Not to mention the fact that he was an alcoholic(or pretty close to it). This is relevant because to pull this off would have required enormous stamina, incredible residency, & a stout will- all qualities I’m afraid the
Yes, the southern states seemed to view this as an existential crisis way earlier than they needed to. And because of this, southern leaders might be open to the president [pretty much any president] saying, Hey, you guys work out a plan [for orderly change] and I’ll support it.
I’m glad you put this out here— because I’m not talking about any of this. Instead, I’m more talking about a barely capable man half-assing it . . .
I’m not really sure I understand. Are you suggesting that southern leaders at this time would spontaneously propose gradual abolition in the south themselves and find wide acceptance because it was ultimately the safest option and would lead to the preservation of the union? I really think to get this outcome you would need to prevent the cotton gin and the exploitation of the Mississippi Valley territories which led to a massive boom time for chattel slavery in the United States. Because by the 1850s, this brand of conciliatory planter which ranked union far above the plantation system in his constellation of mural priorities and was willing to work towards abolition was dead. They really died out back in the 1830s for the most part. This is just practically unworkable and might as well be ASB in the politics of the 1850s. You’d have a hard time finding a serious southern politician or two who would propose such a thing, never mind having it gain any sort of traction at all. They’d be tarred and feathered before the sun was down in all likelihood.
The main question, I'd say, is how far back a PoD you're willing to consider. By 1850 you're already decades too late for both the person of Pierce and the politics of the nation to be able to do anything approximating this without it being fully ASB. With a PoD a few decades prior you might be able to both chart the nation and Pierce himself on a different course to have different positions vis-a-vis and give Pierce a presidency that does this. But that is more an end goal of a TL than a PoD in and of itself, so to say.Yes, the same guy viewed as one of more forgettable and crummiest of the U.S. presidents, instead becomes one of the best.
Yes, this is a flight of fancy, absolutely! Please pitch some ideas and help bring it to life.
If you're willing to make this an event of a timeline with decades of buildup to actually make this make sense it could work. But you'd have to explore a PoD decades past (1804 might be a good place to look, so as to avoid the thorny question of whether or not Pierce's birth would be butterflied). Get the Southern states to chill before they view slavery as an integral part of their world order (a herculean task in and of itself) and eventually you can have it just so happen that Pierce is in office when slavery dies, just for the situational irony of it.
This is true, but these emancipationist forces were pretty much entirely marginal by the late 1830s and early 1840s. They were the last gasp of southern liberalism inherited from Jefferson. Overall the south as a unit, Virginia included, were shifting further and further towards the project of affirming chattel slavery in perpetuity through their territories. The lucrative internal slave trade which opened after the exploitation of the Mississippi Valley gave new life to the system during the 1830s and hardened pro-slavery sentiment among the planter class. That, combined with the hardening of free soilism and abolition to a lesser extent in the north (itself a product of the failure of southern liberalism), acted to further bind Virginia into the emerging sectionalist binary. Eugene Genovese discusses this a bit in “Roll, Jordan, Roll” which I’ve quoted before on this site in an unrelated discussion:
When I say marginal, I don’t necessarily mean they up and vanished. But just looking at Janney’s career, I think it illustrates my point. A prominent Virginia politician who advanced gradual emancipation in the state, he and others made forceful arguments during the 1831 Slavery debate. Defeated in this effort and a few subsequent fruitless motions, his inclination for gradual abolition turn him towards advocacy and philanthropy. Unable to keep up with the hardening sectional divide that was splintering the Whig Party, Janney loses a major election and withdraws from politics almost entirely in the critical 1850s when sectionalism truly hardened into a bitter and powerful force. Eventually, we see him in the final act with ultimately impotent calls for peace and union to the delegates to the Virginia Secession Convention. He is politely respected and serves a pleasant figurehead for the Convention as elder statesman, but his opinions are roundly ignored by all. I think calling his abolitionist sentiment as a marginal belief in Virginia politics is valid considering how little success it met with consistently.
