Hello everyone. I'm sure you've been waiting for this, and I'm very sorry it took me this long. I'm also sorry to say the maps will have to come in later, as I'm away from my usual computer. This is the final part of Act I, which means I'd like to package it with one final call for entries for the "Where are they now?" update. I've got a list of all the names you've asked about, and they will get done in good time, hopefully less than six months this time.
Without further ado, here we go - and a happy new decade!
A House Divided #34: Young Americans
“There are only two sides to this question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this matter; only patriots and traitors.”
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The Battle of Angostura (January 17-18, 1850) marked the end of effective Mexican resistance to the U.S. advance. Before it, although far from the most cohesive fighting force in history, the Mexican Army was able to marshal a serious effort to prevent Taylor from advancing south. After it, more and more officers came to see the war as a lost cause, and supporters of Bustamante and Santa Anna (who was still professing his loyalty to the President at every opportunity) began to position themselves for the post-war power struggle. The usual quote is that the two sides “came to hate each other more than they hated the Americans”, and while this is hyperbole, it’s not too far from the truth…
…The American cause was further bolstered in March, when Sterling Price’s column came out of the northwest and joined Taylor’s army. Of the original 900 volunteer cavalrymen who’d marched out of Santa Fe with Price, only about a third were still in the saddle after nine months, but those three hundred men were hardened veterans of desert warfare. Price was promoted to brigadier general and given command of the Volunteer Division’s Third Brigade, a unit that included two more volunteer cavalry regiments and two regiments of volunteer infantry. Taylor hoped that this would allow the First Missouri to spread its knowledge to the other volunteers without the usual tactic of disbanding the regiment and spreading their men around, which he was prevented from doing… [1]
…Taylor’s strategy remained to push down the center of Mexico and eventually approach Mexico City itself, but as he went south from Saltillo, it became clear that his supply lines were seriously threatened. Price was sent north with two thousand men to fortify the garrisons in Monterey, Saltillo and Laredo, but encountered opposition from Mexican militias led by Santiago Vidaurri, Governor of New Leon. [2] The Papagayos Incident, as the biggest skirmish was called, saw the deaths of around twenty men on each side, and marked the end of direct confrontation in the Rio Grande theater. From now on, the war would be centered in the heart of Mexico…
***
Excerpts of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America, the California Republic and the Mexican Republic
Signed at Santiago de Querétaro on August 24, 1850
Article I.
There shall be firm and universal peace between the United States of America, the California Republic and the Mexican Republic, and between their respective countries, territories, cities, towns, and people, without exception of places or persons.
[…]
Article V.
The Mexican Republic acknowledges the complete independence and sovereignty of the California Republic, renounces all claims upon its territory and people, and pledges firm and universal peace with it.
Mexicans living in the territory of the California Republic who, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the California Republic, and be admitted as soon as possible to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens thereof, according to the principles of the constitution; and in the meantime shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. [3]
Article VI.
The northern boundary line of the Mexican Republic shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Panuco River; from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes the northern boundary of the Mexican department of Veracruz; thence, along the northern boundaries of the Mexican departments of Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, and Durango; and from the point where the Mexican departments of Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa meet, following a direct line to the Gulf of California meeting said Gulf at the middle point of the channel at the northernmost end of the island of Altamura; and finally proceeding into the middle of the Gulf and around the tip of the California Peninsula. [4]
The eastern boundary line of the California Republic, all territories east of which and north of Mexico shall fall under the jurisdiction of the United States, shall be determined by a commission of plenipotentiaries of the California Republic and the United States, to be appointed by a separate treaty between the aforesaid republics.
***
Population data for the United States, 1850
From “Twenty Censuses: America Through the Ages”
(c) 1982 by Dr Arthur Williamson (ed.)
Washington: United States Census Bureau
***
Population data for the California Republic, 1851
Appendix to “Twenty Censuses: America Through the Ages”
(c) 1982 by Dr Arthur Williamson (ed.)
Washington: United States Census Bureau
***
From “Henry Clay: Life of a Statesman”
(c) 1973 by Dr. Adam Greene
New Orleans: Stephens & Co.
With the war with Mexico ended, Clay would have his final blaze of congressional glory. In a speech to the Senate on the 15th of September, the day after the Treaty of Queretaro arrived in Washington, Clay heavily criticized the Treaty, calling it the result of a Southern delegation gone mad with power. A Republican amendment to remove all but California, New Mexico and Texas from the area ceded failed by 33-19, and the Treaty was eventually approved by the Senate in more or less its original content. [6]
It was not in opposing the Treaty that Clay would make his name for the last time, then, but in the organization of the territories now gained by the United States. California, deep in debt and with only the United States to turn to for help, soon abandoned its experiment with independence and applied for annexation much as Texas had a decade before. The annexation bill reached Congress in February of 1851, and unlike with Texas, it faced little determined opposition outside the usual circle of northern Republicans. It passed both houses by safe margins, and on March 31, California became part of the United States.
The new state’s position on slavery would be the cause of the most raucous debate. The California Republic’s constitution had not explicitly banned slavery, but nor had it explicitly condoned it, and only a handful of slaves were present in its territory. The Missouri Compromise line split Upper California down the middle, with the line meeting the sea just south of the capital in Monterey. And to make things worse, most of the potentially arable land (though still dry at this point in time) was north of the line, in the Sacramento Valley.
A constitutional convention was assembled in Monterey to settle the issue, but with communications slow, it would take months to settle on a constitution and send it to Washington for approval. In the meantime, heady disputes opened up in the Senate, as southern senators attempted to pre-empt the Monterey Convention and arrange for the explicit extension of slavery to California. William Yancey and Abel Upshur continued to argue that the U.S. Constitution explicitly protected the right to property, including in slaves, and that any law attempting to limit the institution was unconstitutional – even after their viewpoint had been defeated so spectacularly in the fight over the Lincoln Amendment. This time, they gained even less traction outside their narrow circle of radical pro-slavery southerners…
…Clay’s eventual solution, obvious in hindsight, was to simply admit California as two states – one free, one slave – and make the Missouri Compromise line the border between the two. This would, in time, turn out to be less than the ideal boundary it seemed at the time, but it satisfied both sides of Congress. Texas, having been admitted with the promise of future division, was also split in half, and to prevent the balance in the Senate from being affected, the sparsely-settled territory of Itasca was promised statehood as soon as a government could be organized. It would not be admitted in time for the 1852 presidential election, though, leading to a great deal of rumbling among northern voices in the years after the “Second Great Compromise”…
…With his legislative efforts complete for the year, and prospects looking bleak for the autumn’s presidential election, Clay left Washington on the Baltimore and Ohio in June of 1852. The old senator looked forward to a summer in his home state, consulting with local party leaders and preparing for the fight to come, but destiny would make other plans. Soon after arriving at Ashland, Clay suffered a repeat bout of tuberculosis. This time, both he and Lucretia could tell he wouldn’t survive.
Henry Clay passed away on the 4th of July, surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren, servants, and slaves. He’d been born into an America whose very existence as a nation was in question, and left it a strong, continent-spanning republic whose population was equal to Great Britain’s. For much of the three-quarter-century in between, Clay was in the middle of politics, shaping the country he loved into its familiar form. We owe much to him – probably more than most of us realize. [7]
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1852: The Birth of Young America
Held in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican War, the 1852 election marks the beginning of the “Young America” era of the Democratic Party. Elements of the new course had been seen in the 1848 election, with the diverse factions of the party united by an agenda focused on expansion and aggressive nationalism, but Thomas Hart Benton was fundamentally a man of the old Jacksonian democracy. With his decision not to run for a second term in 1852, citing the advance of old age, [8] the stage was set for the new forces to take control and shape the party’s destiny as well as that of the nation.
The man who shaped the ideology of Young America was Stephen Arnold Douglas, who at the time of the 1852 election was representing his home state of Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Like Benton, he was a determined and headstrong advocate for his party in that body, but unlike Benton, he was a young man, raised in the Age of Jackson, who had devoted all his energy to the modernization and rationalization of the Democratic ideology. Douglas believed in territorial expansion, westward settlement, national pride, support for democratization abroad, free trade, but also a number of issues thought unorthodox by the Democratic old guard. Most notably, he was an eager advocate of industrialization and internal improvements, who had voted for the Morehead Act and helped sell it to his fellow Democrats as a member of the House six years before. Sometimes this unorthodoxy aided the South as well, such as his support for introducing popular sovereignty as a solution to the slavery issue; we have no way of telling how things would have turned out had he been allowed to bring this vision to life, [9] because in his years as President he abided by the terms of the Second Great Compromise.
By comparison to the unruly state of the Democratic Party at the 1844 and (to a lesser extent) 1848 elections, the 1852 Democratic National Convention was a spectacular show of unity – Douglas was nominated on the second ballot with a sizeable majority. There were minor groups who dissented both in New York, where the Locofocos distrusted Douglas’ moderate stance on slavery, [10] and much more prominently in the Deep South, where William R. King enjoyed monolithic support much like that of Upshur four years prior. Douglas would shore up support in the southern wing of the party by selecting fellow Senator and former Speaker of the House Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia as his running mate, a decision that was approved by a near-unanimous convention. [11]
Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois
Democratic nominee for President, 1852The Republicans, meanwhile, were having a harder time finding their man. The now 75-year-old Henry Clay wisely decided to bow out and would die before election day; Daniel Webster briefly wanted to try, but his star was on the wane after he’d opposed the Lincoln Amendment and inflamed opinions in his state. The new generation of Republicans included few men of similar renown – there was plenty of talent, but few if any of these homines novi displayed national popularity as Webster and Clay had. [12] William Dayton, Thomas Corwin, John Jordan Crittenden, Joshua Giddings, Hamilton Fish – all these men tried to claim the prize at the 1852 convention, and all have largely passed unnoticed into the annals of history. James Turner Morehead had name recognition, but as a supporter of harsh action against fugitive slaves, he was far too controversial in the North to be seriously considered.
So, the nomination fell to Edward Everett, ex-Governor of Massachusetts. Everett was known as an eloquent and persuasive orator, whose long speeches swayed minds and aroused the public interest, but also as a shrewd politician who was willing to compromise on values if it meant achieving a workable political settlement. This hardly endeared him to ardent Whig partisans in his home state, the focal point of radical abolitionism in pre-1870s America, but they made him a respected figure within the national party, and ultimately handed him the nomination in the crowded field of the 1852 convention. For regional balance, Everett was joined on the ticket by a fellow former Governor, James Chamberlain Jones of Tennessee. Jones had governed his state during the early Mangum era, when the Republican Party was at its zenith of national power, and built the Tennessee Republicans into one of the strongest branches of the party. [13]
Edward Everett, fmr. Governor of Massachusetts
Republican nominee for President, 1852
The campaign was a spirited affair, as usual, but it rapidly became clear that, much as the Republican candidates were men of ability and renown, they hadn’t captured the public imagination in anywhere near the same way as Stephen Douglas…
…Election Day came and went, and the result was clear. At age 39, Stephen Douglas had become the youngest president in the history of the United States…
***
[1] As discussed in chapter #24, the way the US Army pre-Civil War worked was that a small core of regular troops was kept in peacetime, which would be bolstered in wartime by volunteer recruitment. The volunteer units were raised by private citizens and/or state governments, and their states exercised administrative control over them even as they were subject to the command of regular army officers. This is obviously not a great way to run an army, which is why it changed as soon as they had to deal with a major conflict.
[2] IOTL, Vidaurri was one of the leading conservative centralists in northeast Mexico during the 1840s, but broke with them after the Mexican-American War and joined the liberal Revolution of Ayutla in 1854. He switched sides again when the Constitution of 1857 rearranged the northeastern states, merging his native Nuevo León with Coahuila, and backed the French in their attempts to create a Mexican Empire. He was also chummy with the Confederacy, and his open-door policy toward Confederate trade greatly helped the CSA secure its arms supply during the Civil War. He was executed by the patriotic army as the French were driven out in 1867.
[3] This is the major difference from OTL’s Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which only involved the US and Mexico, and deliberately avoided mentioning claims of sovereignty over Texas and California in favor of just stating what the new border would be. Here, it’s deemed necessary to have Mexico formally recognize California as an independent state in the treaty text.
[4] A fairly sizeable chunk of northern Mexico is ceded to the US in addition to its OTL gains; this is because, with the Missouri Compromise line extended to the Pacific, the southern interest is even more adamant about pushing for major territory south of the line.
[5] This is complete and utter spitballing on my part. IOTL, the 1850 Census lost the data from several counties, none of which were included in the official population estimate of 92,597. The population of the state was most likely around 120,000, but that’s at the height of the gold rush, which hasn’t quite taken off yet ITTL. My spitball estimate is somewhere in between that and the circa 1840 population of eight thousand whites. Likewise, Mexico didn’t conduct an official census until 1895, but population estimates for the mid-19th century have the total population of the country at about half what it was then, so I’m assuming Baja California follows that trend. The round number is because the region is barely under Californian control, so I imagine the census ran into difficulties there.
[6] Believe it or not, this sort of thing happened IOTL with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which the Senate seemed to have viewed as less of a definite agreement and more of a rough draft to be tinkered with to their heart’s content. Jefferson Davis tried to amend the Treaty to add most of northeast Mexico to the US, while Whig senator George Washington Badger did the same but to remove all territorial gains aside from Texas. Both amendments failed by lopsided margins.
[7] Clay lives a few days longer than OTL, mainly to add a poetic twist at the end – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of course, both also died on the Fourth (and in the same year, no less). He also dies at Ashland and not in Washington.
[8] IOTL, Benton died in 1858, aged 76, and remained active in Missouri state politics even after he’d been shut out of the Senate by radical pro-slavery forces in the legislature. ITTL, however, the strain of leading the country – and leading it into war at that – takes its toll, and his life will be shortened by a fair amount.
[9] Spoiler alert: things would’ve turned out very badly indeed.
[10] The Locofoco faction has now largely blended with the group we know as the Barnburners IOTL – the continued prominence of Martin van Buren in the state party enabled the former group to carry on long enough to take in most of the generation of anti-slavery Democrats who in his absence would form the latter group.
[11] Hunter was a titan of the southern Democratic Party in the 1850s, chairing the Senate Finance Committee for the entirety of the decade. He generally supported the mainline orthodoxy of the party, but with an emphasis on securing a future for the institution of slavery, which made him popular in his home state and the wider South. After having his name put forward at the chaotic 1860 convention and failing to win any support outside those few southern delegates who hadn’t bolted in disgust, he returned to his state, where he tried and failed to persuade it to stay in the Union. Accepting the inevitability of secession, he was elected as one of Virginia’s Confederate senators, and became President pro tempore of the Confederate States Senate for the entire duration of that body’s existence.
[12] IOTL, this problem was staved off when Zachary Taylor suddenly and unexpectedly declared himself a Whig and stated that he would not refuse the nomination if presented with it, despite never having voted before in his life and generally having shown no interest in politics. He doesn’t do this ITTL, and this makes things quite interesting.
[13] Jones was in largely the same place IOTL, but by the 1850s he’d grown more and more disillusioned by the Whig Party’s domination by northerners who opposed first the Fugitive Slave Act and then the Kansas-Nebraska Act – the latter would cause him to switch parties and campaign for Buchanan in 1856. He died in 1859, aged only 50, and much like Douglas, he could probably have gone on to great things if he hadn’t been so out of step with the factions that were forming at the time.
Without further ado, here we go - and a happy new decade!
A House Divided #34: Young Americans
“There are only two sides to this question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this matter; only patriots and traitors.”
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The Battle of Angostura (January 17-18, 1850) marked the end of effective Mexican resistance to the U.S. advance. Before it, although far from the most cohesive fighting force in history, the Mexican Army was able to marshal a serious effort to prevent Taylor from advancing south. After it, more and more officers came to see the war as a lost cause, and supporters of Bustamante and Santa Anna (who was still professing his loyalty to the President at every opportunity) began to position themselves for the post-war power struggle. The usual quote is that the two sides “came to hate each other more than they hated the Americans”, and while this is hyperbole, it’s not too far from the truth…
…The American cause was further bolstered in March, when Sterling Price’s column came out of the northwest and joined Taylor’s army. Of the original 900 volunteer cavalrymen who’d marched out of Santa Fe with Price, only about a third were still in the saddle after nine months, but those three hundred men were hardened veterans of desert warfare. Price was promoted to brigadier general and given command of the Volunteer Division’s Third Brigade, a unit that included two more volunteer cavalry regiments and two regiments of volunteer infantry. Taylor hoped that this would allow the First Missouri to spread its knowledge to the other volunteers without the usual tactic of disbanding the regiment and spreading their men around, which he was prevented from doing… [1]
…Taylor’s strategy remained to push down the center of Mexico and eventually approach Mexico City itself, but as he went south from Saltillo, it became clear that his supply lines were seriously threatened. Price was sent north with two thousand men to fortify the garrisons in Monterey, Saltillo and Laredo, but encountered opposition from Mexican militias led by Santiago Vidaurri, Governor of New Leon. [2] The Papagayos Incident, as the biggest skirmish was called, saw the deaths of around twenty men on each side, and marked the end of direct confrontation in the Rio Grande theater. From now on, the war would be centered in the heart of Mexico…
***
Excerpts of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement between the United States of America, the California Republic and the Mexican Republic
Signed at Santiago de Querétaro on August 24, 1850
Article I.
There shall be firm and universal peace between the United States of America, the California Republic and the Mexican Republic, and between their respective countries, territories, cities, towns, and people, without exception of places or persons.
[…]
Article V.
The Mexican Republic acknowledges the complete independence and sovereignty of the California Republic, renounces all claims upon its territory and people, and pledges firm and universal peace with it.
Mexicans living in the territory of the California Republic who, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the California Republic, and be admitted as soon as possible to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens thereof, according to the principles of the constitution; and in the meantime shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. [3]
Article VI.
The northern boundary line of the Mexican Republic shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Panuco River; from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes the northern boundary of the Mexican department of Veracruz; thence, along the northern boundaries of the Mexican departments of Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, and Durango; and from the point where the Mexican departments of Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa meet, following a direct line to the Gulf of California meeting said Gulf at the middle point of the channel at the northernmost end of the island of Altamura; and finally proceeding into the middle of the Gulf and around the tip of the California Peninsula. [4]
The eastern boundary line of the California Republic, all territories east of which and north of Mexico shall fall under the jurisdiction of the United States, shall be determined by a commission of plenipotentiaries of the California Republic and the United States, to be appointed by a separate treaty between the aforesaid republics.
***
Population data for the United States, 1850
From “Twenty Censuses: America Through the Ages”
(c) 1982 by Dr Arthur Williamson (ed.)
Washington: United States Census Bureau
***
Population data for the California Republic, 1851
Appendix to “Twenty Censuses: America Through the Ages”
(c) 1982 by Dr Arthur Williamson (ed.)
Washington: United States Census Bureau
***
From “Henry Clay: Life of a Statesman”
(c) 1973 by Dr. Adam Greene
New Orleans: Stephens & Co.
With the war with Mexico ended, Clay would have his final blaze of congressional glory. In a speech to the Senate on the 15th of September, the day after the Treaty of Queretaro arrived in Washington, Clay heavily criticized the Treaty, calling it the result of a Southern delegation gone mad with power. A Republican amendment to remove all but California, New Mexico and Texas from the area ceded failed by 33-19, and the Treaty was eventually approved by the Senate in more or less its original content. [6]
It was not in opposing the Treaty that Clay would make his name for the last time, then, but in the organization of the territories now gained by the United States. California, deep in debt and with only the United States to turn to for help, soon abandoned its experiment with independence and applied for annexation much as Texas had a decade before. The annexation bill reached Congress in February of 1851, and unlike with Texas, it faced little determined opposition outside the usual circle of northern Republicans. It passed both houses by safe margins, and on March 31, California became part of the United States.
The new state’s position on slavery would be the cause of the most raucous debate. The California Republic’s constitution had not explicitly banned slavery, but nor had it explicitly condoned it, and only a handful of slaves were present in its territory. The Missouri Compromise line split Upper California down the middle, with the line meeting the sea just south of the capital in Monterey. And to make things worse, most of the potentially arable land (though still dry at this point in time) was north of the line, in the Sacramento Valley.
A constitutional convention was assembled in Monterey to settle the issue, but with communications slow, it would take months to settle on a constitution and send it to Washington for approval. In the meantime, heady disputes opened up in the Senate, as southern senators attempted to pre-empt the Monterey Convention and arrange for the explicit extension of slavery to California. William Yancey and Abel Upshur continued to argue that the U.S. Constitution explicitly protected the right to property, including in slaves, and that any law attempting to limit the institution was unconstitutional – even after their viewpoint had been defeated so spectacularly in the fight over the Lincoln Amendment. This time, they gained even less traction outside their narrow circle of radical pro-slavery southerners…
…Clay’s eventual solution, obvious in hindsight, was to simply admit California as two states – one free, one slave – and make the Missouri Compromise line the border between the two. This would, in time, turn out to be less than the ideal boundary it seemed at the time, but it satisfied both sides of Congress. Texas, having been admitted with the promise of future division, was also split in half, and to prevent the balance in the Senate from being affected, the sparsely-settled territory of Itasca was promised statehood as soon as a government could be organized. It would not be admitted in time for the 1852 presidential election, though, leading to a great deal of rumbling among northern voices in the years after the “Second Great Compromise”…
…With his legislative efforts complete for the year, and prospects looking bleak for the autumn’s presidential election, Clay left Washington on the Baltimore and Ohio in June of 1852. The old senator looked forward to a summer in his home state, consulting with local party leaders and preparing for the fight to come, but destiny would make other plans. Soon after arriving at Ashland, Clay suffered a repeat bout of tuberculosis. This time, both he and Lucretia could tell he wouldn’t survive.
Henry Clay passed away on the 4th of July, surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren, servants, and slaves. He’d been born into an America whose very existence as a nation was in question, and left it a strong, continent-spanning republic whose population was equal to Great Britain’s. For much of the three-quarter-century in between, Clay was in the middle of politics, shaping the country he loved into its familiar form. We owe much to him – probably more than most of us realize. [7]
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1852: The Birth of Young America
Held in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican War, the 1852 election marks the beginning of the “Young America” era of the Democratic Party. Elements of the new course had been seen in the 1848 election, with the diverse factions of the party united by an agenda focused on expansion and aggressive nationalism, but Thomas Hart Benton was fundamentally a man of the old Jacksonian democracy. With his decision not to run for a second term in 1852, citing the advance of old age, [8] the stage was set for the new forces to take control and shape the party’s destiny as well as that of the nation.
The man who shaped the ideology of Young America was Stephen Arnold Douglas, who at the time of the 1852 election was representing his home state of Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Like Benton, he was a determined and headstrong advocate for his party in that body, but unlike Benton, he was a young man, raised in the Age of Jackson, who had devoted all his energy to the modernization and rationalization of the Democratic ideology. Douglas believed in territorial expansion, westward settlement, national pride, support for democratization abroad, free trade, but also a number of issues thought unorthodox by the Democratic old guard. Most notably, he was an eager advocate of industrialization and internal improvements, who had voted for the Morehead Act and helped sell it to his fellow Democrats as a member of the House six years before. Sometimes this unorthodoxy aided the South as well, such as his support for introducing popular sovereignty as a solution to the slavery issue; we have no way of telling how things would have turned out had he been allowed to bring this vision to life, [9] because in his years as President he abided by the terms of the Second Great Compromise.
By comparison to the unruly state of the Democratic Party at the 1844 and (to a lesser extent) 1848 elections, the 1852 Democratic National Convention was a spectacular show of unity – Douglas was nominated on the second ballot with a sizeable majority. There were minor groups who dissented both in New York, where the Locofocos distrusted Douglas’ moderate stance on slavery, [10] and much more prominently in the Deep South, where William R. King enjoyed monolithic support much like that of Upshur four years prior. Douglas would shore up support in the southern wing of the party by selecting fellow Senator and former Speaker of the House Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia as his running mate, a decision that was approved by a near-unanimous convention. [11]
Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois
Democratic nominee for President, 1852
So, the nomination fell to Edward Everett, ex-Governor of Massachusetts. Everett was known as an eloquent and persuasive orator, whose long speeches swayed minds and aroused the public interest, but also as a shrewd politician who was willing to compromise on values if it meant achieving a workable political settlement. This hardly endeared him to ardent Whig partisans in his home state, the focal point of radical abolitionism in pre-1870s America, but they made him a respected figure within the national party, and ultimately handed him the nomination in the crowded field of the 1852 convention. For regional balance, Everett was joined on the ticket by a fellow former Governor, James Chamberlain Jones of Tennessee. Jones had governed his state during the early Mangum era, when the Republican Party was at its zenith of national power, and built the Tennessee Republicans into one of the strongest branches of the party. [13]
Edward Everett, fmr. Governor of Massachusetts
Republican nominee for President, 1852
The campaign was a spirited affair, as usual, but it rapidly became clear that, much as the Republican candidates were men of ability and renown, they hadn’t captured the public imagination in anywhere near the same way as Stephen Douglas…
…Election Day came and went, and the result was clear. At age 39, Stephen Douglas had become the youngest president in the history of the United States…
***
[1] As discussed in chapter #24, the way the US Army pre-Civil War worked was that a small core of regular troops was kept in peacetime, which would be bolstered in wartime by volunteer recruitment. The volunteer units were raised by private citizens and/or state governments, and their states exercised administrative control over them even as they were subject to the command of regular army officers. This is obviously not a great way to run an army, which is why it changed as soon as they had to deal with a major conflict.
[2] IOTL, Vidaurri was one of the leading conservative centralists in northeast Mexico during the 1840s, but broke with them after the Mexican-American War and joined the liberal Revolution of Ayutla in 1854. He switched sides again when the Constitution of 1857 rearranged the northeastern states, merging his native Nuevo León with Coahuila, and backed the French in their attempts to create a Mexican Empire. He was also chummy with the Confederacy, and his open-door policy toward Confederate trade greatly helped the CSA secure its arms supply during the Civil War. He was executed by the patriotic army as the French were driven out in 1867.
[3] This is the major difference from OTL’s Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which only involved the US and Mexico, and deliberately avoided mentioning claims of sovereignty over Texas and California in favor of just stating what the new border would be. Here, it’s deemed necessary to have Mexico formally recognize California as an independent state in the treaty text.
[4] A fairly sizeable chunk of northern Mexico is ceded to the US in addition to its OTL gains; this is because, with the Missouri Compromise line extended to the Pacific, the southern interest is even more adamant about pushing for major territory south of the line.
[5] This is complete and utter spitballing on my part. IOTL, the 1850 Census lost the data from several counties, none of which were included in the official population estimate of 92,597. The population of the state was most likely around 120,000, but that’s at the height of the gold rush, which hasn’t quite taken off yet ITTL. My spitball estimate is somewhere in between that and the circa 1840 population of eight thousand whites. Likewise, Mexico didn’t conduct an official census until 1895, but population estimates for the mid-19th century have the total population of the country at about half what it was then, so I’m assuming Baja California follows that trend. The round number is because the region is barely under Californian control, so I imagine the census ran into difficulties there.
[6] Believe it or not, this sort of thing happened IOTL with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which the Senate seemed to have viewed as less of a definite agreement and more of a rough draft to be tinkered with to their heart’s content. Jefferson Davis tried to amend the Treaty to add most of northeast Mexico to the US, while Whig senator George Washington Badger did the same but to remove all territorial gains aside from Texas. Both amendments failed by lopsided margins.
[7] Clay lives a few days longer than OTL, mainly to add a poetic twist at the end – John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of course, both also died on the Fourth (and in the same year, no less). He also dies at Ashland and not in Washington.
[8] IOTL, Benton died in 1858, aged 76, and remained active in Missouri state politics even after he’d been shut out of the Senate by radical pro-slavery forces in the legislature. ITTL, however, the strain of leading the country – and leading it into war at that – takes its toll, and his life will be shortened by a fair amount.
[9] Spoiler alert: things would’ve turned out very badly indeed.
[10] The Locofoco faction has now largely blended with the group we know as the Barnburners IOTL – the continued prominence of Martin van Buren in the state party enabled the former group to carry on long enough to take in most of the generation of anti-slavery Democrats who in his absence would form the latter group.
[11] Hunter was a titan of the southern Democratic Party in the 1850s, chairing the Senate Finance Committee for the entirety of the decade. He generally supported the mainline orthodoxy of the party, but with an emphasis on securing a future for the institution of slavery, which made him popular in his home state and the wider South. After having his name put forward at the chaotic 1860 convention and failing to win any support outside those few southern delegates who hadn’t bolted in disgust, he returned to his state, where he tried and failed to persuade it to stay in the Union. Accepting the inevitability of secession, he was elected as one of Virginia’s Confederate senators, and became President pro tempore of the Confederate States Senate for the entire duration of that body’s existence.
[12] IOTL, this problem was staved off when Zachary Taylor suddenly and unexpectedly declared himself a Whig and stated that he would not refuse the nomination if presented with it, despite never having voted before in his life and generally having shown no interest in politics. He doesn’t do this ITTL, and this makes things quite interesting.
[13] Jones was in largely the same place IOTL, but by the 1850s he’d grown more and more disillusioned by the Whig Party’s domination by northerners who opposed first the Fugitive Slave Act and then the Kansas-Nebraska Act – the latter would cause him to switch parties and campaign for Buchanan in 1856. He died in 1859, aged only 50, and much like Douglas, he could probably have gone on to great things if he hadn’t been so out of step with the factions that were forming at the time.
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