see slavery abolished by, say, 1865 in such a scenario.

1990-04-02 18:50 EST, @YosemiteSam wrote:

What? I got what you were saying with that post, and even broadly agreed, until the last sentence. What “unified northern agenda” could've done that so quickly? The North was always disunited politically during the First Republic, otherwise every presidential election would've been lopsided. Plus it had more than a few active supporters of slavery, and probably a majority of people who didn't care either way and just wanted economic prosperity. If such a “Northern Party” were to arise, I refuse to believe it could *both* be openly abolitionist *and* maintain its broad support from across the free states.

***

[1] Jackson said this IOTL as well. That man was not the sort to mince words, to say the least.
[2] My description of the Nullification Crisis up to this point is more or less entirely OTL.
[3] At this point things diverge somewhat – the Republicans, having been energized by Taney's anti-Bank shenanigans, are sufficiently willing to put egg on Jackson's face to agree to a compromise tariff before the Force Bill is floated.

Utgard96 · Aug 30, 2016

A House Divided #7: Where Hearts Were Entertaining June

“This shoot from our European continent will ultimately increase, and a plant will spring up, infinitely more important than the branch from which it proceeded;
and though the season of its maturity is far distant, yet the rapidity of its advance or tardiness of its growth greatly depends upon the fostering care or indifferent negligence of its rulers.
Still, whatever the conduct of these may be, its extent, its fertility, and other numerous advantages must, in the course of time, give it that rank which it has a right to claim among the great nations of the world.”

***

From “The Special Case of Brazil”
(c) 1967 by Dr. Florian Steiner
Translation (c) 1971 by James W. Grant
Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus AG

Brazil forms a special case in South American history for a great number of reasons. There are two reasons any ten-year-old schoolchild knows: firstly, unlike much of the rest of the continent it speaks Portuguese rather than Spanish, and by extension was colonised by Portugal rather than Spain. Secondly, it is the only (native) monarchy on the continent. Moreover, while the several republics formed from what was Spanish America have frequently been plagued by civil war and interregional conflict, Brazil has retained a relatively stable form of government since independence, with the second oldest functioning constitution in the Americas after that of the United States. This becomes even more impressive when one consider the massive size of the country – it's the third largest country in the world by surface area – and the heterogeneity of its population. So why did Brazil develop differently to all of its neighbours, and how can these differences be seen in today's Brazilian society?…

…In 1800, Brazil was a much smaller nation than it is today. Its population was just over three million, of which some 1.6 million, or a little over half, were enslaved. A further 400,000 were free blacks of various kinds, around a quarter of a million were natives, and the remainder, or just about a million Brazilians, were white. Like everywhere else in the Americas at the time, the economic and political systems were entirely under the control of the whites, but the racial barriers were notably less rigid than elsewhere. Mulattos (mixed-race descendants of whites and blacks), in particular, were able to gain some degree of prominence within the hierarchy, chiefly as enlisted soldiers and artisans. This was not due to a lesser degree of racism among the Brazilian elite, but rather can be explained by a lack of available whites to fill these positions in society, and the fact that mulattos were better treated by society the lighter their skin was (some even passed as white for all intents and purposes) should serve to underline the purely pragmatic reasons for this seeming abandonment of racial doctrine.

In general terms, early 19th-century Brazil was a thoroughly preindustrial society, with a small landholding and merchant elite making up perhaps two percent of the total population and controlling the entire apparatus of government and the entire economy between them. Even poor whites had next to no power in the system, although they were still better treated than mulattos and free blacks, and miles above the slaves. Slavery was the lifeblood of the Brazilian economy at the time, as nearly all Brazil's exports were either agricultural products (mainly sugar, later coffee) or minerals from the plentiful mines in the southeast of the country (centred upon the aptly-named province of Minas Gerais, or “General Mines”). Brazilian slavery was even harsher than that practiced in the United States or the Caribbean at the same time; a popular saying claimed Brazil was “Hell for blacks, Purgatory for whites and Paradise for mulattos”, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that the first part of this was true. The average lifespan of a black slave in Brazil was eighteen, and very few ever managed to reproduce. While this averted the particular horrors of a family-based slave economy such as that of the United States, where families could be broken up and sold off one by one at their master's whim, this can hardly be said to outweigh the unique horrors of the Brazilian slavery system. Aside from the harrowing mortality rates, the biggest of these was probably the fact that the low rate of slave reproduction meant that new slaves constantly needed to be brought in from Africa to keep the system alive, and by the 19th century Brazil accounted for some two-thirds of the Atlantic slave trade by itself…

…Who, then, ruled Brazil? Two groups dominated the local economy, and thus were able to exercise control over those parts of the political system not subject to Portuguese control. On one hand there were the plantation and mine owners who owned the means of production, on the other hand there were the merchants who controlled the export of the former group's products across the sea to the mother country (which held a crown-enforced monopoly on all Brazilian exports until independence, in accordance with the mercantilist doctrine that still held sway over its ruling class). Unlike the situation in Europe in the same period, in Brazil it was generally the landowners who espoused liberal ideas and the merchants who tended toward conservatism. This difference in alignment can be explained by the presence of the third faction in Brazilian politics: the monarchy, and before independence the entire Lisbon bureaucracy, which exerted its own influence upon the nation's politics. The merchant class were intimately connected to Portugal by virtue of the economic system's mercantilist nature, and many of them had been born there; as a result, they were inclined to favour stronger ties to the mother country, and with it, a stronger monarchy. On the other hand, the landowners were nearly all native-born Brazilians, and they desired an independent Brazil that could trade with whomever it liked and govern with a lighter hand.

In addition, one must consider the relatively uneventful way in which Brazil had won its independence. Although republican revolts, inspired by the revolutions in the United States, France and Haiti, had occurred several times in the closing years of the 18th century, the Portuguese crown had a firm enough hold on Brazil by 1807 that they considered Rio de Janeiro a safe place to move the royal court when Napoleon threatened the Portuguese metropole. From its position in Brazil, the Portuguese empire was reformed into a “United Kingdom”, wherein Brazil and Portugal would be of equal status, and Rio itself was developed into a proper capital city with such features as an opera and several newspapers (though these were subject to heavy royal censorship). When the crown moved back to Lisbon in 1821, Prince Pedro, the eldest son of King João VI, was left in Brazil as Prince Regent. Rumblings of discontent in Portugal over the previous years had been eased by King João's return, but still threatened to boil over, and the Cortes threatened to turn Brazil back from its newly-granted status as an equal partner to a mere Portuguese colony. Prince Pedro seized the moment, and in a lavish ceremony in Rio de Janeiro in December of 1822 he was crowned as Dom Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil. Without a shot fired or an official removed, independence had been achieved.

The new empire got its constitution in 1824, and this established a system somewhere in between absolute monarchy and parliamentary rule – there was to be a separation of powers inspired by that of the United States, with executive (the Emperor and State Council), legislative (the National Assembly) and judiciary (the courts) powers all independent of one another, but unique to Brazil was the addition of a fourth power – the moderating power, invested personally in the monarch, which would serve to ease tension and resolve disputes between the other three powers and take extraordinary action when such was deemed necessary to protect Brazil's independence. The National Assembly would consist of two chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, of which the former would be elected indirectly by electoral colleges in single-member districts, with at least one member per province, and the latter would be chosen to serve for life by the Emperor from a shortlist of three candidates selected by each province [1]. Dom Pedro had written the constitution himself, and put it into force through imperial decree, when the constituent National Assembly's proposal angered him – he nonetheless maintained that his constitution was “twice as liberal” as that proposed by the Assembly, and whether or not that was true, it was clearly a work of political genius as it kept the nation together and remains in force with alterations to this day… [2]

…While most of the elite in Rio were happy to support Pedro I's position, this general goodwill did not extend uniformly to the provinces. In particular, the province of Pernambuco in the northeast of the country was unhappy with being ruled from a distant capital, and when the Emperor named a president for the province without consulting the local powers that be, the latter rose up in revolt intending to proclaim a federal republic. The “Confederation of the Equator”, as it was called, received support from republicans across the northeast, but nonetheless the rebellion was squashed within three months. Lord Cochrane, a retired British admiral who led the Imperial Brazilian Navy against the rebels, was brought into the Brazilian nobility as Marquess of Maranhão, as was customary for victorious military leaders, and Pernambuco quieted down as the Emperor agreed to issue an amnesty for all participants in the rebellion except its leaders, who were summarily tried and executed.

The next provincial rebellion proved far more troublesome. The province of Cisplatina, in the far south on the River Plate, had been a constant source of friction between Spain and Portugal during the colonial period, with both sides laying claim to it and frequently fighting over its allegiance. On the one hand, its inhabitants were mainly Spanish-speaking; on the other hand, in this age before railways and the opening of the interior, Brazil's only reliable route to its interior provinces was by way of the River Paraná, which had its mouth in the River Plate; any nation that controlled both sides of the river would have a stranglehold on Brazilian commerce and governance. Brazil had taken control of the province in 1821, nominally as a protective measure to ensure the republican revolution in the Argentine wouldn't spread east, and while it was given broader autonomy than the other provinces, it still resented being ruled by what it saw as a foreign power. In 1825, a convention of notables declared Cisplatina's independence from Brazil, with the intention of joining the United Provinces of the River Plate, causing Brazil to send its army into the breakaway province while blockading the port of Buenos Aires with its navy. The resulting “Cisplatine War” lasted three years, with very little in the way of movement or decisive battles, before the British brokered a “neutral” peace treaty that created an independent Cisplatine state, named Uruguay, while requiring that the Paraná and Uruguay river systems would remain unconditionally open to Brazilian shipping.

The Cisplatine War had weakened the Emperor's authority, but the final crisis would come from quite a different source – Portugal. The fact that the ruler of Brazil was simultaneously a senior member of the Portuguese royal house turned out to be problematic [3] when King João died in 1826 and the throne fell to Dom Pedro, who immediately abdicated in favour of his daughter Maria. However, the new queen was opposed by a powerful conservative faction who argued that Pedro had disclaimed the Portuguese throne when he declared Brazil's independence, and that the rightful heir was therefore Infante Miguel, the Emperor's younger brother, who conveniently happened to share their views in all important respects. Miguel overthrew Queen Maria and took the throne for himself in 1828, sparking a lengthy civil war. In order to protect his daughter and, by extension, keep his homeland from falling back into absolutism, Dom Pedro decided to abdicate the Brazilian throne in April of 1831, leaving it to his six-year-old son, who was acclaimed Emperor Dom Pedro II immediately after [4]. Brazil was entering a new era…

***

This contemporary cartoon depicts Prince Pedro being reluctantly spurred on by John Bull while Miguel tries to hold onto his crown with the aid of an Austrian Grenzer who props him up.

From “Portugal 1800-1900: A Century of Strife”
(c) 1987 by José Antonio de Sousa
Cambridge University Press

The Miguelite War is often seen as parallel to the Carlist War in Spain, and certainly there are prominent similarities. Both wars resulted from the accession of an underaged female monarch and discontent arising from this in conservative circles, and both were triggered by an attempted coup d'état at the hands of the new queen's reactionary uncle. But this obscures the significant differences between the two conflicts: in Spain the Carlists only managed to capture some parts of the country, and the conflict was largely a siege by the liberals of their positions. By contrast, in Portugal the supporters of Dom Miguel were able to take over the entire administration, aided by the fact that the two main opponents of the Infante's rule were a seven-year-old girl and her father who was busy governing Brazil at the time. The Portuguese liberals thus found themselves completely outmaneouvred, and it fell to Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil and Dom Miguel's older brother, to abandon his new throne in a quixotic attempt to reclaim the Portuguese kingdom for his daughter… [5]

…Dom Pedro arrived at Porto, the most liberal major city in Portugal [6] and the site of the first liberal insurrection against Dom Miguel's rule, on the 9th of July, 1832. From there, he hoped that the peasantry would rise in support of their rightful queen – a hope that would quickly prove optimistic in the face of facts. The liberal army engaged a larger Miguelite force at Ponte Ferreira, and although they were victorious, the force was decimated to the point of being unable to pursue its enemy, and ultimately it was forced to fall back to Porto, which was the site of a year-long siege…

…The stalemate ended in June of 1833, when a segment of the liberal army left Porto aboard British ships to land at Faro, in the far south of Portugal, whence they would march to Lisbon. To the astonishment of all parties involved, this was successful, and the Duke of Terceira's liberal force took the capital on the 17th of July. Dom Pedro himself was able to move south from Porto later that month, and the liberals thus controlled the entire coast, with Dom Miguel's supporters confined to the rural inland. Dona Maria was proclaimed Queen at the end of the year, and the surrender of the Miguelites was negotiated over the spring of 1834. Dom Miguel himself gave up his claim to the throne and was banished from Portugal forever, in exchange for which he received a pension from the Portuguese treasury and amnesty for his supporters. Portugal was whole again, and although Maria was queen in name, it was known who actually commanded the kingdom: Dom Pedro, who would remain the power behind the throne for two decades to come… [7]

***

[1] I'm a bit uncertain as to precisely how this worked – if there was a single senator per province or if they were assigned seats as the Emperor pleased, or if there was actually a fixed number of nationwide senators and the Emperor picked each one from among all the candidates nominated by all the provinces. I haven't found a source more detailed than what's written in the update, and if one exists, I'm sure it's in Portuguese (a language I do not speak). If anyone knows, clarification would be much appreciated.
[2] This is obviously not true IOTL, but the 1824 constitution did last through the entire imperial era, which was marked by remarkable political stability (by Latin American standards anyway) and was only undone by Pedro II's lack of desire to see the monarchy go on after his own demise – after the Republic was proclaimed in 1889, a new constitution was written, and this has been replaced a number of times (the current constitution, dating from 1988, is the seventh since independence).
[3] Who knew having the heir apparent of your chronically unstable former colonial overlord as your monarch would come back to bite you?
[4] Everything up to this point is either pre-PoD or so close after the PoD that nothing differs.
[5] For those of my readers who don't instinctively memorise royal family connections (and this being Pre-1900, there won't be many of those), here's a rundown of the Portuguese royal family: King João VI had two sons, Pedro and Miguel, of which the former was the Emperor of Brazil and the latter a mere infante (junior prince), but was regarded as the rightful heir by those who felt Pedro had disclaimed his right to rule. Pedro had a single son, also called Pedro, who was left to rule Brazil when his father returned to Portugal, as well as a gaggle of daughters, the oldest of which inherited the throne on his abdication. Miguel, on his hand, had a large family, none of whom played the slightest role in all this except perhaps as a pragmatic reason for him to take over (having more children who could potentially inherit).
[6] Weirdly, given how it would later become a monarchist stronghold and the region around it remains a centre of power for the Portuguese right.
[7] IOTL, Pedro caught tuberculosis from his exposed position during the war, and died not long after the peace was signed at the age of 35. ITTL, this does not happen.

Utgard96 · Sep 2, 2016

A House Divided #8: The Barbour of Seville

“Let our object be: our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country. And, by the blessing of God, may that country itself become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration forever!”

***

From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

Having been comfortably returned to office in the 1832 elections, and seen the end of the Nullification Crisis, Jackson set about completing the economic agenda on which he'd staked his reelection bid. The recharter of the National Bank had been vetoed, the House of Representatives now had a solid pro-Jackson majority, the Senate remained finely balanced between the pro- and anti-Jackson camps [1], and Jackson himself had received a landslide majority in the presidential election. Taken together, these factors led Jackson to conclude that he'd been given a popular mandate to end the Bank before its charter was up. To this end, he fired McLane from the Treasury Department, replacing him with Levi Woodbury, a former Governor of New Hampshire whose views on monetary policy and the Bank aligned well with Jackson's. In his December 1832 address to the new Congress, Jackson called for an investigation into the “safety” of federal deposits in the soon-to-be-dismantled Bank; Speaker of the House James Polk proceeded to launch such an inquiry by a seven-man commission, which would report in March of 1833…

…To what extent the commission's findings were directed by political pressure and to what extent they were prompted by genuine motivated concerns about the Bank is unknown, but in any situation, it ended up issuing a divided ruling which declared by a margin of four to three that the deposits were in danger and should be removed as soon as possible. The House convened to vote on removing the deposits later that month, and despite the best efforts of Webster and Clay to rally its members to the Bank's rescue, it ended up passing the divestment bill in a party-line vote. The federal deposits were divested from the National Bank and moved to a number of “pet banks” across the country over the course of the spring, with the official policy change occurring on May 1. The Bank had been killed… [2]

***

From “A History of the U.S. Economy, 1776-1976”
(c) 1979 by Professor Thomas Scotson (ed.)
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press

The Panic of 1836

The Panic of 1836 was one of the most severe thus far in the nation's history, and probably the most intensely politicized. It's commonly held by those superficially versed in history that the panic was caused by President Jackson's dismantlement of the Bank of the United States, but this is an oversimplification of a situation that had, in fact, been building up for several years…

…When the Bank of England, faced with a worsening economic situation in Great Britain, raised its interest rate to almost twice what it had been in 1835, it created a ripple effect that forced American banks to do the same. The effects of this could've been less disastrous than they ultimately were, if the U.S. economy had been better regulated than it was, but the demise of the National Bank meant that there was no aid to be found, and the less-remembered actions taken by Andrew Jackson in his second term were scarcely more helpful. Notably, the transfer of significent federal deposits to a number of “pet banks” in the West meant that currency was moved away from the traditional banking markets of the Northeast, and the banks were forced to scale back their loans. In turn, the effects of the contracted loan market were exacerbated by the Specie Circular, issued in 1835, which required payment for all federal land to be given in specie [i.e. hard gold or silver currency]. The Circular was passed with the best of intentions – Jackson and his hard-money allies believed it would curb speculation and encourage land purchases by actual settlers – but its timing was deeply unfortunate, and caused a price crash on land that worsened the panic further…

…So it was that by April of 1836, the United States was entering the worst financial crises in its history, and the presidential election of that year would come to be dominated by the response to it…

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1836: In the Shadow of Jackson

The 1836 election was the first in twenty years not to feature either John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson [3], and additionally marked the first time neither party had an obvious candidate going into the election. On the Democratic side, President Jackson declared categorically that he would honor the tradition of not seeking a third term, deciding instead to retire to his plantation when his term was up in March of 1837. This left the nomination open, and at their convention in May of 1835, the delegates were divided on whom to support. A group of northern Democrats, centered on the New York “Locofoco” faction [4], wanted to nominate Martin Van Buren, the Minister to London, who was a noted minarchist and opponent of the Bank, but whose lukewarm track record on slavery worried the southerners, and his candidacy utterly failed to win traction. Instead, the choice fell upon Vice President Philip Pendleton Barbour of Virginia, who held the sway of the party's southern wing and was nominated on the first ballot. In order to shore up the ticket north of the Mason-Dixon line, the convention nominated William Wilkins of Pennsylvania as his running mate…

…On the opposition side, the Anti-Masons had largely folded into the Republican Party, establishing the two-party system that would last the next forty years. The party was strongly divided after Henry Clay decided against standing a second time. Some New England Republicans wanted to see Adams run again, but they were hugely outnumbered by Daniel Webster's supporters, while the southern wing of the party mainly supported Senator Willie Person Mangum [5] of North Carolina, although a small group of states-rights anti-Jacksonians backed John Tyler [6]. Many westerners wanted to draft Clay, while New York and Pennsylvania were divided between all these candidates, with some New Yorkers backing favorite-son candidate Francis Granger. However, when William Henry Harrison, retired general and hero of the Indian campaigns in the War of 1812, announced he was a Republican, he quickly became the obvious unity candidate. He was acceptable to the party leaders because he promised to give leeway to Congress, and seemed to share their fundamental views on the role of government. As a national hero, he was already a household name in most of the U.S., and it was hoped that the “star power” that had helped propel Jackson into the White House could have a similar effect for Harrison. Mangum was chosen as Harrison's running mate to secure votes from the South, particularly the crucial swing state of North Carolina…

…The campaign was dominated by one issue: the mounting economic depression. The Democrats tried to make the case that the National Bank had indirectly caused the panic by issuing large amounts of paper currency and thus creating a speculation bubble, but these arguments fell short, and for many voters, the Republicans appeared to have been right about the Bank all along. Harrison received momentum from this, but Jackson still remained personally popular, and Barbour's status as a continuity candidate meant that he put up a significantly better fight than another Democrat might have done…

…The year 1836 saw two new states admitted, the first time this had happened since 1820 – as per the usual mode of operations, the admission of Arkansas Territory as a slave state was offset by a free state created from the peninsular part of Michigan Territory [7], and both were given three electoral votes until the 1840 census returns had established their population. As such, 294 electoral votes were at stake, and divided themselves as follows:

William Henry Harrison was thus elected the 8th President of the United States, becoming the first Republican to hold that office… [8]

***

From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press

Jackson left office on March 3rd, 1837, having completed his two terms not in peace, but without the sort of violent upheavals that have marked power struggles in the other American republics. It is a testament to the quality of our democracy, even in its earliest, most chaotic days, that even through the heady days of nullification and the Bank War, even when his opponents were calling him a tyrant and an abuser of power, everyone nonetheless recognized Jackson's popular mandate and allowed him to remain President; had he been the President of Mexico or Colombia, doubtless there would've been an uprising against his rule at some point [9]…

…Having left office and Washington with it, Jackson returned to private life as master of the Hermitage, his cotton plantation just outside Nashville. When he arrived, it was to find that his adopted son Andrew Jr., who had been left to manage the plantation while Jackson was in Washington, had done a poor job, and the elder Jackson immediately set upon restoring it to good working order. He would go on to live out the remaining seven years of his life as another Tennessee planter, much like Washington before him, and apart from taking to the stump against President Harrison's re-election bid in 1840, did not involve himself in politics…

***

[1] IOTL, a number of southern senators (most notably John Tyler) crossed the floor in protest against the Force Bill. As a result, the 23rd Senate had an anti-Jacksonian majority. ITTL, with the crisis headed off slightly more peacefully, this break does not occur, and most of the South stays solidly with the Democrats.
[2] IOTL the commission ruled the opposite way, declaring the deposits safe, and Jackson was forced to resort to executive action. Further fracas in the Treasury Department meant that it took until October before the deposits could finally be divested.
[3] Finkelstein is being a little disingenuous here, since the one vote cast for Adams in 1820 was by a faithless elector, and a purely symbolic gesture intended to keep Monroe from being elected unanimously.
[4] The Locofocos were a group of Democrats in New York State who were noted for their extremely laissez-faire economics and their opposition to New York's Tammany Hall political machine (their name derived from a brand of matches, which they supposedly lit their meetings by after Tammany Hall tried to shut them down by turning off the gaslights). In many ways they were very similar to modern-day fiscal conservatives (classical liberals to a Europer), and their agenda came to have a large influence on the fiscal policy of Jackson's, and especially Van Buren's, administrations.
[5] Mangum pronounced his first and middle names “Wylie Parson”. This, impressively, is actually far from the worst butchering of grammar seen in 19th century American politicians' names.
[6] Hugh White is still a Democrat ITTL, so the South has no obvious unity candidate to bridge the gap between the nullifiers and the Clay men. With fewer nullifiers in the party, Mangum (a Clay supporter if ever there was one) becomes the South's candidate largely by default, and the few small-government Republicans back John Tyler.
[7] An all-Troll version of the state gets admitted ITTL.
[8] Not counting John Quincy Adams, of course.
[9] The author's biases are not necessarily my own (at the very least I'd be a lot less crass about them), but do broadly reflect popular opinion in the U.S. as of the time Harris was writing.

Utgard96 · Sep 10, 2016

...of course. Sorry, had a busy day yesterday and it slipped my mind.

A House Divided #9: All On the Plains of Mexico

“Oh, Santianna fought for fame
Away, Santianna!
And Santianna gained a name
All on the plains of Mexico”

***

From “Mexico Between the Wars, 1820-1850”
(c) 1976 by Manuel Guzmán
Monterrey: University of New Leon Press

The administration of Gómez Pedraza marks the peak of a distinct, though brief, period in Mexican history, extending through much of the 1830s and notable for its unusual domination by political moderates. This era is referred to in Mexico by the ominous name of “el Ojo de la Tormenta”, the Eye of the Storm, a term that sets out its contrasting nature from on one hand the preceding War of Independence and Iturbide dictatorship, and on the other hand the Texian Rebellion and the following period of…

…Despite the rose-tinted image given to his presidency by posterity, Gómez Pedraza's term in office was by no means a quiet one. Beset by radicals under Guerrero and Zavala on one side, and conservatives under Alamán and Bustamante on the other, as well as a myriad of provincial strongmen and army generals with agendas entirely their own, it's a testament to his skill and the vigor of the state left by Victoria that he was able to endure his entire four-year term. It was also a great stroke of fortune that the first blow against his rule should come from outside…

***

From “Santa Anna: The Man”
(c) 1971 by E.W. Swanton
London: Macmillan Publishers

…On July 5, 1829, a fleet of Spanish ships set sail from Cuba, and three weeks later arrived at Cabo Rojo, on the coast between Tampico and Veracruz. The fleet carried with it a detachment of some 3,000 troops, which made the first attempt at landing on the 27th; however, the weather would not permit them to do so, and the officers were forced to offer a gold prize to any soldier willing to swim to land and reconnoitre the immediate area around the landing site. The offer was taken up on by a soldier named Eugenio Aviraneta, who swam to shore and spoke with a group of Huastecs who informed him that the closest group of soldiers were at Tampico. The troops disembarked in the evening, and began marching north. They hoped to take Tampico in short order, establishing a bridgehead where more soldiers could be landed for an eventual march on Mexico City. Events would soon overtake them…

…News of the Spanish landing soon spread, and Santa Anna was sent with a thousand men to reinforce the garrison at Tampico. His force was numerically inferior to the Spanish force, but several other factors were in his favour. Most notably, Tampico's position at the north side of a major river made it defensible against attacks from the south, and General Lagarza, the commander of the local garrison, had already taken up defensive positions around the city. Perhaps even more fortuitously, however, the Spanish were marching through a coastal lowland area that was infested with yellow fever. By the time they reached Tampico, the Spanish force was fatigued and wracked by disease, and opted to stay in Pueblo Viejo on the south side of the river rather than try to take the city proper. From there it was relatively easy for Santa Anna to surround the Spanish and simply wait for them to surrender, no battle needed. This they did on September 11, and the “Capitulation of Pueblo Viejo” became the last hurrah of the Spanish reconquest attempts. No further moves were made against Mexico, and in 1836 Spain took the momentous step of recognising Mexican independence, leaving Peru as the only state on the American mainland still under Spanish claim. [1]

After the defeat of the Spanish, Santa Anna was hailed as a national hero. Everywhere he went he was feted by the people, and in characteristic style he revelled in this to the point where he himself fanned its flames, inventing such titles for himself as “Saviour of the Motherland” and “Napoleon of the West”. With this fame came the opportunity of greater power, and both President Gómez and Vice-President Bustamante offered him promotions, the latter secretly and in exchange for backing a conservative coup against Gómez. In less characteristic style, Santa Anna decided to go for the safe option of accepting Gómez' offer, and took office as commander of the units in Veracruz State in early 1830. This was evidence of a great trust on the President's part, for the port city of Veracruz was of fundamental importance to the Mexican economy, and had frequently been the origin of plots against the lawful government. [2] It appeared to have been well-placed, for Santa Anna remained loyal to Gómez' rule throughout his term…

…The 1832 presidential election was every bit as contentious as the preceding one. Against all odds, Gómez had survived a full four-year term in office in spite of the Spanish invasion and the abortive conservative uprising under the Plan of Pachuca [3], and the relative peace had allowed some of Mexico's economic woes to sort themselves out. Nonetheless, he declined to run for reelection, like Victoria before him, citing the principle of avoiding centralization of power by any individual. Instead the main two candidates were both generals: on one hand Vicente Guerrero, the hero of the Revolution, who was determined to win the office he'd narrowly lost in 1828. Guerrero was an enthusiastic supporter of liberal causes and a member of the York Rite. On the other hand there was Santa Anna, the hero of Tampico, who was unaffiliated with either branch of Mexican Freemasonry and whose politics were poorly known (even to himself, as his detractors would point out, only half in jest). Both men were hugely popular with the masses and at best lukewarmly supported by the powers that were in Mexico City, who were afraid of Guerrero's radicalism and Santa Anna's volatile politics. For want of a unity candidate, the election ended up being extremely close, with seventeen states supporting Santa Anna and sixteen supporting Guerrero (the other three backing local favorite-son candidates) [4]. Like in 1828, Guerrero refused to recognize the outcome of the election, and met with sympathetic generals in the city of Querétaro, where they drafted a pronunciamiento against Santa Anna's rule. Once more, Mexico descended into civil war…

***

From “Texas: The Story of a Nation”
(c) 1990 by Henry Rutherford Hill
Harrisburg: Lone Star Press

After the Fredonian Rebellion, Texas settled into a six-year period of relative peace, encouraged by the relatively laissez-faire attitude of the Mexican government toward its Anglo population. Some rumblings were felt when Mexico abolished slavery, but since it was unable to enforce the decision in Texas, little came of it. However, when the administration of Manuel Gómez Pedraza announced a halt on immigration from the United States, as well as a ban on the importation of slaves into Mexican territory, in the Law of January 26, 1832 [5], it began to become clear to the Texians that their situation could not continue indefinitely – they would either be forced to abandon slavery, an economically unpalatable decision for many of them, or declare independence.

The law did not end up halting immigration in practice – thousands of Americans a year continued to move across the border – but did cause worry among the Texians who were already settled. A convention was called to Harrisburg in May of 1834 to voice Texian worries about the law and send a proclamation to this effect to Mexico City; however, its report fell on deaf ears due to the ongoing civil war between Guerrero and Santa Anna [6]…

…The conflict had left Texas without a clear horse to back, as neither Guerrero nor Santa Anna seemed to be particularly likely to carry out a laissez-faire policy toward the frontier province. When Santa Anna routed Guerrero's forces at Jilotepec six weeks after the Harrisburg Convention, sending his rival into exile, it naturally became clear that he would turn on securing the periphery next, but few people could've imagined how far he'd go. His first act as undisputed President was to order the disbandment of state militias, and his second act was to dissolve Congress, ruling by decree for several months until a new one could be assembled. In September of 1834, he promulgated seven constitutional laws, which disbanded the state governments altogether and replaced them with departments whose governors would be appointed by the President. To add insult to injury, the laws did not make provision for separating Texas and Coahuila, and in fact reduced the overall number of departments. The prospect of being ruled by a governor appointed by Santa Anna and a legislature four hundred miles away in Saltillo was not one that enticed the Texians, and neither was the prospect of having their laws made by a legislature in Mexico City that would overrule them on nearly every issue.

Texas was not the only area in Mexico that felt this way; revolts immediately broke out all over the western part of Mexico itself, with particular intensity in the department of Zacatecas, a longtime liberal stronghold [7] whose inhabitants – and more importantly, governor – were strongly inclined toward federalism. Said governor, Francisco García Salinas, raised the state militia (what remained of it) in revolt against centralist rule. Santa Anna took it upon himself to stamp out the rebellion, leaving Mexico City in the hands of his War Minister Miguel Barragán, and was able to rout the Zacatecan rebellion in short order. Salinas was arrested, and by way of collective punishment, Zacatacas lost control of the prosperous Bajío region, which became the new department of Aguascalientes [8].

Meanwhile, tensions continued to rise in Texas, and by June of 1835, were at a breaking point. The English-speaking settlers' mistrust of Mexico City was higher than ever, and it seemed as though open rebellion was only weeks away. The first shots were fired in the town of Gonzales, whose inhabitants had been given a cannon to protect the town from Indian raids four years prior. The Mexican administration in San Antonio sent five men to request the cannon back in early June, fearing that the inhabitants might use it against their lawful government, and when they pointedly refused to honor the request, a Lieutenant Castañeda was sent with a hundred dragoons to take it by force. Arriving at Gonzales, Castañeda and his men found all bridges across the Guadalupe River, the only way to enter the town from the west, severed; scouts were sent to a nearby hilltop to reconnoitre the town itself, and found that the defiant inhabitants had adorned their town hall with a white flag with a black cannon and the caption ”COME AND TAKE IT”. The next day, despite their invitation, it was the Texians themselves who crossed the river and stormed the Mexican encampment, taking the dragoons by surprise and forcing them back. The first battle of the Texian Revolution had been won… [9]

***

[1] All of this happened in exactly the same way IOTL.
[2] Such as, for instance, the coup against Guerrero's government launched by Anastasio Bustamante when he served in the same position at the same time IOTL.
[3] An alternate version of Bustamante's uprising, which fails to gain traction and is ultimately defeated.
[4] IOTL, Guerrero was executed by Bustamante's order after the latter took power, leading to outrage throughout the country and a counter-coup by Santa Anna in 1832. The resulting 1833 election saw another fairly even split, but between Santa Anna and Valentín Gómez Farías, who ended up accepting the vice-presidency with little fuss once Santa Anna made it clear he'd be left in charge of all the actual governing (one presumes Santa Anna's own brief in this administration was to make Mexico great again). ITTL, with Guerrero alive and humiliated in 1828, I see no reason why he wouldn't try for the presidency once more.
[5] IOTL, Bustamante proclaimed this ban very soon after taking power, in April 1830. Gómez Pedraza is a bit more reluctant to do so, but the passage of such a law was more or less inevitable once it became clear that the Texians weren't going to give up their slaves because Mexico asked them to.
[6] One of the instances where TTL is changed due to Mexico being less stable – IOTL, the convention was held in 1832, and the year after the Mexican government under Valentín Gómez Farías, eager to prevent an uprising and repair relations with the US, actually agreed to several of the Texian terms, including loosening the immigration policy. That all came to naught once Santa Anna took power though.
[7] This is stretching the truth a bit, but the state was a key battleground in the War of Independence.
[8] The course of the Zacatecan Rebellion is more or less exactly as OTL, mainly because I don't see any way it could've gone much differently.
[9] This is again more or less exactly how the Battle of Gonzales went IOTL, except insofar as it's moved up by four months.

Utgard96 · Sep 16, 2016

Today's update returns to American internal politics, and introduces quite a few things that will become important later on. Thanks to @Archangel Michael for suggesting the new Chief Justice.

A House Divided #10: Tippecanoe and Mangum Too

“We have had good and bad Presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American Nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad Presidents cannot destroy it, and have been able to do no more than slightly to retard the public's advancement.”

***

From “A History of America Through its Presidents”
(c) 1991 by Michael Andrews (ed.)
Wilmington: Cape Fear Publishers

William Henry Harrison was inaugurated on March 4, 1837. Harrison decided to continue Jackson's tradition of taking the oath and giving his inaugural address in the open air on the East Portico, and to upstage rumors spread by his opponents of his declining health, he declined to wear an overcoat for the event. He hardly would've needed one in any situation, because the sun broke through as he appeared on the portico, and continued to beam down on the proceedings throughout the morning [1]. Matters were probably helped by the fact that the ceremony was officiated by the ailing Chief Justice Marshall, a man of 81 next to whom the 64-year-old Harrison looked positively sprightly… [2]

…Harrison's inaugural address, the longest since the delivery of the address became a public event rather than a congressional one, set out the Republican ideological platform in broad terms, calling for internal improvements and the return of the national banking system. However, the continued Democratic majority in the Senate, a result of the admission of two arch-Democratic states in Arkansas and Michigan, meant that pursuing that platform would prove difficult for the Harrison Administration. Instead, the President opted to make the first major move of his administration in a different field, and one which was somewhat outside the orthodoxy of his party – Indian removal…

***

From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers

William Henry Harrison is perhaps the most controversial President of the 19th century in terms of Native policy – like Jackson he had a long record of fighting for white settlement of the West (except in his case it was the Old Northwest rather than the Middle South [3]), like Jackson he believed Indian Removal was the only fair way of dealing with the Natives remaining in “white lands” and the only way to stop massacres, unlike Jackson he actually successfully pushed it as part of his legislative agenda. Part of the reason why he was able to achieve this is that as a Republican (and thus part of the traditionally anti-removal party), he was able to cajole votes for the proposal from both parties, whereas Jackson had been more or less restricted to hoping the Democratic House majority wouldn't break. Republican leaders, Daniel Webster particularly, were bewildered at Harrison's decision to push for it, but both Henry Clay and Vice President Mangum were sympathetic to the idea in principle, as were most Democrats, and when the Second Indian Removal Bill came up for a vote in the House, it ended up passing by a margin of 146-93, with three abstentions, in a vote that crossed party lines heavily [4].

White historians, in particular those sympathetic to the Republican/Unionist platform, have painted this shift in opinion as an outpouring of magnanimity on the part of Harrison and the Republican congressional leaders. However, one is utterly remiss not to examine the events of the 1830s and their effects on public opinion regarding the issue. In 1831, Alabama settlers had run the Muscogee off their lands in the northeastern part of the state, nearly exterminating the tribe in the process; in 1835, something similar happened to the Choctaw in Mississippi, who sat on large tracts of potential cotton-growing land that was heavily desired by white planters and settlers. The massacres of the Muscogee and Choctaw were condemned by politicians and the press, particularly north of the Mason-Dixon line; southern commentators typically responded to these condemnations by pointing out that what the Alabamans and Mississippians had done was scarcely different from the fates that had befallen the Wampanoag [5] or the Susquehannocks [6]. These counter-arguments fell on deaf ears, and what had seemed like an unnecessary expenditure in 1831 became a lauded humanitarian measure in 1838…

…Having secured the removal bill's passage through Congress, Harrison turned to the task of obtaining land for the tribes to resettle on. Jackson had reportedly favored removal to the southernmost part of the unorganized territory, what is today the state of Cimarron. Harrison, however, felt that this would unnecessarily enrage the South, being the only remaining land south of the Missouri Compromise line, and thus inevitably slated to be opened for white settlement; when this happened, the debate would start all over again [7]. Instead, Harrison favored moving the tribes as far away from potential white settlement areas as possible, and ideally into a region that was already populated by Natives. His choice fell upon the upper Missouri valley in the far northwest, a region controlled by the Sioux confederacy; between 1839 and 1844, the remaining Choctaw along with the Cherokee and Chickasaw were moved into this area, while the Seminole, after resisting removal in the Third Seminole War, were moved southward along the Florida Peninsula. The three “civilized” tribes that moved into the Northwest were able to secure their new lands despite resistance from the Sioux, and when the Plains territories were opened for settlement in 1856, the portions north of the 44th parallel were set aside as formal Indian territory [8].

Buffalo hunting in Indian Territory, circa 1860.

***

From “A History of America Through its Presidents”
(c) 1991 by Michael Andrews (ed.)
Wilmington: Cape Fear Publishers

In October of 1837, months after Harrison's inauguration, Chief Justice Marshall finally passed away after a long bout of illness; it had been expected for some time, and the fact that Marshall lived as long as he did and was able to exercise his office into his final days is a testament to the man's constitution [9]. Harrison quickly moved to appoint a replacement; his choice was slightly unorthodox, but not unwelcome to the Senate Republicans. The nomination fell upon former President and sometime Representative from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams. The President had neglected to consult Henry Clay before making the nomination, a fact that was not lost on the Senator from Kentucky. Nevertheless, Clay didn't see the appointment as objectionable in itself, and indeed viewed it as a prime opportunity to annoy the Democrats; after a brief hearing, Adams' nomination narrowly passed through the Senate, largely thanks to Clay's expert whipping of the Republican Senate contingent. John Quincy Adams had become the first man ever to lead both the executive and judicial branches of government [10], and his period as Chief Justice would be every bit as fraught as his presidency…

…Harrison was the first President since Madison to face significant upheavals in U.S. foreign policy. Whereas in Madison's case the upheaval came from the British to the north, in Harrison's case it was to do with Mexico to the south. Texas, hitherto a Mexican province [11] though one with heavy American settlement, had declared independence in the fall of 1835, and Jackson had recognized the nascent republic hours before leaving office. The ascent of Davy Crockett as President of Texas in the 1838 election on a platform of seeking annexation into the United States precipitated a major political crisis – not so much in Texas, where the vast majority supported becoming a U.S. state, as in the United States itself. Any attempt at expansion, particularly south of the Missouri Compromise line, was always met with suspicion by large sections of the North, particularly Republicans, who of course happened to be in power at the time. As such, when the request for annexation came across President Harrison's desk, he had little choice but to completely disregard it, and when southern Democrats launched congressional resolutions seeking to approve Texas annexation through legislative action, they were soundly defeated in both houses of Congress [12]. This was not the last anyone would hear of Texas…

Chief Justice Adams photographed in 1843.

***

From “How the States Got Their Shapes”
(c) 2003 by Glen Redmond
Baltimore: Chesapeake Publishers

When you visit the city of Toledo, Michigan, it's hard to imagine that it was once the focal point of the only armed conflict between two individual U.S. states in the nation's history. But nonetheless this was so, for when the southern border of Michigan Territory was defined, it was defined as a line going straight east from the southern end of Lake Michigan, which was believed at the time to be significantly north of where it was, somewhere around where the Detroit River flows into Lake Erie. This followed a precedent stated in the Northwest Ordinance, which declared the same line appropriate for the southern boundary of any state in the area. On the other hand, when Ohio was admitted as a state, its constitutional convention, fearing that the line was in fact further south, defined the state's northern boundary by a line from the south end of Lake Michigan to the north end of Miami Bay [13]. Congress sponsored a survey to settle the line in 1811, but the war with Britain delayed its implementation, and when it was finally conducted five years later, it surveyed the boundary as defined by Ohio; in response, Michigan governor Lewis Cass launched his own survey to define the Michigan claim, which found that it lay significantly to the south of Ohio's claim, and so the boundary remained unsettled for another twenty years.

The conflict flared up for real in the mid-1830s, as Michigan applied for statehood; Ohio was determined that Michigan should not be allowed to enter the union with territorial claims against an existing state. In April of 1835, Ohio governor Robert Lucas sent a force of six hundred state militiamen to occupy the “Toledo Strip” by force; when they arrived, they found a numerically superior force of Michigan militia were already present. At this point, Washington was scared into action. Eager to avoid an altercation, President Jackson asked his Attorney General Benjamin Butler (not the President, a different Benjamin Butler) for legal advice on the conflict. Butler recommended that the Michigan claim be accepted, as it predated the Ohio claim and could thus be considered original; he was joined in this opinion by future Chief Justice John Quincy Adams, who wrote that “never in the course of my life have I known a controversy of which all the right was so clearly on one side and all the power so overwhelmingly on the other.” Jackson, on the other hand, was inclined to support Ohio's claim, as Ohio was a key swing state whose loss might mean a nationwide loss for the Democratic Party. [14]

In the end, the dispute was settled by allowing the residents of the region to choose their allegiance for themselves. Elections were held in late 1835 under Ohio law; the area ended up narrowly voting for Michigan, which Ohio argued was due to the intimidating presence of Michigan militiamen in the area [15]. Nonetheless, the result was not disputed for long, and Ohio was soon forced to give up the strip to the newly-admitted state of Michigan, which gave up its claims north of the Mackinaw Strait in return… [16]

***

Population data for the United States, 1840
From “Twenty Censuses: America Through the Ages”
(c) 1979 by Dr Arthur Williamson (ed.)
Washington: United States Census Bureau

[17]

***

[1] This is markedly different from the weather at Harrison's OTL inauguration in 1841, which was overcast and drafty. ITTL he's luckier with the weather, as indeed was Van Buren IOTL (he and Jackson rode through Washington to Capitol Hill together, to the cheers of the spectators).
[2] IOTL, John Marshall died two years earlier, and was replaced by Roger Taney as Chief Justice in one of the major coups of Jackson's second term (Taney's appointments to both the Cabinet and the Supreme Court having previously been struck down by the Senate). Marshall was in terrible health from 1832 onwards, so we can expect him to pass away in very short order indeed ITTL.
[3] The Middle South is about the same area that the Census Bureau calls South Central IOTL, so more or less everything between the Apalachicola, the Ohio, the Sabine and the Rio Grande. As usual with US macroregions, definitions differ from one source to another.
[4] The bill is opposed by many Eastern Republicans, in particular the New Englanders and former Federalists, as well as two groupings within the Democratic Party: former Federalists who voted against the 1831 bill, and theoretically sympathetic southern Democrats who vote against out of spite against Harrison.
[5] The Wampanoag were a people who lived in what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island, who were largely wiped out by 1700, partly due to their war against the settlers but mainly due to diseases contracted from bacteria to which the settlers were immune. Some 2,000 registered Wampanoag tribe members remain today, most of whom are mixed-race.
[6] The Susquehannock people lived on the Susquehanna river (insert Nicolas Cage meme here), and were rendered completely extinct by disease in the 1670s.
[7] The acquisition of Texas and New Mexico was probably about the one thing that kept this from becoming the case IOTL.
[8] This is one of our first major divergences in the West, and will probably lead to a more southward focus of settlement ITTL, along with several other changes still to come.
[9] IOTL, Marshall died in 1835; even that was a pretty impressive feat considering that he lived to the age of 79 and had had serious health problems since 1832.
[10] IOTL this didn't happen until Taft, whose nomination process wasn't altogether dissimilar to Adams'.
[11] Well, technically it was only half a province since it was administratively united with Coahuila, but the author feels no particular need to clarify this relatively peripheral point.
[12] This is more or less what happened IOTL when Van Buren received the annexation offer; any “only Nixon could go to China” effect Harrison might've had behind him is negated by his complete lack of desire to alienate his own party over what he views as a peripheral issue.
[13] This is OTL's Maumee Bay; the river and bay were never respelled ITTL.
[14] Up to this point, the entire Toledo War goes as OTL.
[15] IOTL, the militiamen were more heavy-handed, arresting several Ohio partisans; this caused Ohio to send in its own militia and led to an armed standoff that lasted over a year.
[16] IOTL Michigan was forced to give up its claim to Toledo, and in exchange received what is now the Upper Peninsula – which was at the time almost entirely uninhabited by whites, and so considered a poor tradeoff until its massive ore deposits were discovered.
[17] This is more or less exactly as per OTL, except for the Toledo strip (pop. roughly 15,000) being in Michigan and the Upper Peninsula (pop. roughly 1,500 citizens) being in Wisconsin Territory. The exact figures are slightly different due to butterflies – large-scale demographic changes from OTL only start to happen later on.

Utgard96 · Sep 23, 2016

A House Divided #11: The Yellow Rose of Texas

“I want the seals of power and place,
The ensigns of command,
Charged by the people's unbought grace,
To rule my native land.
Nor crown, nor scepter would I ask
But from my country's will,
By day, by night, to ply the task
Her cup of bliss to fill.”

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1840: Tippecanoe Once More

By comparison with the elections preceding and following it, 1840 was a relatively quiet affair – President Harrison had been able to do very little to alleviate the economic crisis, but by 1840 it was beginning to dissipate. The banking system had returned to reasonably good order, and the continued decline of tariff rates (the congressional situation had never allowed the Republicans to repeal the Compromise Tariff during Harrison's first term, and so it still remained in effect) meant that southern agriculture was beginning to recover as well. However, food prices remained low as the economy as a whole grew, and coupled with poor harvests in 1839 this meant that the crisis had finally reached the Western states, which turned against their favorite son in his bid for a second term… [1]

…On the Republican side, the nominations were relatively clear; for the first time the party had an incumbent President and Vice President, and although the economy was still doing poorly, Harrison remained personally popular and was easily nominated for a second term. Willie Person Mangum accepted renomination as Harrison's running mate, and so the Republican Party presented voters with the same ticket as in the previous election, a much-needed sign of stability after years of infighting during Jackson's time in the White House…

…The Democrats, for their part, were torn. The New York Locofocos still wanted Van Buren; New England Democrats pushed for Levi Woodbury; Virginians were partial to a second chance for Barbour, a proposal that gained little traction with the other states; while the southern states' rights faction rallied around Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee. Eventually the convention settled on a dark-horse candidate in the form of former Treasury Secretary Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland; Taney was considered acceptable to the South as well as the middle states, since he was a slaveholder from a slave state whose actual opinions on the morality of slavery were unknown; his legacy in the Cabinet gave him a degree of appeal with the Locofocos and other small-government groups. The only faction that didn't approve of Taney was the New Englanders, and to create a balanced ticket, Woodbury was given the nomination for Vice President…

…The campaign, as always, was a spirited affair; Republicans declared Taney a dangerous states' rights extremist who would “wreck our dear Union, just as he attempted to wreck the National Bank”, in the words of a Republican publication; Democrats, for their part, pointed to Harrison's poor economic record and contrasted it with the growth seen under Jackson, indicating that change was needed. Taney was considered an uninspiring candidate, and was unable to capture the national imagination in quite the same way as Harrison; by September the now-iconic campaign song “Tippecanoe and Mangum Too” was heard in every corner of the nation, and this proved enough to deliver the President a second term, despite Taney's narrow victory in the popular vote…

***

From “A History of America Through its Presidents”
(c) 1991 by Michael Andrews (ed.)
Wilmington: Cape Fear Publishers

Having been returned to office with a continued Republican Senate and Democratic House, Harrison sought to make headway on the issues that had eluded him during his first four years in office, most notably tariff reform. There was little he could do, however, not because of political opposition but because of his own health; the President was approaching his sixty-ninth birthday, and health problems were beginning to rear their heads. In October of 1841, a particularly cold autumn, Harrison received a bad cold that turned into pneumonia, and by the 27th of that month, the President was dead…

…With Harrison's death, Willie Person Mangum became the first Vice President to ascend to the presidency – although there was raucous debate over whether he actually got to be President or merely Acting President, as the Constitution's language was unclear on the matter [2]. The Cabinet met soon after Harrison's death, and agreed by a majority vote that Mangum would be Acting President only, but Mangum himself undid this when he arranged to take the presidential oath with no qualifiers whatsoever, in effect laying claim to the presidency, on November 1st. In doing this he made enemies of several powers in Washington, including the Cabinet as well as Henry Clay, but he assuaged their fears when he proclaimed that he would continue Harrison's practice of abiding by majority decisions of the Cabinet in all matters [3]. So it was that Mangum became the 9th President of the United States, and settled into the office expecting to spend a quiet three years in office and then hand over to whomever the people elected to succeed him. Things would turn out rather differently…

***

From “Texas: The Story of a Nation”
(c) 1990 by Henry Rutherford Hill
Harrisburg: Lone Star Press

By 1840, Texas was beginning to get used to the idea of long-term independence; domestic conflict in Washington had killed its first annexation bid, and with William Henry Harrison's re-election, it seemed unlikely that the next four years would see matters change significantly. President Crockett, whose election had been on the promise to seek immediate annexation, had begun to change his priorities to securing the republic's western border against the Comanche and its southern border against Mexico. To this end he sought aid from foreign powers; the French sent a diplomatic envoy to the nascent republic to investigate the possibility of a deal that would see France guarantee Texian independence in exchange for some of the republic's land being opened to French settlement, but an incident involving a group of pigs who trashed the envoy's hotel room led to a breakdown of negotiations [4]. Crockett also sent a delegation to Mexico City in an attempt to gain formal recognition and perhaps even a border settlement [5], but with the strife in Mexico following Santa Anna's overthrow, none of the sides were particularly interested in being seen to treat with Texas in the context of international diplomacy, so nothing came of it.

With President Harrison's death and President Mangum's ascension, however, matters changed. Mangum himself was no more of an annexationist than Harrison, but in the confusion surrounding the delineation of his formal powers, southern Democrats in the House of Representatives launched a resolution calling for annexation that ended up passing narrowly with the support of the new intake of southern Republicans from the 1840 elections. The Senate, after raucous debate, ended up passing the measure by a single vote, an event that Henry Clay would later refer to as “the single greatest defeat of my Congressional career”. President Mangum was not bound to abide by the resolution, but declared his intent to do so as soon as the Texian election was over, so as to ensure that the will of both nations was abided by. Sam Houston's victory meant that annexationism carried on in Texas, and so a delegation was sent to Washington to work out terms.

The treaty was finalized in March of 1842, and yet again the annexation issue was placed before the Senate; the treaty would need to pass by a two-thirds margin, and this was not reached. The issue fell by the wayside for several months, as other issues loomed; however, congressional Democrats were adamant that Texas should be annexed in time for the 1844 presidential election, and so in December of the same year, during the 1840 Congress' lame-duck session, the issue was once more raised, this time in the form of a joint binding resolution that would declare the annexation treaty to be in force, thus bypassing the need for a Senate supermajority. Under the leadership of Senator Robert Walker of Mississippi [6] and former House Speaker James K. Polk of Tennessee [7], an intense period of cajolery and vote-buying ensued, and Daniel Webster and his Republican allies responded with an equally fierce campaign against annexation. The House voted first, on February 3, and passed the measure by a reasonable margin; all but a few Democrats voted for, and all but a few Republicans against. The Senate, where the Republicans still held a majority, would be a harder nut to crack, but several western Republicans were supportive of expansion in general, and open to persuasion on Texas specifically. Many Republicans wanted Mangum to use his power over executive appointments to ensure the party loyalty of Republican lame-duck Senators [8], but the President demurred citing Republican principles of good government.

In early March, just before the end of the term, the vote was taken in the Senate, and to Henry Clay and Daniel Webster's chagrin, it passed by a margin of 25-24, with one abstention. The treaty was signed by President Mangum on April 2, 1843, and by Sam Houston in Harrisburg two weeks after. Texas formally entered the Union on November 1, and its inaugural two Senators and two Representatives arrived in Washington in time for the new Congress' first session the next month… [9]

***

From “Mexico Between the Wars, 1820-1850”
(c) 1976 by Manuel Guzmán
Monterrey: University of New Leon Press

The annexation of Texas by the United States sent shockwaves through Mexico; what had used to be a rebellious border province was now part of the larger neighbour to the north, and most Mexican opinion was dead-set against recognizing the annexation, just as it had opposed recognizing Texian independence. The republic had sent several envoys to Mexico City to negotiate a settlement; these were either ignored, turned away or assaulted in public, depending on the mood and degree of political stability in the capital. Santa Anna maintained throughout his second presidency that he had signed the Velasco Treaty under duress, and that Mexico was under no obligation to abide by it… [10]

…Following the Plan of Morelia and the ensuing overthrow of Santa Anna's government, the Texas issue saw a major breakthrough. President Herrera [11] was no less patriotic than the next man, contrary to Mexican depictions in subsequent years, but he was a realist in terms of Mexico's relationship with the United States, and firmly held that war should be staved off at all costs. When he articulated these sentiments in early 1844, he was denounced as a traitor to Mexico, and it was only through luck that he avoided a full-on popular uprising in Mexico City [12]. Washington sent John Slidell to Mexico City in the summer, with an offer of $10 million for the disputed areas; when he arrived, he was met with loathing from nearly everyone, and his very presence was seen by many as an insult to Mexican national honor [13]. However, President Herrera treated with him in secret, and eventually worked out a compromise settlement; Mexico would retain the entirety of Nuevo México, with the border set at the 25th parallel west of Washington [14], then the Pecos and Rio Bravo, and in exchange Mexico would receive $8 million. The treaty was signed in secret by Herrera on August 21, using the presidential powers established by Santa Anna that hadn't been rescinded following the uprising, and Slidell subsequently took it back to Washington for approval, which was granted easily by the Senate [15].

When the treaty was made public in September, Mexico City went into an uproar of seldom-before-seen proportions, and the uprising Herrera had feared was a fact. A group of soldiers in the National Palace arrested the President on the 11th, and the next day the capital was declared to be under the control of a provisional junta. Within a week, Anastasio Bustamante was installed as the new President, and vowed to fight the “disgraceful and unjust transgression against the Mexican people” committed by Herrera and Slidell; however, the need to consolidate his power forestalled any such plans for the immediate future…

***

[1] Similar patterns were seen IOTL, although the banking crisis itself has lasted only four years as opposed to OTL's five; chalk this up to butterflies.
[2] Article II, Section 1 (obviously this predates the PoD): “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President … until the disability be removed, or a President elected.” You'll note the ambiguous meaning of “the same”, which could refer to the actual presidency or its powers equally well; there's also the final part of the clause which might indicate that a special presidential election should be held or might not.
[3] IOTL, Tyler declared that he would take executive decisions on his own, and threatened to sack any cabinet member who disagreed with him, and refused to heed the “advice” Clay had provided to Harrison, thus alienating his own party and creating something of a clusterfuck. Mangum is more prudent than that, but still won't be Clay's puppet by any means.
[4] This happened IOTL. See also @Sicarius' fantastic (although dormant) TL “The Stars at Night”, which has this as its PoD.
[5] The treaty which ended the Texas Revolution, in both OTL and TTL, was signed by Santa Anna but immediately rejected by the Mexican Congress, and Mexico never actually recognized Texas as an independent nation in the nine years until it was annexed by the United States.
[6] IOTL, Walker was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of annexation, writing an open letter in support of it that was widely read in Washington.
[7] Polk stays in Washington ITTL, largely because the situation for the Democrats in Tennessee is less dire sans Hugh White's defection.
[8] Read, buy them off with patronage jobs (see methods depicted in Spielberg's Lincoln).
[9] Just like in OTL, a special provision of the Texas annexation treaty allows the state two Representatives until the next census, instead of one as is typical for newly admitted states.
[10] The Velasco Treaty is broadly as per OTL, except that the Texians actually do abide by the article giving Santa Anna passage back to Veracruz instead of holding him prisoner and then sending him to Washington as they did IOTL.
[11] José Joaquin de Herrera was an army general and three-time President IOTL, notably becoming the first President since Guadalupe Victoria to last a full term in office between 1848 and 1851.
[12] This was Herrera's opinion IOTL, and the Mexican people's reaction is more or less the same too.
[13] IOTL, Slidell was instructed to offer up to $25 million for New Mexico and California as well as the disputed areas; the offer was almost certainly intended as a prelude to war, as neither Washington nor Mexico City was particularly interested in negotiating, and it was (correctly) believed that Mexico could be provoked into declaring war that way. ITTL, Mangum earnestly wants to see the border settled, and so Slidell is given a more acceptable offer and becomes slightly less despised by the Mexicans for it.
[14] This is the OTL western border of Kansas, and runs about through the middle of the Texas Panhandle; the Llano Estacado is still in Mexico, but just barely.
[15] So why does negotiation over Texas happen ITTL, when IOTL both sides shrugged off the idea completely? Well, for a start, Mexico is actually able to negotiate, being slightly less unbelievably chaotic than IOTL – IOTL the presidency changed hands four times in 1846 alone. Secondly, Herrera, who was one of very few people in Mexico not to dismiss the idea of negotiating out of hand, happens to be in power at a fortuitous time. Thirdly, whereas Polk wanted to take California at any cost and was completely willing to go to war over it, Mangum actually wants the border settled ASAP to keep the Democrats from pulling any shenanigans if he were to lose re-election in 1844.

Utgard96 · Sep 30, 2016

A House Divided #12: Mangum Opus

“I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1844: The Democrats Split

The 1844 presidential election could probably have been a lot less interesting than it ultimately was. The incumbent President was Willie Person Mangum, who had ascended upon Harrison's death three years prior, and the circumstances of his ascension to the Presidency were still hotly disputed; a number of high-profile figures on both sides of the party divide still referred to Mangum as “His Accidency”, feeling that an unelected President lacked a mandate to push his agenda and should leave governing to Congress until new elections could be held. By 1844, however, Mangum had more or less proved himself as the nation's chief executive, and the majority view was that as the Vice President's constitutional powers barely extended beyond those of a designated successor to the President, Mangum had been duly elected and was within his rights to claim the title of President as well as the powers of the office. Doubtless they were helped in this by Mangum ordering the White House clerks to return any mail addressed to the “Vice President” or “Acting President” unopened, requiring anyone who had business with him to recognize his ascension to the Presidency [1]. Mangum's relatively smooth working relationship with Henry Clay, a man who shared many of his policy stances, also helped prevent Washington from descending into infighting for the remainder of the presidential term [2].

When the Republican Party held its convention in Philadelphia in April of 1844, Mangum announced that he would be seeking election to a full term as President. He was nominated with a narrow majority on the first ballot, and Senator Rufus Choate of Massachusetts was nominated for the vacant office of Vice President. Clay had harbored intentions of running a second time, but stood aside in Mangum's favor, allegedly because he found the working environment running Harrison's and Mangum's congressional agenda pleasantly surprising and felt that a run for the Presidency risked too much. In fact, however, correspondence between Mangum and Clay reveals that the former had promised a free run for the latter in 1848, and the eternal realist from Kentucky might've believed that 1844 was a lost cause.

Willie Person Mangum, 9th President of the United States
Republican nominee for President, 1844

So it likely would've been – Mangum's period in office was far from the most successful, notwithstanding the annexation of Texas, and while the economy was in better shape than it had been in 1836, that wasn't saying much. Efforts to pass a protectionist tariff had been frustrated by the Democratic-held House of Representatives, and by all appearances, the Democrats should've walked the presidential race. As it was, however, the Democratic Party was nearly as riven with internal division as the Republicans. The convention, held in Baltimore in May, originally looked likely to nominate former Minister to Britain and perennial Northern Democrat favorite Martin Van Buren, but with the Texas annexation and the rising tide of revanchism in Mexico, Van Buren's anti-expansionist and anti-slavery views went from fringe issues that could safely be ignored to major gulfs of opinion between the presumptive nominee and the party. So it was that when Lewis Cass of Michigan, former Secretary of War and one of the most noted expansionists north of the Mason-Dixon line, threw his hat into the ring he swept the convention off its feet, and with the backing of the South and the West he took the nomination on the third ballot. Governor John Fairfield of Maine became his running mate, and the platform adopted pledged to “defend our Union and her interests from all comers” – this was interpreted as a call to war with Mexico.

Lewis Cass, Senator from Michigan
"Regular" Democratic nominee for President, 1844

The New York Democrats did not take kindly to the nomination of Lewis Cass. His economic policies were unknown, but he was known for supporting territorial expansion and potentially the extension of slavery to newly acquired lands – this was considered a red line [3]. A convention of the state party was called in June, and nominated Van Buren for President with Representative John Parker Hale of New Hampshire as his running mate. The two pursued a platform of “small-government radicalism” typical of the Locofoco tendency within the Democratic Party; free enterprise and social equality were to be the goals of the prospective Van Buren administration in all things. Despite both candidates' anti-slavery tendencies, the institution was ultimately left out of the platform, as its retention was felt to hurt the ticket's chances… [4]

…A number of other candidates ran low-level campaigns for the presidency, including James G. Birney who stood as an anti-slavery candidate on the Liberty ticket for the second time in a row, and Joseph Smith, President of the Mormon Church, who ran on a typically mysticist platform promising to make America into the new Garden of Eden. Neither one would have a significant influence on the outcome of the election, Birney because Van Buren took much of the abolitionist vote, and Smith because his authority didn't extend far beyond the membership of his church…

Martin Van Buren, former Minister to the Court of St James's
"Locofoco" Democratic nominee for President, 1844

…The first three-cornered campaign since 1832 was carried out with as much spirit as previous elections, as supporters of the various factions accused each other's candidates of gross iniquities; Cass was said to be a doughface of the worst kind [5], a man who was sure to sell out the Union's interests to southern moneyed interests and see the extension of slavery across the western territories, while Van Buren was a dangerous Locofoco who would undo the work of two successive administrations and throw the economic future of the Union into the mix by challenging the compromises made on slavery. Mangum, meanwhile, was conspicuously ignored; some barbs were made by both Democratic factions about his unelected status, and Van Buren supporters railed against the American System just as they had done in the previous two elections, but ultimately the incumbent President was left to act as a symbol of stability.

Van Buren and Hale had managed to become the official Democratic ticket only in New York and Vermont; in Hale's home state, moderates led by Levi Woodbury and Franklin Pierce [6] contrived to keep Cass' name on the ballot over that of their state's son – the presence of John Fairfield as a local figure on the Cass ticket probably helped them achieve this. However, the Democratic vote was heavily split throughout New England, and this allowed Mangum to carry every state in the region. In the South, where the contest was entirely two-sided between Cass and Mangum, the latter managed to capture his home state of North Carolina as well as Georgia and Kentucky. The election came down, as ever, to the three large states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, of which the first two were three-way contests and the latter was Van Buren versus Mangum exclusively. Van Buren managed to carry his home state, largely thanks to the unified state Democratic Party, while his support in Ohio and Pennsylvania was well short of what he would've needed it to be in order to be a serious contender. Nonetheless, however, Ohio was a crucial swing state, and even the small backing Van Buren received there proved sufficient to flip the state and deliver its electoral slate to Mangum, despite the President receiving well under fifty percent of the state's popular vote.

To the Democrats' consternation, the same happened in their traditional stronghold of Pennsylvania, where the official party backed Cass but a significant following existed for Van Buren, sufficient to get him onto the ballot and capture around a tenth of the total votes cast in the state. This was enough to secure a narrow victory for Mangum, who won a majority of the electoral vote in spite of receiving the same share of the popular vote as John Quincy Adams did in 1828…

***

From “A History of America Through its Presidents”
(c) 1991 by Michael Andrews (ed.)
Wilmington: Cape Fear Publishers

Mangum was sworn into office as elected President on March 4, 1845, a stormy and cold day, and gave the now-customary address to the people from the steps of the Capitol – the first time he had done this, despite having been President for three and a half years already [7]. In it he promised decisive action to restore the competitiveness of American industry (tariff reform was not explicitly mentioned, but it was nonetheless abundantly clear that that was what he was talking about) as well as to secure the borders of the Union by promoting westward settlement. The latter point was particularly urgent with the Texian border agreement becoming more and more of a paper fantasy as the revanchist regime in Mexico City consolidated its power.

The administration's first order of business, however, was squarely on the domestic side. In 1838, the settlers of Florida Territory had held a convention to write a constitution and apply for statehood; however, the outbreak of the second Seminole uprising the same year meant that the statehood application was kicked into the long grass. After the end of the Second Seminole War in 1842, however, the process began once more. Soon after the opening of the 28th Congress in December of 1843, Florida's non-voting House delegate David Levy Yulee presented the proposed state constitution to Congress and urged the members to approve it in time to let Florida participate in the 1844 elections. The constitution itself was more or less the same as that proposed in 1838, and would keep slavery legal in the state – no other course could've been reasonably expected in a territory so entirely dependent on plantation agriculture, and where the slaves were within inches of outnumbering the free population. As such, that Florida would be a slave state was largely taken as read; however, there was significant opposition from the Republicans in Congress to the admission of a second slave state so soon after Texas.

David Levy Yulee, Delegate to Congress from the Florida Territory.

Moreover, the Seminole situation caused concern in northern circles, evoking much the same sympathy as the Georgia Cherokees had a decade prior. Relations between the Seminoles and white settlers had always been strained, in part due to the Seminoles inhabiting good cotton and fruit land that the settlers desired for themselves and in part due to their habit of sheltering runaway slaves, who by the 1840s formed a full-fledged community known as the Black Seminoles. It was therefore regarded as unlikely that the peace between Seminoles and settlers would hold for very long, and although they had been given a reservation by the peace treaty of 1842, the tide of settlement meant that they might once again face encroachment, and this time they would be surrounded on all sides with no escape. Attempts had been made to convince the Seminoles to agree to removal, but they refused to abandon their ancestral home even if it meant more bloodshed to stay [8].

In light of these facts, many northern Republicans were given to oppose the admission of Florida without a constitutional protection for the Seminoles, and Representative John Pendleton Kennedy of Maryland [9] drafted a resolution to this effect which went before the House in February of 1844. The Republican leadership approved of it, and saw it pass with a narrow majority thanks to the support of several northern Democrats. In the Senate, controlled as it was by the Republicans, an equivalent resolution sponsored by Daniel Webster passed easily, and the bill to admit Florida was killed in committee not long after. A number of southern figures condemned these actions as a powergrab by Washington against the states, despite the clear precedent of Worcester v. Georgia [10]. Nonetheless, the Territorial Council in Tallahassee decided achieving statehood was a high enough priority that the Kennedy-Webster Resolution could be worked around, and promptly drafted a second constitution that set off a Seminole tract on the mainland south of Lake Okeechobee where settlement would be illegal.

This third constitution was sent to Washington with a post rider, and arrived in mid-April. At that point, the situation had changed somewhat, as Republicans had let it be known to Yulee in committee that they would only vote to admit Florida if free states were created out of both Wisconsin and Iowa Territories to balance it. This would almost certainly delay the application significantly, as while there was a clamor for statehood in both territories, neither had actually started the process yet. Although Yulee launched yet another bill to admit Florida, it met with a similar fate to the first one, and it took until the end of the lame-duck session in 1845 before the state was finally admitted…

***

[1] Tyler did the same IOTL.
[2] This is in sharp contrast to Tyler, who was a borderline nullifier and shared essentially zero opinions with Clay other than the notion that Andrew Jackson was not that great of a President. He ended up quarrelling with his party to such an extent that the congressional Whig Party voted to expel him, and he became the first (and only) President not to be aligned with any party since Washington. Mangum, by contrast, was a supporter of the American System who fit in well with the *Republican orthodoxy.
[3] Cass actually only supported popular sovereignty, but anything that might theoretically lead to the expansion of slavery above the compromise line was too much.
[4] IOTL, Van Buren became more and more openly abolitionist as the 1840s rolled on, and ultimately ran for President as the Free Soil candidate in 1848; Hale was the party's nominee in 1852. Here, Van Buren's run is less of a declaration of principle and actually seeks to become the main Democratic ticket, and so the rhetoric is toned down somewhat.
[5] A doughface, in the parlance of the time, was a Northerner who stood up for the South's interests rather than his own.
[6] Who incidentally pronounced his surname “Purse”. Good luck not thinking about that every time you hear him mentioned from now on.
[7] Although every Vice President to ascend to the presidency has taken the presidential oath, to my knowledge, Gerald Ford was the only one to give any type of public address, and even he refused to consider it anything more than “a little straight talk among friends”.
[8] They only very reluctantly agreed to be removed to Oklahoma IOTL, after two rounds of uprisings, and even then a significant number stayed behind on reservations in the Everglades. ITTL, if they're getting removed they're getting removed to Montana, and that's not going to make it easier to swallow for a people who are used to a tropical climate.
[9] Kennedy was a noted philanthropist and anti-slavery activist who IOTL helped get Maryland on board with the Union and abolition after its attempt at secession had been stymied. After rummaging through lists of congressmen from the era, he strikes me as a likely one to sympathize with the Seminoles and have enough clout to actually do something about it.
[10] See chapter #2. Or just OTL, since the case and its outcome are pretty much the exact same.

Utgard96 · Oct 7, 2016

Here's that long-awaited Mormon update. Thanks go to @Zioneer for providing much-needed feedback.

A House Divided #13: The All-American Prophet

“I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandment unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”

***

From “The Army of God: A History of the Mormons”
(c) 1979 by Mathias Young
Zion: Deseret Press

Since its settlement and the Great Awakening of the 18th century, North America has been known as a hotbed for eclectic Christianity in all its forms. Besides the Catholics and regular Protestants [1], the continent is home to various evangelical traditions, some (like Baptism) shared with Europe, and some entirely unique to the North American continent and its peoples. The largest and most prominent of these “American churches” is the Church of Christ, better known to those outside its membership as the Mormons…

…In 1820, Joseph Smith was a fifteen-year-old farmer's son like any other, living a quiet life in the rural town of Manchester in upstate New York. His father, also named Joseph, had been born in rural Massachusetts, and like many of his contemporaries, made his way west, spending several years in Vermont before continuing on and settling in a number of different locales before his death. In his life he fathered six sons and three daughters – Joseph Jr. was the third son and fourth child overall. Having tried his hand at a number of professions, he settled on farming and took out a mortgage on a farm property in rural Ontario County, where he worked the land for a decade and a half from 1816 until 1831. Joseph Sr. was not a religious man, but his wife Lucy was a practicing Presbyterian and expressed distress at her husband's lack of faith. She made efforts to teach the Smith children her religion, with varying degrees of success – notably, Joseph Jr. grew restless with organized religion as he entered adolescence, frequently complaining to his mother that “I can take my Bible, and go into the woods, and learn more in two hours, than you can learn at meeting in two years”.

Nonetheless, the Smith men had a spiritual side, as did nearly all Americans at the time. Joseph Sr. was a firm believer in divining and other types of folk magic, and claimed to receive revelatory visions in his dreams, which he would retell to his family at length to the point where his wife claimed to remember at least five of them by heart. Some would claim this progyny was what made Joseph Jr. the choice to become the new prophet of God, some would phrase it as a family predilection for mysticism, but they all agree that Joseph Jr. inherited his father's spiritual bent and took it even further. According to his own account, his first vision came in 1820, when he saw God appear before him in a grove near his home and tell him that his refusal to attend church was no sin as all the churches had “turned away from the gospel”.

A stained-glass rendition of Joseph Smith's first vision.

It was three years later, however, that the young Joseph Smith received his most important revelation. In his sleep, he was visited by an angel, of whom he said the following: “He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me, and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people. He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants; also that there were two stones in silver bows—and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim—deposited with the plates.”

He went out the next day, and sure enough, on a hill behind his family farm, he found the prophesied golden plates and the seer stones that would let him translate them into English. This was the fabled Book of Mormon, and he would spend the remainder of his life spreading it to all who would listen… [2] [3]

…In October of 1829, after two and a half years' work, Smith finally finished the Book of Mormon, and Martin Harris [4] mortgaged his farm to raise money for its publication, a decision that became a key factor in the breakdown of his marriage. A printer in Palmyra named Grandin had previously agreed to publish the Book, and remained true to his word – an edition of five thousand copies were printed over the course of the winter and spring, going on sale the following March. Smith had gained some notoriety by this time, aided in no small part by news of the impending publication of the Book, and his old enemies [5] came out of the woodworks to organize an opposition to the nascent Church and specifically to the Book of Mormon, which they regarded as “the greatest piece of superstition that has ever come to our knowledge”. They employed two main lines of attack, of which the first was a general boycott of the Book – hardly a single copy was sold to anyone not previously a member of the Church. Smith was distraught until one night he received a revelation that he should not try to sell the Book for money, but impart it freely to all those who would receive its message. He convinced Harris to sell his farm [6], used the $3,000 thus raised to pay off Grandin's remaining expenses, and began the tradition of giving out free copies of the Book of Mormon to potential convertees that continues to this day.

The second line of attack was far graver – the general populace began to physically threaten members of the Church. It is unclear precisely when Joseph Smith made the decision to move the Church westward, but tensions ran high throughout the year 1830, culminating in an incident in Colesville after Oliver Cowdery [7] had brought a number of new members to the Church; Smith had barely arrived to confirm their baptisms when he was thrown in jail and put on trial for disorderly conduct. It was while awaiting trial that Smith received another revelation, this time from Saints Peter, James and John, who revealed the existence of a higher priesthood, the Melchizedek [8] priesthood, and ordained Smith and Cowdery as its first members. Smith was acquitted of all charges, but was nonetheless run out of town by a mob alongside Cowdery and most of the local Mormons. Shortly thereafter, he appointed Cowdery to head an expedition to the West, with two goals: to attempt to convert the natives and to locate the site of the Garden of Eden, which according to Smith's revelations and the Book of Mormon was to have been located in North America.

Cowdery left Palmyra in August of 1830, and on his way west, he met Sidney Rigdon, the leader of a Restorationist [9] congregation in Kirtland, Ohio. Rigdon was moved by the message of Joseph Smith, and it wasn't long before he was baptized into the Church alongside his entire congregation, more than doubling the size of the Church at a stroke. He travelled to New York to visit Smith in December, and it wasn't long before Smith circulated a new revelation that Kirtland was “the eastern limit” of the New Jerusalem that Cowdery had been sent to find, and that the Church should move there as soon as possible…

A bishop's home and storehouses in rural Iowa.

…It was from Rigdon's followers that Smith received the idea for the United Order. Isaac Morley, a settler in the region who had joined Rigdon's congregation and followed them into the Church, owned a farmstead outside Kirtland where he oversaw the creation of a society, known to others in the area as the “Morley Family”, which consisted of nine families including Morley's own, who all held their property in common, worked the farm together and shared in its proceeds. While the Smiths were building their new home, Morley took them in, and Joseph Smith was inspired by the spirit of charity that ran through the Morley Family. At the same time, many converts were coming to the Church from abject poverty, and Smith was distraught at the idea of his disciples living in such an undignified state. On February 9, 1831, he received a revelation detailing the way by which the Church's members would be ensured a good life and the Church itself the resources to continue to spread its message. This Law of Consecration directed the faithful, on a voluntary basis, to donate their property to the Church, which would then assign each member a “stewardship” sufficient to maintain their family. Any surplus after all members had been thus provided for was left to the Bishop of the Church to dispose for the benefit of “those who have not”. A storehouse was erected in Kirtland to gather these community resources.

Once more, however, the Church's enemies were catching up to it. The Ohioans had scant personal conflict with Joseph Smith himself, knowing about his exploits in New York only through vague rumours, but their objections to the nascent religion were more than strong enough to make up for it. In the late summer of 1831, numerous fields belonging to the Church were razed, destroying large portions of its expected harvest and ensuring trouble come the winter. Violence continued through 1832, culminating in an incident in August in which Smith was captured, tarred and feathered [10], and Smith again decided the Mormon community must move west. After Cowdery returned from his mission in 1833 declaring the “center place of Zion” to be just west of the Mississippi in Michigan Territory [11], Smith endorsed his findings and declared that the Church should move to Iowa. The area had only just been opened to settlement following the Black Hawk War, and acting as a proxy for the Church, Cowdery had been able to obtain a tract of land large enough to settle all the roughly three thousand members of the Church. The first party of settlers arrived early the following year. They erected a meeting house around which a town began to grow, and after Smith's arrival in 1835, it was christened New Zion [12].

The New Zion Temple, circa 1850.

Ironically enough, after the decampment to Iowa, the situation in Ohio began to calm down as the locals were getting used to the Mormon presence. A large contingent decided to stay behind, and Smith did not press the matter, appointing Rigdon as the Church's second Bishop and giving him authority over the flock in Ohio. When the site of the Zion Temple was consecrated in 1838, Smith declared that a second temple would be built in Kirtland shortly thereafter, and the first two Mormon enclaves were born…

***

[1] What we would refer to as mainline Protestantism IOTL.
[2] Obviously large parts of this account are questionable at best, but Young is writing an LDS publication, and makes no attempt to do anything other than tell the Church's version of what happened.
[3] The years between 1823 and 1830 in Smith's life are really quite boring (they revolve around him repeatedly trying and failing to find the “right person” whose presence would let him actually claim the plates, until he finally realizes that it's his wife-to-be Emma Hale, then spending a long time working on transcribing them), and mostly pre-PoD to boot, so we're going to be unceremoniously skipping them.
[4] A friend of Smith's who met him during our interval.
[5] Further stuff we glossed over; Smith worked with a group of treasure hunters in the 1820s, and there were a number of legal disputes between members of said group.
[6] That's right, Martin Harris was basically Smith's sugar daddy during this phase of his life. Smith convinced Harris to sell his farm by claiming he'd received revelation from God to the effect that “thou shalt not covet thine own property”, which… yeah, I'm not even going to try to make sense of that. Welcome to Mormonism.
[7] Another of Smith's associates. Cowdery and Harris, alongside a third man named David Whitmer, constitute the “Three Witnesses” in Mormon historiography, a group who were supposedly shown the golden plates in separate visions and signed a sworn testimony to this effect.
[8] Pronounced mel-KIZ-uh-dik. Or… so I think.
[9] Restorationism is any one of a diverse array of movements in an ecumenical tradition seeking to restore the original Church as created by Jesus. Technically, Mormonism qualifies as one of these movements, but since they're large and diverse enough they're generally counted as a tradition in their own right.
[10] This happened IOTL, and was a major factor in pushing Smith to abandon Kirtland.
[11] That is, what is now eastern Iowa. This marks our first major divergence - IOTL, the location of Zion was said to be Jackson County, Missouri.
[12] Roughly OTL Muscatine, IA.

Utgard96 · Oct 14, 2016

A House Divided #14: At Heaven's Command

“I wish nothing but good; therefore, everyone who does not agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.”

***

From "The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of British Politics"
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press

1833 GENERAL ELECTION: General election held in June-July 1833 as a result of the passage of the Reform Act earlier in the same year. The incumbent Canning ministry, made up of Whigs and reformist Tories both (see CANNING, GEORGE), hoped to receive an increased majority as a result of the reform, which enfranchised the liberal-minded northern cities at the expense of many rotten boroughs. A spirited campaign resulted in significant gains for the Whigs, and losses for both the "Canningite" and "Ultra" factions of the Tory party. Ireland gained its first separate political party in the form of Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, which fought to restore the separate Irish Parliament, and won broad support among the newly-enfranchised Catholic voters.

Whig: 361 (+165)
"Canningite" Tory: 148 (-117)
"Ultra"-Tory: 106 (-80)
Irish Repeal: 32 (+32) [1]

***

From "The Men of Downing Street: The Lives of Britain's Prime Ministers"
(c) 1967 by Adrian Menzies
London: Macmillan Publishing

With the establishment of a redoubtable Whig majority, prominent figures within the party - notably Lords Grey and Russell - called for the formation of an all-Whig administration that could heighten the pace of reform, but Lansdowne refuted those calls and declared his commitment to Canning remaining Prime Minister. More crucially, the conservatively inclined King would likely have balked at such attempts, and in any case made no attempt to remove Canning from office or otherwise rock the boat. He thus remained in office for another eight months, before finally deciding to resign in March of 1834. In accordance with his advice, the King gave William Huskisson the task of forming a new ministry, which he did, with largely the same composition as Canning's ministry.

George Canning is remembered as a middling Prime Minister – he had little of the longevity of a Walpole or a Liverpool, the decisive action of a Pitt or a Hartington, or for that matter the unmitigated failure of a North or a Richmond, but he deserves credit for attempting to stem the tide of popular discontent through cautious reform. His failure can only be ascribed to events succeeding his premiership…

circa-1850-english-statesman-henry-pettyfitzmaurice-3rd-marquis-of-picture-id3238744

22. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1835-37)

The government of Lord Lansdowne is something of a historical anomaly. Appointed after the disruption of the Canningite Coalition, which quickly proved untenable without Canning himself to lead it [2], it was the first all-Whig ministry in several decades, and achieved some degree of reform, but went nowhere near as far as some of its members (notably Lord Grey) might have wanted, and had both the Lords and the King against it. The most notable reform was carried out by the Home Department under Lord Melbourne, which promulgated the Poor Law Amendment Act 1836. Inspired by the population theories of Thomas Malthus and the utilitarian ethos of Jeremy Bentham, the Act created a poor relief system that was limited to local workhouses that provided meagre pay for deliberately unpleasant work, so as to prevent people from seeking relief unless they really needed it. A series of poor law unions were created to administer the workhouses, becoming the first modern local government entities in Great Britain… [3]

…On the foreign side, Lansdowne's influence was almost certainly greater than at home, for it was he who presided over the abolition of slavery, a matter which most prominent Whigs viewed as a crucial priority. The Slavery Abolition Act was passed by Parliament in 1836, and the Navy was given increased powers and resources to prevent the slave trade abroad. Notably however, the abolition of slavery did not apply to the lands of the East India Company, where the institution would continue for more than another decade…

***

From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press

When King George III died in 1820, he had seven sons, no less than three of whom would inherit the throne. The oldest, who had already served as Prince Regent for ten years on account of his father's encroaching madness, became King George IV, and reigned until 1830, when he died childless of internal haemorrhaging. He survived his brother the Duke of York by three years, and so the third son, hitherto the Duke of Clarence, became King William IV. The fourth son, the Duke of Kent, died six days before his father, but had a daughter, Princess Alexandrina, who was heir presumptive for much of King William's reign [4]. His widow (the Duchess of Kent) and her household comptroller (and possible lover) Sir John Conroy hoped to become the power behind the throne, and designed a “system” whereby Alexandrina was kept in seclusion at Kensington Palace in order to render her weak-willed and dependent on them. Under the Regency Act 1830, if King William were to die before Alexandrina turned eighteen, the Duchess would be appointed as Regent – an option the King found distasteful to the point where he publicly expressed his wish for the Act not to be necessary. In the event, it proved irrelevant, as Alexandrina fell ill after a seaside trip in 1835, dying not long thereafter.

This meant that the new heir was Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, and if the idea of the Duchess of Kent as regent was one King William found distasteful, the idea of Cumberland as monarch was directly revolting. Born with a disfigurement that left him ostracised by his peers and gave him a strong temper as a result, Cumberland had been sent to Hanover in his youth to study, and later to command the King's troops there. He would spend much of his life in Germany, and the culture he was exposed to there was rather different from that which prevailed in Britain – German rulers were generally far more actively involved in the affairs of their realms, and the political scene was more conservatively inclined as a whole. He thus aligned himself with the extreme right wing of the Tory party once back in Britain, much to the relief of his father who feared that all his sons would become Whig sympathisers. He made a name for opposing Catholic emancipation, and was elected Grand Master of the Orange Order in 1807. At that point the war against Napoleon was in full swing, and Cumberland was sent to the Continent at the head of an army, but soon returned to Britain to lead the King's forces at home. In 1810, he was at the centre of a peculiar controversy surrounding the death of his valet Joseph Sellis, who died of a cut in the throat inflicted in his room in the middle of the night. Rumours circulated that Cumberland had murdered his servant, and those rumours were fuelled by the involvement of Francis Place, radical anti-monarchist and social reformer, who got on the inquest jury and spared no effort to indict the Duke for Sellis' death, although the death was ultimately proven to be a suicide.

Augustus I, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

The Sellis case nonetheless lingered in the collective memory, and along with Cumberland's constant presence in the House of Lords during the late 1820s and the 1830s, where he became a leader of the Ultra-Tories, his reputation was extremely poor with both the political scene and the general public. Matters were not helped by the rumours that he had had his niece poisoned, an allegation he denied as fiercely as he did those surrounding Sellis' death: in the House of Lords in early 1836, he declared that “I would've shed the last drop of my blood for my niece”. [5] The great British public was not convinced; street chants began referring to “Bloody Prince Gus” not long after, and an anonymously-written manuscript entitled The Bloody Murder of the Foul Prince Romero began to circulate around the less reputable parts of the London social circle, ostensibly set in an unnamed Italian principality in a pastiche of Shakespeare, and dealing with the accession, short reign and assassination of a tyrant whose ideas and mannerisms were a thinly-veiled parody of Cumberland.

So it was that when King William passed away on 16 April 1837 [6], the country found itself with the most unpopular monarch since James II. There were mounting concerns that the new King, who had made a name for opposing both the Reform Act and the wage rises made in the wake of the Swing Riots, would actively intervene to overturn them, and a series of riots occurred across the country over the summer of 1837. King Augustus eased concerns slightly by appointing the immensely-popular Duke of Wellington [7] as Prime Minister immediately after ascending, and the new House of Commons elections [8] returned a Tory majority, perhaps indicating some degree of support among the small parliamentary electorate for the King's expected course. There were still a substantial number of “Canningites” left in the party, personified by figures like Huskisson, Palmerston and Peel, who looked with concern on events, but Wellington made efforts to include them in his Cabinet, notably making Peel his Home Secretary, an office he had held ten years prior under Lord Liverpool [9].

The Wellington Government proved less immediately controversial than had been feared, but it also came to power in a relatively quiet time. As 1837 turned to 1838, the economic crash made itself felt across the country, and the Government was forced to reintroduce an income tax for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars to cover its expenses. There were ruptures in the party over this radical move, but it proved effective, and in 1839 the state’s finances did well enough that several controversial excise taxes could be removed, most notably the sugar duty. Britain seemed to be going fairly well, but discontent bubbled under the surface, and with the coming of the Bloody Forties, it was only a matter of time before it boiled over…

***

[1] Compared with the state of play at OTL's 1830 general election (the only one which featured this party system), the “Ultras” are much stronger; this is because IOTL they were formed by groups opposed to Wellington over Catholic emancipation, while ITTL they have a much broader range of disagreements with Canning. The Whigs largely did not benefit from this split IOTL or ITTL because the Canningites and “Ultras” didn't really stand candidates against each other – indeed, neither Tories nor Whigs would really be considered organised parties to modern eyes. The later Whig gains aren't as large as those seen under the Earl Grey IOTL, largely because TTL's Reform Act is much weaker.
[2] As indeed was the case IOTL – after Canning's premature death, Lord Goderich tried and failed to keep the coalition together, leading to Wellington being called upon to lead an all-Tory administration.
[3] This is more or less exactly how the poor law system was reformed under the Earl Grey IOTL. Take heed, anyone who thinks the Whigs were proto-leftists in any way, shape or form.
[4] IOTL, Alexandrina did inherit, and is better known to history by her second name Victoria.
[5] Cumberland said something similar IOTL in response to a resolution against the Orange Order, which was rumoured to be plotting Victoria's murder in order to put him on the throne.
[6] This is about two months before King William's OTL death. IOTL he felt a compulsion to live long enough to see Victoria reach adulthood so as to avoid handing power to the Duchess of Kent; ITTL there is no such factor at play, and indeed the inevitability of Cumberland's accession might lead him into despondency.
[7] Who has yet to be in government ITTL, so while he's known to be conservatively inclined, he's also not had the opportunity to put that into practice and retains his reputation as a relatively untarnished national hero.
[8] Remember, new monarch means fresh elections.
[9] And indeed under Wellington IOTL.

Utgard96 · Oct 16, 2016

Gian said:
Mind if we see a map of TTL United States at this time?

This is as of the 1848 presidential election, but the only real changes from the TL's current state is that Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin have been admitted as states and Itasca and Cimarron Territories have been organized, so I don't think it's too spoilery.

Utgard96 · Oct 21, 2016

A House Divided #15: Banking on Success

“Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pursue and direct it incessantly.”

***

From “A History of the U.S. Economy, 1776-1976”
(c) 1979 by Professor Thomas Scotson (ed.)
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press

Although Willie Mangum is an obscure President among the general public, even by 19th century standards, his legacy for the U.S. economy is far more significant than this would let on. He presided over the annexation of Texas and added four stars to the flag, more than any President since Monroe, kickstarting the second phase of westward expansion – the drive to the Pacific – which in turn created the longest economic boom in our history. He used the tariff passed by a friendly Congress in 1845 to create a funding program for internal improvements, which by this point mainly meant railroads, and many lines across the nation – not least the Union Pacific, our first transcontinental railroad – can credit this scheme alone for their successful completion. And last but definitely not least, it was under Mangum's administration that the Third Bank of the United States was created, a long-time goal of the Republican Party that only became realizable after the 1844 elections produced a majority for the party in both houses of Congress. Between them, these three actions can be credited with kickstarting the thirty-year period of constant economic growth that only ended with the Great Crash of 1874… [1]

***

From “Wheels of Steel: How North America Embraced the Rails”
(c) 1992 by James Manning
Chicago: Illinois United Writers

It is impossible to tell the story of rail in North America without mentioning the Baltimore and Ohio. Chartered in 1827 to carry freight across the Appalachians from Baltimore, Maryland to Wheeling, Virginia (as it then was), the B&O was the first true common carrier in the United States: that is, it was the first railroad whose charter required it to run regular services, accept all paying customers and assume financial responsibility for any cargo lost in transit. The reason for the B&O’s construction was simple: after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1821, New York received a major competitive advantage in trade between the growing western states and the outside world, and the other major cities along the East Coast were fearful of losing their economic lifeblood. In particular, Baltimore had previously had an edge over the other cities as a result of being located at the head of Chesapeake Bay, which meant its harbor was significantly further inland than others, requiring shorter distances transported overland – a great advantage in an era when the fastest and highest-capacity form of overland transportation was the horse-drawn carriage. When the Erie Canal opened, however, it suddenly became possible to get cargo all the way to Lake Erie without needing to move it overland a single foot, and Baltimore’s merchants feared that this would spell their end unless they could come up with a suitable alternative mode of transportation.

The founding of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

The answer came from England, where the world’s first public steam railroad had opened between the towns of Stockton and Darlington in 1825. News reached the U.S. not long after, and Baltimore residents Philip Thomas and George Brown sent a group led by Thomas’ brother Evan to investigate this new mode of transportation. They concluded that a railroad would be the perfect solution to Baltimore’s problems, and on February 12, 1827, a meeting of Baltimore notables signed an agreement founding the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road Company. They obtained charters from the Maryland and Virginia legislatures within a month, and Thomas was appointed president of the company with Brown as its treasurer. Virtually every citizen of Baltimore bought stock in the B&O, whose total value approached three million dollars after a year of fundraising, and on Independence Day in 1828, the 91-year-old Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, conducted the groundbreaking ceremony for what may have been the boldest commercial venture in the young nation’s history. Constructing a railroad across the Appalachians would be a challenging proposition today, and we know where the Ohio River is, we know the lay of the intervening land, and we know how a railroad works. The closest one might get to an equivalent to the B&O today would be if Congress were to charter a corporation to provide regular freight service to the planet Mars. [2]

The first stretch of line, from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on the Patapsco River, opened for business on May 24, 1830, and over the next four years the road was extended to Frederick (December 1831), Point of Rocks on the Potomac River (April 1832) and Sandy Hook, the location of the proposed Potomac crossing (December 1834). There, a legal dispute erupted between the B&O and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, whose owners wanted to exclude the railroad from its right of way, and it took until 1837 before the crossing to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia could finally be opened. By 1842 the B&O had reached Cumberland, where construction halted a second time before resuming in 1847, with the aid of Virginia’s share of Morehead funds, and in 1851 it finally reached Wheeling [3]. This was not to be the end of the railroad’s expansion, as it set its sights on what would become the hub of the nation’s transportation grid – Chicago, Illinois…

…The B&O is the most celebrated of America’s early railroads for a variety of reasons previously named, but contrary to the common conception it was not the first railroad to offer scheduled passenger service. That honor goes to the South Carolina Rail Road, now folded into the Great Southern system, which opened for business on Christmas Day 1830, after the B&O had opened its first line but before it had begun revenue passenger service. The SCRR was also the first railroad to use an entirely American-built locomotive, the Best Friend of Charleston, which served the line for six months before securing another first by being the first locomotive to fall victim to a boiler explosion on U.S. soil. The owners were not deterred by this, and in 1833 the railroad completed its intended mainline from Charleston to Hamburg, South Carolina, on the Savannah River. This route provided a shortcut for goods from the Upper South that would otherwise have been shipped through Savannah, Georgia, and earned Charleston its place as the South’s premier port into the bargain. Whereas most railroads in the North were constructed to the 4ft 8½in gauge in common usage in Europe, the SCRR was built to a broader gauge of five feet; other roads in the southern states would follow its example, thus giving rise to the division now existing across North America… [4]

Drawing of the Best Friend of Charleston. Note the slave shoveling coal into the boiler.

***

From “Henry Clay: Life of a Statesman”
(c) 1973 by Dr Adam Greene
New Orleans: Stephens & Co.

The 1844 elections, aside from returning Mangum in office as President, also saw huge strides for the Republicans on the congressional level. Both houses of the 29th Congress had Republican majorities, and for the first time ever this was combined with a Republican-held White House. Clay saw at long last the chance to implement the American System in full, and in this he had Mangum’s full cooperation. The first step in this was the Tariff of 1846, also known at the time as the “Black Tariff”, which increased tariff levels from roughly 25% under the Compromise Tariff of 1832 to an average of 37%. This passed through Congress on party-line votes, with a few southern Republicans voting against on conscience, but not enough to strike it down. Ultimately it had been expected given the victory of the Republicans that they’d pass a higher tariff, which may have contributed to the lack of serious opposition. More radical, however, was Clay’s proposal for what to do with the tariff revenue: an allocation of federal funds to subsidize railroad and canal construction.

Internal improvements had been a cornerstone of the American System for as long as the System had been in existence, but there was nonetheless segmented opposition to putting the funds into the hands of the federal government. Calhoun spoke against the idea in the Senate on March 4, 1846, calling it “the greatest intrusion upon the rights of the states to determine their own fate ever committed in the history of our republic”, and numerous less prominent southerners echoed his sentiments, including a large number of Republicans. Nonetheless, Clay was adamant, as were President Mangum and Daniel Webster, and positions appeared to be at a stalemate when Senator James Turner Morehead, Clay's Kentucky colleague, proposed a compromise: the establishment of a formula whereby the money allocated to internal improvements would be distributed among the states according to their census population and existing railroad and canal mileage. This, Morehead hoped, would target the funds toward spurring growth in the South and West rather than providing for the already well-developed rail system in the Northeast. Clay readily agreed to the idea, but Webster took some convincing before he went along with it – he was likely concerned that the small and highly developed New England states would lose out in the compromise. The Morehead Amendment, which set up the distribution formula, passed the Senate 27-22 with one absent member, and when the amended bill came before the House of Representatives it won broad approval and passed by a margin of 127-96…

James Turner Morehead.

…The 1847 session of Congress would prove even more controversial than that of the previous year. Most controversial of all was the Banking Act of 1847, which proposed to resurrect the old National Bank. If it had been proposed during the Harrison years, when the nation was in the throes of an economic crisis, it could’ve been passed very easily, but in the more prosperous 1840s the idea of regulating economic growth was an unappealing one. Nevertheless, Clay and Webster were adamant that the Bank must be resurrected before the end of the 29th Congress, the latter writing in his diary that “if our continued prosperity is to be secured, it is to be done now or never, for the vagaries of politics are such that we may never again enjoy the position we currently find ourselves in”. So the bill was introduced, and one of the oldest battles in American politics began again…

…The battle over the Bank is believed to have been the main contributing factor in the loss of the Republican House majority in the 1846 midterms, but the Bank itself grew increasingly popular over the remainder of Mangum’s term in office as the heightened tariffs resulted in a temporary loss of trade, which might have led to another economic crash had the Bank not helped redistribute financial resources toward the South. The relative quiet of the succeeding two decades, with the exception of the row over slavery in the early 1850s, can in part be attributed to the Bank’s stabilizing effect on the economy, and when its charter expired in 1867, just like that of the Second Bank it kicked off a speculation boom that ultimately led to the 1874 crash…

***

[1] IOTL, the U.S. economy was doing consistently fairly well in the 1850s and 1860s, with the obvious exception of the Civil War years – there were minor crises every few years as usual, but they were all quickly staved off, and the country didn't see a major economic depression until the Panic of 1873.
[2] The last two sentences are borrowed almost wholesale (it’s not plagiarism, it’s an homage) from Trains Magazine’s Historical Guide to North American Railroads, which I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to know more about the OTL history of rail transportation in the US.
[3] This is two years ahead of OTL.
[4] IOTL this was also the case, and a majority of southern railroads retained the 5ft gauge until the Civil War, when the breaks of gauge in Virginia and North Carolina wreaked havoc with the Confederacy’s logistics, ultimately leading to a system-wide regauging in 1886.

Utgard96 · Nov 4, 2016

A House Divided #16: The King, the Law, and Liberty

“Whoever has Dutch blood flowing in their veins,
Free of foreign blemishes;
Whose heart glows for king and country,
Rejoice in song as we do!
He sings with us, united in purpose,
At the top of his voice
This festive song, pleasing to God,
For fatherland and king”

***

The marriage of Belgium to the Netherlands, as depicted in an 1832 cartoon.

From “A History of the Netherlands”
(c) 1980 by Luca Abramo
New York City: Columbia University Press

In 1815, upon the defeat of Napoleon, the Great Powers of Europe gathered in Vienna to redraw the map of the continent in such a way as to restore the order that prevailed before the French Revolution. France gave up all the lands it had gained since 1789, and Poland was repartitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria (though a small part of it remained independent under Russian oversight for fifteen years). Italy once more became the domain of a dozen petty rulers, as did Germany, although the ecclesiastical states disappeared and were largely taken over by Prussia in recognition of its contributions to the war effort. Napoleon’s reorganization of southern Germany was left in place by the Powers, who recognized its usefulness, and the Swiss Confederacy was similarly left alone despite its pleas to take over French and Italian lands on its borders. The Netherlands, finally, were made into a kingdom under the House of Orange, which covered the Austrian Netherlands and the Bishopric of Liège in addition to the old lands of the Dutch Republic.

This division was somewhat awkward, as the new kingdom was anything but homogenous. Of its seventeen provinces, only ten had been part of an independent Dutch state before, and half of the other seven didn’t even speak Dutch. Moreover, eight of seventeen provinces (the Southern Netherlands plus North Brabant) were Catholic, while the Dutch Republic had always been staunchly Calvinist. This divided identity reared its head almost immediately, on an issue as trivial as that of what the country and its citizens were to be called. The Dutch-speaking Protestants regarded it as obvious that the country was Nederland and its people Nederlanders, but this was less the case further south. The Flemings were divided between those who wanted to be Nederlanders and those who wanted to be Belgen, as per the name of the state briefly created in 1790 in the revolution against the Habsburgs. The French-speaking Walloons, on the other hand, regarded the name néerlandais (the French version of Nederlanders) as completely alien and called themselves belges in all cases. Nor did it help that King William wanted the country referred to in French as “la Néerlande”, replacing the existing “les Pays-Bas” (the Low Countries) that had been used for the country until then. The situation was resolved by a compromise whereby in Dutch the country would be known as the Koninkrijk der Nederlanden and its citizens as Nederlanders, but in French it would be la Royaume des Belgiques and its citizens belges, regardless of where in the country they were from. This was viewed by some radical Walloons, who viewed the “Belgian” (Southern Netherlands) identity as a separate one, as unsatisfactory, but it nonetheless quickly became accepted in nearly all cases.

The underlying issues of inequality, however, persisted. The southern half of the kingdom was more populous than the north, and more economically developed, but nonetheless the two halves had equal representation in the elected lower house of the legislature, and the upper half was selected by the King, who being a Calvinist northerner was wont to choose other northerners. The King also held the executive power and could appoint and dismiss ministers at will. As a result, the state of the government was very much dependent on the King’s disposition, and unfortunately, King William I was not a conciliatory or liberal-minded man. His focus was on creating a united people, but the way he felt would best accomplish that was to extend northern culture to the entire kingdom. To this end, schools in all seventeen provinces were required to instruct children in the Dutch language and the tenets of the Calvinist faith, which naturally stoked resentment among the Catholics in the south and led to persistent rumors that the King might be working to extinguish the Catholic religion and the French language. The latter would’ve affected all the southern provinces, as French was the language of prestige even in the Dutch-speaking parts of the south at the time. Even the King’s attempts to spur economic growth were met with disillusionment, as they seemed to be focused unfairly toward trade in the north rather than the south’s burgeoning industry…

…The French Revolution of 1830, which overthrew the restored Bourbon monarchy and replaced it with a “constitutional” Orléanist monarchy based on a compromise between monarchical and democratic forms of rule [1], was widely admired in French-speaking circles of the southern Netherlands, and it was in August of the same year that Brussels exploded into violence. Popular legend places the starting point of the “Belgian Revolution” on the night of August 25, when the city’s opera company staged Auber’s opera La muette de Portici, whose plot is based on the revolt against Spanish rule in Naples in 1647. The performance was a special affair intended to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of King William’s reign, but its themes nonetheless led the audience to entertain romantic notions of revolt, and radical Walloon riots scheduled for the anniversary soon swelled as the revolutionaries were joined by theatregoers and the public.

Arrival of the volunteers from Liège in Brussels during the Belgian Revolution.

The King responded to the revolt by sending William, Prince of Orange, his eldest son and the only member of the royal family with a shred of popularity in the south, to put it down. When invited by the citizens of Brussels to hear their case and treat with them in person, William accepted, and was convinced that administrative separation was the only way to satisfactorily resolve the situation. He proposed a settlement based on the creation of an autonomous government for the southern provinces under a personal union, similar to the status already enjoyed by Luxemburg, but this was rejected flatly by the King who insisted that negotiation was a waste of time. Thus, a stalemate was reached, solidified when the army withdrew to the fortresses of Maastricht and Antwerp, and when the rebels convened a Belgian National Congress in late September, any hope for a peaceful settlement appeared lost… [2]

…To resolve the crisis, representatives of the five Great Powers convened in London in December. France announced, to no one’s surprise, that they supported the rebels and that an independent Belgium was the only long-term solution, but this unequivocal declaration likely hindered their cause. The other Powers recalled the Revolutionary Wars well, and it was feared that an independent state in the southern Netherlands might fall into the French sphere of influence. Austria, Prussia and Russia all agreed that King William’s authority must be restored, by force if necessary, and Britain, being the most neutral major power on the issue, was left to decide. The Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Portland [3], was a conservative Tory, and sympathized with the Dutch position – certainly he did not want to risk a growth of French power. So, he came to oppose Belgian independence, and with four out of five Great Powers in agreement and the fifth implacably opposed, the conference made no official recommendation but made it clear that the fledgling Belgian nation was not to be long-lived… [4]

…The Belgian Congress spent much of the winter debating a proposed constitution and searching for a suitable monarch for the new nation, but with the lack of recognition came a reluctance on the part of nearly all European princely houses to entertain the notion of accepting the Belgian crown. Eventually the Congress caved in and declared Belgium a republic, a resolution that was passed on March 3, 1831. It would last a little over three months…

…On August 1, the Dutch army marched south from Breda and Eindhoven, crossing into Antwerp Province the next morning. The Belgian army marched north to meet them, which they did at Turnhout on the 3rd. The battle was a complete rout for the Belgians, who were forced to retreat, and in a second engagement at Leuven on the 10th, the Dutch were once again victorious. By the 12th, the Prince of Orange rode into Brussels, and the Belgian Republic’s government was disbanded by force. Resistance soon died down in the southern provinces, but the lingering issues remained in the background… [5]

…On July 6, 1835, Queen Wilhelmina died after a lengthy bout with disease [6]. The King was deeply distraught, but not for very long, because soon rumors began to circulate about his affair with Countess Henriëtte d’Outremont, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and, scandalously, a Catholic from Liège, one of the most strongly revolutionary southern provinces. When in 1836 he announced his desire to marry Henriëtte, the potential consequences were such that he was eventually compelled to abdicate [7]. On May 1, 1836, the Prince of Orange was crowned King William II, and immediately announced constitutional changes: firstly, ministers were now to be answerable to the courts – not a full transition to parliamentary government, but an acknowledgement that the King’s will was not the sole basis for government – and secondly, seats in the lower house of the States-General were to be reapportioned based on the population of each province. The changes were greeted with approval in the south, and at last the nation appeared to be on the road to unity again…

***

[1] This dichotomy is perhaps a bit drastic by our standards, but in 1980s New York it’s about par for the course.
[2] Everything up to this point is OTL.
[3] Portland was Lord Privy Seal under Canning IOTL, and one of the Tory “grand old men” on whose support the Canningite coalition depended (his father had been Prime Minister on two occasions under George III).
[4] IOTL, the Whig administration and its enterprising new Foreign Secretary, a gentleman about town by the name of Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, brought about the compromise solution of letting Belgium go independent and making a formal guarantee of its neutrality to assuage the risk of French meddling. ITTL, with a significantly older and more conservative man presiding over the London Conference, no such compromise comes to pass.
[5] This largely follows the OTL “Ten Days’ Campaign”, except insofar as the Belgians called for French aid after Leuven and received it, forcing the Dutch to back down and concede de facto independence to Belgium (although formal recognition didn’t come until King William’s abdication in 1839). ITTL, with no agreement among the Great Powers to respect Belgian independence, the French are warier of sending help (it might’ve provoked war with Prussia, who held the Fortress of Luxemburg and were poised to strike at France itself), and so the Dutch receive the easy victory they probably would’ve had without French intervention.
[6] IOTL she lasted two more years; consider this compensation for John Marshall.
[7] He did IOTL as well, but four years later; I’ve accelerated the process here, because my extremely limited sources tell me nothing about whether King William had an affair with Henriëtte before the Queen’s death or not, so as far as I know they might have. This section may get retconned as I gain access to actual academic writings on the topic.

Utgard96 · Nov 13, 2016

A House Divided #17: There’s Bullion in Them There Hills

“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American!”

***

From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books

1848: The Democrats Return

Where the 1844 election result was unexpected, dramatic and decisive, the one in 1848 can only truly be said to have been the last of those. It was held during a mild economic recession, the result of the tariff increase passed under President Mangum and the loss of trade with Great Britain following events there, and the two main issues were essentially the same as in the previous election – on one hand, the Republican economic agenda, which had been put into practice in almost its entirety over the previous four years, and on the other hand, relations with and possible expansion into Mexico. The civil war there was beginning to calm down, and the Republicans argued that there was no point intervening when the situation was beginning to stabilize, while the Democrats – and southern ones particularly – argued that it was inevitable that things should get tense again…

…The Republicans, as was widely expected, gave the nod to the aging Henry Clay to run for President a third time. It is believed that Clay had been promised a free run in 1848 by Mangum in exchange for not opposing his re-election bid, and no other major candidate appeared in what was still a largely united party. Instead it was the race to be Clay’s running mate that proved heated, with several candidates from different regions vying for the post. New Englanders were partial to letting Rufus Choate stay on as Vice President, as George Clinton and John C. Calhoun had before him, but this wasn’t a terribly popular idea elsewhere in the country. Many southerners pushed for a candidate from their part of the country, which was generally an unpopular idea, partly because Clay was from a slave state but mostly because there were few good candidates. Ultimately the convention settled on William Lewis Dayton, the junior Senator from New Jersey, who was known as a mainstream party man who was northern enough to appease the Webster section of the party but quiet enough on slavery to not offend its vital southern wing. [1]

Henry Clay, Senator from Kentucky
Republican nominee for President, 1848

The Democratic convention in Philadelphia was significantly more unruly. The split in 1844 had destroyed the party’s chances in that presidential election, and all sides were eager to avoid a repeat of it, but there was (at least initially) no obvious unity candidate either. The Locofoco faction in New York backed Silas Wright, that state’s former governor, who had become a household name as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee when it recommended the defunding of the National Bank, and who incidentally had been an opponent of Texas annexation [2]. Wright’s main rival in the North was James Buchanan, the Senator from Pennsylvania, who was known as a moderate who could work with both North and South in Congress. In more capable hands this trait might’ve won the nomination, but in Buchanan’s case it only led to both sides despising him, and so his star had never gone very high [3]. Also popular in New England was Levi Woodbury, the 1840 vice-presidential candidate, who had some similarities to both Wright and Buchanan and was largely regarded as a regional “favorite son” candidate. The three were joined by a gaggle of other local candidates whose support evaporated after the first ballot.

By contrast to the unruly northern branches of the party, the South stood united behind one man: Abel Parker Upshur, the junior Senator from Virginia, who was noted for his staunch conservatism and support for the institution of slavery. Upshur’s constitutional views were unpalatable to many Jacksonians in the Upper South, but he was universally supported by the Deep South as well as his home state, who were of the belief that the election was nigh-impossible to lose and an ideologically pure candidate would be preferable to a moderate (or worse, a slavery opponent like Wright) [4]. Upshur was able to secure a plurality of delegates on the first ballot thanks to this regional unity, but the northern candidates held a majority between them, and it was clear that very few of their delegates were going to switch to Upshur’s column. So, his support began to fade as southern delegates turned to Buchanan, creating a three-cornered race between Buchanan, Wright and Upshur that lasted several rounds of balloting with no conclusion in sight.

It was then that western delegates proposed the nomination of Thomas Hart Benton as a compromise candidate. Benton was a convinced old-line Jacksonian who had made a name on support for hard-money policy, giving him the nickname “Old Bullion”, and represented Missouri in the Senate, a state whose allegiances were at once northern and southern (although it was a slave state). Benton’s views on slavery were largely unknown, but he eagerly supported western expansion and settlement – although he had been cautious on the issue of Texas, preferring to see the existing territories settled first so as to render them more defensible. His name was first put forward by his state’s delegation on the fifth ballot, and after the ninth, most of the Buchanan and Upshur columns had been convinced to back him. The tenth ballot saw a broad majority aligned behind Benton, and after shifts it was a unanimous vote aside from one anti-war New York delegate who stubbornly continued to back Wright. Benton chose Representative John B. Weller of Ohio, a fellow westerner [5] and slavery moderate who would emphasize the ticket’s expansionist credentials, setting in motion the standard course of Democratic Party politics for the next generation.

Thomas Hart Benton, Senator from Missouri
Democratic nominee for President, 1848

The election was as raucous an affair as ever, with both sides attacking the other’s candidate with gusto – it helped that they were both well-known figures who had spent a long time in politics. Republicans painted Benton as a second Panic of 1836 waiting to happen, a radical Jacksonian who would rip up the National Bank at the first chance and send the country into economic chaos, leaving hardly any time for the other main line of attack (and in hindsight the more logical one) that Benton might provoke war with Mexico. Democrats, for their part, viewed Clay with the visceral contempt that only four decades of public life could inspire, and believed that he would turn the United States into an aristocratic society ruled by bankers and railroad owners with no room for the common man to prosper.

It was in the middle of the campaign that the Monterey Incident erupted, ultimately leading to the secession of the Californias from Mexico. This would become highly significant during the succeeding term, but in the campaign, it merely cemented the southern border as the second priority of the election after the economy. Benton and Weller supported recognizing the California Republic, but stopped short of advocating immediate war to claim California for the United States – other Democrats, however, were not so tactful, particularly in the South. Clay retained his position that the existing U.S. territory should be focused on, which didn’t set him apart significantly from Benton, but his party remained adamantly opposed to expansion, and the positions of the parties came to eclipse those of their candidates on this issue. When Election Day came (for the election was held on a single day nationwide, for the very first time in the nation’s history), the result was clear. Once again, Henry Clay would not be President, and this was to be his last chance at the office…

***

From “The Californias: A History”
(c) 1991 by Earl Brantham
San Pedro: University of South California Press

In 1848, Alta California was a land of change. In previous decades, the territory had been a backwater, a lightly-settled ranching country whose population was mixed between Californios (Spanish-speaking settlers) of various races, natives and assorted mixtures of the previous. Its residents had backed the Spanish during the Mexican War of Independence out of concerns that Mexico would neglect it, and these concerns were largely vindicated by the actions of the Mexican government after independence. Direct settlement was largely abandoned as a policy, and instead Mexico used California as a dumping ground for criminals, which did nothing to endear them to the locals. The sparse population of the territory mostly prevented widespread unrest, but even so it had not been quiet. In 1834, midway through the civil war between Guerrero and Santa Anna, the territorial government in Monterey declared an independent Republic of California, raising a flag with a red star on a white field to symbolize their newfound independence. However, the Republic quickly broke down into civil war, and rather than yield power to his opponents the governor saw fit to bargain with Mexico City for readmission into the country… [6]

…Under the Colonization Law of 1824, Mexico maintained an easy road to citizenship for voluntary settlers and granted free land in Alta California to all naturalized citizens in the territory. This caused a large number of opportunistic Americans to settle in the region and apply for citizenship. Although similar to, and often conflated with, the settlers of Texas, the Californians differed in one significant respect: they were far less monolithically southern and by extension far less monolithically pro-slavery. Settlement was concentrated in the Sacramento Valley and at the north coast of San Francisco Bay, areas previously unsettled [7], and so tensions did not immediately erupt; indeed, the settlers and the native Californios found much common ground. Particularly so after the Texas annexation, when Mexico tightened the leash on its other border provinces – the 1824 law was repealed, banning U.S. citizens from settling in California, and sending an army to defend the territory from any possible incursion. The head of the army, a Oaxaca-born brigadier named Manuel Micheltorena, was appointed governor of both Californias (which had been administratively united by Santa Anna) and quickly managed to antagonize almost the entire population, so to the extent that the Californios rose in revolt and drove him out of the territory, replacing him with José Castro, who was quickly recognized as legitimate governor by a central government eager to avoid embarrassment in the face of mounting crisis [8].

José Castro, Governor of the Californias (1844-1848)

Americans continued to flood into California throughout 1844 and 1845, in open violation of Mexican law, and Castro’s government flaunted the law rather than try to expel them [9]. The Mexican government pressured Castro into issuing warnings to the settlers, which he did, but with the caveat that “conciliating my duty with of the sentiment of hospitality which distinguishes the Mexicans, and considering that most of said expedition is composed of families and industrious people, I have deemed it best to permit them, provisionally, to remain in the department” so long as they obeyed the law and made efforts to obtain the proper settlement licenses… [10]

…The trigger for Californian independence came in September of 1848, when Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, commander of the U.S. Navy Pacific Squadron, received word that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico. This was of course false, but Jones had no way of knowing that, and sailed for Monterey with three ships to capture the city and its vital harbor. When he arrived, the city was defended by a force of fifty aging soldiers who surrendered immediately, and Jones took command of the territory in order to prevent Britain from taking advantage of the war (which was of course not taking place) [11]. Castro protested the invasion and retreated to his ranch at San Juan Bautista, some forty miles to the north. It wasn’t long, however, before the American settlers in the north received news of Jones’ arrival, and in a fit of frenzy, descended upon the Sonoma Barracks to demand the surrender of local Mexican commandant Mariano Vallejo.

Vallejo initially appeared hostile to the Americans, largely due to communication difficulty, but as soon as interpreters were arranged it transpired that he actually supported their cause – he just didn’t think much of them themselves. Terms were settled over dinner, and on October 1st, the Lone Star flag was raised over the barracks – the California Republic was born… [12]

The "Lone Star Flag" of the California Republic.

…When John C. Frémont, noted explorer, U.S. Army officer and son-in-law of President-elect Benton, arrived in California on October 8th, he found a territory in open revolt. This represented to Frémont opportunity to turn his father-in-law’s Manifest Destiny vision into a reality. The Neutrality Act prevented him from unilaterally recognizing California’s independence, but he nonetheless met with the Republic’s leaders and privately agreed to aid them. He wrote to Benton on the 10th, asking to extend U.S. recognition to the fledgling Republic, and upon finding out about Jones’ presence in Monterey, went south to meet with him and transfer control of the Californian capital to the Republic…

…In the last days of 1848, the lame-duck Senate approved a resolution to request recognition of California from President Mangum. The President refused to heed their request, as was his constitutional prerogative, and it took until Benton assumed office in early March for the situation to change. By then, the Mexican government had already taken action against U.S. positions in Texas, fearing that the Republic was little more than a plot to wrest California out of Mexican hands and into those of the United States. Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande on February 21st, and engaged U.S. forces the day after at Fort Austin [13] – the Mexican government claimed it was doing no more than asserting its claim to a region that rightfully belonged to Mexico, but from the American side it was a clear provocation. As one of his final acts in office, President Mangum asked Congress to declare war against Mexico, and this it did three days after Benton assumed office. The tenuous peace that had lasted almost a decade was finally broken…

***

[1] IOTL, Dayton was a fairly standard Northern Whig, and like most of them, went into the Republican Party when it was founded. He was chosen as the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 1856, presumably to balance the flamboyant westerner (who will remain nameless) at the top of the ticket.
[2] IOTL, Wright died very suddenly after stepping down from the governor’s office in 1847, aged 52. This is of course eminently susceptible to butterflies, and so ITTL he lives and carries on the Locofoco/Barnburner tradition.
[3] This was true IOTL as well, so much so that after his failed runs in 1848 and 1852, he was sent off by President Purse to be Minister to London. This was viewed as a sinecure to keep him away from Washington, but with the sectional fracas that plagued the aforementioned President’s time in office, having been away from Washington for the past four years worked to Buchanan’s advantage, and he ultimately became the compromise candidate in 1856.
[4] IOTL, Upshur was a Whig, but exactly the sort of Whig who’d go to the Democrats ITTL. He was arguably the most prominent person killed in the USS Princeton explosion of 1844, which also claimed the Secretary of the Navy, President Tyler’s father-in-law and his valet (and very nearly President Tyler himself).
[5] Although even at this point it was questionable whether Ohio could really be called a western state.
[6] This rebellion happened in 1836 IOTL, but is otherwise exactly as OTL.
[7] Well, y’know, except the people who already lived there, but those people died soon after anyway. Probably of disease or something, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.
[8] This happened in 1842 IOTL, except that it was Pio Pico, the leader of the Californios around Los Angeles, who drove out Micheltorena and became governor – Castro refused to recognize his authority and carved out his own fiefdom using proceeds from the Monterey Customhouse.
[9] IOTL, Castro was less cautious – in 1840 he rounded up a group of American immigrants and deported them to Baja California, causing a diplomatic incident in the process. Nothing so brazen is done ITTL, but certainly there will have been distrust between Americans and Californios.
[10] Again, this is all OTL. Consider the irony of California’s eventual secession from Mexico originating with an American illegal immigration crisis.
[11] This happened in 1842 IOTL. My delay of it can be chalked up to the fact that he’s unlikely to believe President Mangum would’ve declared war.
[12] IOTL, Vallejo laughed the rebels off, but put up no resistance whatsoever and ultimately became a politician in post-war California. Here, he’s in a better mood and decides to actively work with them.
[13] OTL Fort Brown, in modern-day Brownsville, TX.

Utgard96 · Dec 13, 2016

At last the 1839 show. Thanks to @Redolegna for suggesting the Lesseps-Linant connection.

A House Divided #18: Departing for Syria

“In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." – The City's gone,
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.”

***

From "In the Courts of the Orient: Europe and the Middle East in the Modern Era”
(c) 1978 by Dr. Anthony Clarke
Cambridge University Press

…Mohammad Ali Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, had first risen to power after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign left a power vacuum in the region, and had used the twenty-five years since to carve out a large personal empire-within-an-empire for himself in Egypt, the Sudan, and the areas around the Red Sea. When Greece rose in revolt against Turkish rule in 1821, the Ottomans were unprepared to deal with it, and asked Mohammad Ali to help them put down the revolt, in exchange for which he would receive the island of Crete. Mohammad Ali happily accepted, and sent his entire navy along with a sizeable military force across the Mediterranean. He was unprepared, however, for Western intervention on the Greek side, and in 1827 a joint Russo-Franco-British naval force sunk almost the entire Egyptian navy at the Battle of Navarino. The Greeks won their independence two years later, meaning that the war had cost Mohammad Ali his entire navy and stranded a significant portion of his army for no tangible gain whatsoever, and so he saw fit to increase his demands for compensation. He now wanted control of Syria as well as Crete, and that was unacceptable to the Sultan. When no answer had been given to his request, Mohammad Ali sent his forces into Syria to assume control of it by force, and the Ottoman Empire descended into civil war.

The war lasted a year and a half, and saw the Egyptian forces overrun Syria and parts of Anatolia with embarrassing ease – they likely would’ve marched on Constantinople and overthrown the Sultan had the Great Powers not intervened to stop this, Russia because of their support for the Sultan and the others to preserve the regional balance of power. Mohammad Ali was given control of Syria in exchange for maintaining his position as a nominal vassal of the Sultan, who accepted Russian protection under the Treaty of Hünkâr Iskelesi in June of 1833. Under this treaty, Russia could request that the Dardanelles be closed to foreign shipping at any time, a provision that alarmed the British greatly, but with the agreement a fait accompli and no desire to provoke Russia into war, nothing was done about it immediately…

…In May of 1838, Mohammad Ali decided to declare independence from the Sultan, and informed the Great Powers of his desire to do so. The British Government received the news with concern, and eager to prevent a major war in the region, they and Russia offered to mediate a compromise settlement between the Khedive and the Sultan. The Khedive refused, no doubt hoping to obtain his final victory in the field, and the Sultan felt similarly. It was the latter who made the first move, invading Syria at the start of 1839, and Muhammad Ali’s eldest son Ibrahim broke the Ottoman force at Nezib in June. Once more the way to Constantinople was open, and Ibrahim wanted to seize the opportunity to march on the imperial city; he was no doubt strengthened in his conviction by the defection of the entire Ottoman fleet to Muhammad Ali’s cause. The Khedive himself, however, regarded this as a risk too much, and preferred to use the current high position to leverage territorial gains and/or increased autonomy from the Sultan. [1]

Muhammad Ali was getting ready to negotiate when the Great Powers intervened a second time. Eager to prevent too great a consolidation of power on either side, the British, Austrians, Prussians and Russians jointly offered a peace where Muhammad Ali and his heirs would be given Egypt and the Sudan to rule in perpetuity in exchange for giving up Syria; the Khedive refused. He did this for multiple reasons – firstly because he believed facts on the ground were in his favour, and secondly because he had the backing of France, which sent a flotilla of ships to Jaffa in December as a show of support. The other Powers did not take this lying down, and for the first time since Napoleon’s fall, Europe stood on the brink of a Great Power war…

***

From “The Empire that Wasn’t an Empire: France in Africa and Asia, 1830-present”
(c) 1983 by Stéphane Tremblay
Montreal: McGill University Press

The history of France’s involvement in Egypt runs parallel to the history of the Suez Canal. The construction of a canal to link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea had been a dream of Napoleon’s, and a major cause of his Egyptian campaign, but it wasn’t until after the July Revolution that these plans would begin to be explored seriously. The crucial figure in this was Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds, the explorer and civil engineer, who originally came to Egypt in 1819 to explore the course of the upper Nile, but was captivated by the Sinai and the potential of building a canal across its western isthmus, which was narrow and flat enough that the canal wouldn’t require a lock system. [2]

Linant Pasha, as he was known, would come to serve the rulers of Egypt for most of his life.

From 1828, Linant devoted himself body and soul to the canal project, and two years later he was appointed chief engineer for Upper Egypt by Muhammad Ali, the Egyptian ruler. In this position, he liaised with the French consulate in Cairo over the canal, but the plans never truly took off until 1832, when Ferdinand de Lesseps arrived in Alexandria to take over the vice-consulate there. Linant and Lesseps corresponded eagerly regarding the project, and Lesseps gradually came to share Linant’s enthusiasm for it. [3] Crucially, Lesseps had Muhammad Ali’s ear thanks to a family connection (his father had previously served as consul-general in Cairo, and had a hand in Muhammad Ali’s appointment as provincial governor), and through his lobbying, the Khedive came to take an interest as well.

Lesseps wrote to Paris in early 1834 regarding the Suez Canal plans, and what he wrote was of great interest to Périer and his cabinet – particularly so the Foreign Minister, Adolphe Thiers. Thiers had been looking for ways to expand French influence in the region, and what better way to accomplish this than to construct a shortcut to the East that France would exercise complete control over? …

…Although it was only in 1836 that the Egyptian authorities gave a concession to the Suez Canal project, and although it would take until 1843 before construction would begin, France nevertheless had a strong strategic interest in Egypt by the time of the 1839 crisis. Thiers, who by now was President of the Council, felt that France had rolled over once too many in her efforts to avoid upsetting the other powers, and that it would be necessary to make a stand on Egypt. He believed that none of the powers except the British would regard the matter as sufficiently important to risk a confrontation, and that Russia could perhaps even be persuaded to back their position, since a weak Turkey would be in their strategic interests. So it was that a flotilla was dispatched from Marseille in November of 1839, arriving at the Syrian port of Jaffa on the 8th of December. There it joined the Egyptian navy, until recently the Turkish navy, to much jubilation from the locals and the Egyptian leadership. [4]

Although no direct action was taken, the arrival of the French Navy in the Levant sent shockwaves through the courts of Europe. Metternich was incensed at the provocativeness of the French, but ultimately had no personal quarrel with it – the Tsar was similarly disinclined to care about the actual substance of the situation. Prussia had no interests one way or the other, but joined Austria and Russia in protesting France’s actions in support of Egypt. The strongest reaction came from Great Britain, whose dependence on revenues from India meant that a Suez Canal controlled by a foreign power was a threatening prospect. For the Foreign Secretary of the day, the geriatric Lord Melville, this was particularly acute – he had previously served as President of the Board of Control, responsible for the affairs of the East India Company [5]. He found an ally in Wellington and another in the King, and a conference was called to London in May of 1840. Once more the powers attempted to maintain order through negotiation, and just as in 1830, they failed dismally. Austria and Prussia were unwilling to take action that might lead to war with France, and Russia was beginning to warm to the idea of a weakened Turkish sultanate that would be more easily pliable, and so Britain found herself isolated just as France had in 1830. The convention disbanded with no agreement reached in late June, and France found itself unchallenged…

***

From "In the Courts of the Orient: Europe and the Middle East in the Modern Era”
(c) 1978 by Dr. Anthony Clarke
Cambridge University Press

The Treaty of Scutari was signed on August 4th, 1840, across the Bosporus from Constantinople itself. Ibrahim Pasha, who negotiated the treaty on behalf of his father, was able to extract significant concessions from the weakened Sultan, including full independence and recognition of his domain over much of Syria – the provinces of Gaza, Acre, Tripoli and Damascus were all ceded, while Aleppo and Rakka remained in Turkish hands. The Hejaz, including the two holy cities, was the subject of the most intense negotiation, but in the end the Sultan’s men realised the futility of attempting to keep it when it was isolated from their other possessions, and it fell to Muhammad Ali as well. The Sultan was left in control of Turkey in Europe (minus Crete), Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and his rump state would increasingly fall under the sway of the Russian bear as the decades progressed, just as Egypt fell under the sway of France…

Turkey in Asia as of 1840, with the post-Scutari Egyptian border in red.

***

[1] Everything up to this point is OTL.
[2] As indeed the OTL Suez Canal doesn’t – it’s perfectly flat and seawater flows freely through it.
[3] Linant and Lesseps were both present in Egypt around this time IOTL, but I’m not aware of any significant contact between the two, and it would take another twenty years before Lesseps came to pursue the Suez Canal project in any serious manner. However, Linant had the idea at the same time IOTL, and there was certainly little to no technological difficulty involved (the Suez Canal is pretty much just a long ditch).
[4] IOTL the French were undecided for a long time, and only dispatched forces to aid Egypt in September of 1840, by which time the other powers were already attacking it – even Thiers thought carrying on in spite of that would be a bit mental, and backed down. ITTL, they get in first thanks to the vested interest brought by the canal.
[5] Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount Melville was an aristocratic Tory of the old line, who served as President of the Board of Control under Lord Liverpool and then First Lord of the Admiralty under Wellington. Canadians may be interested to know that his father, thanks to his close friendship with John Graves Simcoe, is the namesake of Toronto’s Dundas Street and the town of Dundas, now part of Hamilton, to which it leads. The elder Melville was a highly colourful figure, serving as Secretary of State for War and President of the Board of Control in Pitt the Younger’s long administration, and was the most recent British politician to be impeached (although he was eventually acquitted).

Utgard96 · Jan 19, 2017

A House Divided #19: The Charter of the Land

“'Tis time that the victims of labour and care
Should come for to reap what is labour's fair share
'Tis time that these voices in councils be heard
That rather than pay for the law of the sword;
All power is ours, with a will of our own
We conquer, united – divided we groan.

Come hail brothers, hail the shrill sound of the horn
For ages, deep wrongs have been hopelessly borne
Despair shall no longer our spirits dismay
Nor wither the arms when upraised for the fray;
The conflict for freedom is gathering nigh:
We live to secure it, or gloriously die.”

***

From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press

For most periods in Britain’s political history, it has been a common historiographical tradition to focus on goings-on within the halls of Westminster Palace first and everything else second. The “Bloody Forties”, however, represent an exception to this pattern – understandably, considering the events at the end of that fateful decade – and analysis of groups like the Chartists, the Anti-Corn Law League, Young Ireland, and the Peterloo Clubs has been exhaustive. We will not deal with these in greater depth than any other facet of British history, but any analysis of 19th-century Britain would be incomplete without them.

The Chartists are arguably the most famous of the mass movements, and with good reason – they were the first to have a significant degree of coherence and organisation. The early 1830s had seen some degree of popular discontent in such forms as the Swing Riots [1] and the Merthyr Rising [2], but these were spontaneous explosions of popular feeling rather than organised social movements such as those that came to be seen in the 40s. Reform clubs organised protests during the succeeding years which extended into the working classes, but were mainly concentrated in London and the Nonconformist-heavy industrial cities of Northern England. When the Reform Act was passed in 1833, the Nonconformist cities were enfranchised and part of the steam went out of the reform clubs, but by no means did the activism die down, and it was from the still-discontented lower and middle classes that Chartism was born.

There was no one impetus for the birth of the Chartist movement, but the most important one is probably the feebleness of the Lansdowne government in pursuing reform, and in particular, the Poor Law Amendment Act that ended the outdoor relief system. Where the more idealistic reformers had hoped that a reformed Parliament would take into account the concerns of the working classes as well as those of the elite, what they were instead faced with was a government of aristocratic Whigs who pursued reforms in the name of economies and of good government, even where those goals were contrary to the interests of the great bulk of the British people [3]. If the weakness of the Reform Act had aroused suspicion among the radical middle classes, the actions of the Lansdowne ministry – which had taken office promising to govern in the spirit of reform – had been definite proof that the Whig interest was different from the radical interest.

In 1837, a meeting of radical MPs and working-class leaders met to draft a charter, a list of stated aims around which radical agitation could be marshalled. It was from this charter that the Chartist movement drew its name, and its main author, William Lovett, personified the radical movement as it stood at the time. Born in rural Cornwall, Lovett moved to London at a young age to ply his trade as a cabinet maker, and was drawn into the nascent trade unionist movement there. Initially Lovett was a supporter of Robert Owen’s co-operative brand of utopian socialism, but this was sidelined by the Swing Riots and the ensuing reformist agitation, of which Lovett was at the forefront. When the Reform Act was passed, Lovett and a group of others formed the London Working Men’s Association, a radical club for skilled workers that would come to form the kernel of Chartism. It was in this capacity that he gained a place on the committee that drafted the People’s Charter.

The Charter was a fairly simple document, and a very moderate one – it called for six major reforms to how Parliament was elected, with no greater aim of constitutional reform:
- The extension of suffrage to every man above 21 years of age.
- The introduction of the secret ballot (at the time voting was conducted in public by means of a poll book in which voters signed their name under the name of their chosen candidate).
- The removal of property qualifications to stand for election.
- The introduction of a salary for Members of Parliament, so that the right to stand for office wouldn’t be limited to the wealthy.
- The reform of constituency boundaries to provide equal representation, as opposed to the system then in use where each county or borough returned no more than two members regardless of size.
- Annual elections, partly to make the House of Commons more accountable and partly to make it more difficult to buy elections.

Ever the optimist, Lovett had a firm belief in non-violent action, which he felt was more likely to win over hearts and minds than the use of physical force. To this end, it was decided that the Charter should be supported by a petition campaign, which would peaceably gather signatures and present them to Parliament. Several meetings were held across the nation, gathering thousands of spectators, and the Chartists secured well over a million signatures. In 1839, a National Convention was called to London to debate aims and present the petition to Parliament. Its members, elected by local radical clubs, referred to themselves as “Members of Convention” and some of them even added the letters “MC” to the end of their name [4]; it was clear that they thought of themselves as an alternative Parliament, and the establishment looked on with a mixture of bemusement and concern. When the People’s Charter and petition were presented to Parliament, Whigs and Tories united in opposition to it, and both houses voted by overwhelming majorities not to hear the petitioners.

The rejection of the petition was, predictably, met with considerable resentment from the Chartists. The Convention debated calling a general strike in support of it, but in this age before large-scale trade union organisation, the coordination of such an affair was difficult to work out, and the debate quickly bogged down into technicalities. In the meantime, the radicals in the provinces were plotting more direct action, particularly in two regions – the West Riding of Yorkshire and the South Wales Valleys. Both areas were among Britain’s largest coal-producing regions; both had strong Nonconformist traditions; and both had developed networks of workingmen’s clubs which fostered both local feeling and radical political opinions among their members. The aforementioned clubs agitated throughout the summer and autumn, occasionally clashing with police in the process, but the first premeditated violence only came on the 3rd of November, when the Chartists of Newport rose in rebellion. A large body of Chartists entered the town and set upon the Westgate Hotel, where they believed a group of Chartists were imprisoned. The mayor of Newport, having gotten wind of the rising, had summoned a force of some five or six hundred soldiers and special constables to guard important points in the city, and a large segment of this force kept the Chartists at bay outside the Westgate. Who struck first is a question that’s been debated over and over in the historiography of the period, but suffice it to say that the standoff turned into a brawl and the brawl ultimately turned into an all-out battle for control of Newport’s streets.

The Chartists fought as well as untrained, mostly unarmed miners can be expected to, but ultimately, they were no match for the soldiers defending the hotel, who managed to beat back an attempt at forced entry and then scare the crowd into retreating, many dropping their weapons and leaving them on the ground in their panic. Well over a hundred arrests were made, and twenty-one men identified as leaders of the rising and indicted on high treason charges [5]. At the Monmouth Assizes Court, the three principal leaders – John Frost, William Jones, and Zephaniah Williams – were all found guilty and sentenced to hanging, drawing and quartering – a sentence reserved for high treason, which originally involved being drawn behind a cart to the place of execution, hanged until nearly dead, taken down, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into four pieces (quartered). However, this was found needlessly barbaric by many Enlightenment thinkers, and by the 19th century the actual nature of the punishment changed to being hanged until dead and then posthumously beheaded, and this had last been done to Robert Emmet, one of the leaders of the Irish rebellion of 1803. [6]

The sentence provoked, if possible, even more outrage than the rejection of the petition six months earlier. This time, large parts of the House of Commons joined in the outcry, with Lord John Russell [7] and Henry Brougham [8], both noted Whig reformists, rising in opposition to the “medieval brutality” of the sentence, while carefully avoiding any notion of doubting the guilt of the sentenced men; the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Abinger [9], petitioned the Home Secretary to commute the sentence to transportation, but this was vocally opposed by the King, who felt that a strong hand was needed, and Peel was inclined to agree. A compromise solution was found, and the three men were ultimately subjected to gibbeting – they were taken to public places on the outskirts of Newport, Pontypool, and Merthyr Tydfil, publicly hanged, and their bodies left hanging in plain sight as a warning to potential future insurgents. [10]

If the government had assumed the hanging would serve as a deterrent, it had the exact opposite effect; soon after Jones’ hanging, the Chartists of Pontypool cut down the gibbet, released the corpse of their leader and gave it a burial in the churchyard of the Methodist congregation. When the Merthyr Tydfil Chartists attempted to do the same to Williams, they were met by a force of armed constables who fought them off, and the day after, Merthyr saw open fighting in the streets for the second time in eight years. Across the country, similar scenes took place, and across the country, the government forces quite easily defeated the disorganised risings and restored order. The Chartist Rising was dead in its cradle, and harsh reprisals followed, but the radical cause was anything but dead, and in the meeting houses of the British skilled working class, new movements would soon arise…

***

From "Peel”
(c) 1979 by Alan Sharpe
London: Crandall & Sons

The 1839-40 Rising and its repercussions placed Peel in an awkward seat. Although he was firmly supportive of restoring order by force, the level of violence and the return of gibbeting as a form of punishment [11] had him deeply distressed. Many others in Cabinet, particularly on the “Canningite” end of Tory thought, agreed, but as Home Secretary (and thus the minister responsible for internal security matters), Peel’s voice of dissent was by far the most prominent. However, the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, and the Lord Chancellor were all hardliners, and Peel increasingly became sidelined and his plans overridden in Cabinet as the rising carried on. In September of 1840, the trial of several leading Yorkshire Chartists ended up sentencing them to the gibbet, and when the Attorney General’s office recommended against commuting the sentence, Peel decided he’d had enough and it was time to resign. Wellington accepted, and on the 3rd of October, 1840, Sir Robert Peel moved to the backbenches. He was not to return to government for a decade…

***

From “The Cambridge Dictionary of 19th Century Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press

GANG OF FOUR: Informal grouping of moderate (or “Canningite”) Tory MPs opposed to the governments of the Duke of Wellington and (after 1842) the Duke of Richmond, consisting of Sir Robert Peel (the group’s informal leader), William Huskisson, the Viscount Palmerston, and Charles Grant. Though Peel had been outside government since the fateful days of the summer of 1840, it took until the 1842 general election and the dismissal of the remaining Canningites, among them Huskisson and Grant, before the group truly crystallised. The “Gang of Four” became increasingly ostracised by the Tory party (now dominated by its “Ultra” faction) and enjoyed virtually no support in the House of Lords, but they had enough Commons allies to deny a majority to the more controversial bills proposed by the government. After the events of 1849 and Peel’s “Second Restoration”, the Gang would form the core of the Moderate Party…

***

[1] See chapter #5.
[2] An 1831 coal miners’ rebellion in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, which saw some ten thousand miners rebel against poor conditions and high unemployment, taking effective control of the town and raising the red flag (the first use of the red flag as a symbol of open revolt rather than a general warning sign) before being struck down by the army.
[3] The Poor Law Amendment Act is essentially the same document as that passed by Lord Grey’s government IOTL – see chapter #12.
[4] Moral-force parliamentary reformism in da hizzouse.
[5] This is exactly how the Newport Rising went down IOTL – probably (probably) chronologically the last event we will see go exactly as OTL.
[6] Hanging, drawing and quartering was an absolutely real thing which European monarchies did well into the 18th century – the most notable case would probably be that of Robert-Francois Damiens, attempted assassin of King Louis XV of France, whose 1757 execution drew shock and horror from nearly all the prominent Establishment figures of the day. Britain only formally abolished it as punishment in 1870, at the same time as a traitor’s possessions stopped automatically becoming forfeit and passing into the Crown’s hands.
[7] IOTL, Russell was the principal author of the 1832 Reform Act, and later went on to become Prime Minister at the head of the last Whig ministry in that party’s history, and then again as a Liberal after Lord Palmerston’s death in 1865. He sat in the Commons despite being a titular Lord, because his title was a courtesy title in right of his father the Duke of Bedford.
[8] Brougham (whose surname, in what’s becoming something of a running theme of this TL, was pronounced “broom”) was a prominent anti-slavery campaigner and reformist Whig who became Lord Chancellor in the Earl Grey’s government, leading the push to abolish slavery across the Empire and simplifying the judiciary by establishing the Central Criminal Court. Like other Whig leaders of his time, he’s best remembered for lending his name to a product – a small carriage, first built to his specifications by London coachbuilders Robinson and Cook. He’s thus the indirect namesake of the Cadillac Brougham.
[9] James Scarlett, 1st Baron Abinger (the title was created for him in 1835, technically post-PoD, but it came from his estate that he’d bought in 1813, so I don’t see why it’d be different ITTL) was a prominent barrister and MP who served as Attorney General in the Canningite ministry, moving from the Whigs to the Tories in protest over the Reform Act. ITTL he’s a prominent Canningite, and gets made Lord Chief Justice by Canning upon Lord Tenterden’s death in 1832.
[10] IOTL, they were transported, and all three were pardoned in 1856 and lived into the 1870s; Frost returned to England after his pardon, Williams and Jones remained in Australia where the former discovered coal deposits and died a wealthy mining magnate.
[11] IOTL, the gibbet was last used in 1832, and the Whig ministry passed legislation to remove it from the statutes two years later. ITTL, if these events happened, they happened while Canning was busy with reform, and the Whigs never really got around to criminal justice reform during their brief time in government.

A House Divided: A TL

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