Franklin Pierce, 1853-57, both prevents U.S. Civil War and brokers deal for gradual phase-out of slavery.

[jmc247]

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.

Men like Janney may still have been around in politics in the 1850s and 1860s, but they felt the political winds were against them because they clearly and overwhelmingly were against them. Like I was arguing earlier in the thread, changing these political winds requires a much deeper PoD than anything possible by the 1850s. And we are just discussing an Upper South state like Virginia and not the fire-eating secessionist hotbeds down in the cotton belt where this kind of opinion was even more isolated.

Marginalized would be an accurate word. That occurred in institutions and colleges throughout the state.

Augusta Academy was representative of the developments in Virginia in the education sphere. It was founded in the 1749 to educate mainly wealthy teens and after the Revolution they changed their name to Liberty Hall academy.

It became a hot bed of gradual emancipationist sentiment and enrolled its first free black man John Chavis a Revolutionary War veteran. George Washington gave the academy $20,000 enough to convert it to a college which took on his name Washington College.

The school started moving away from being a gradual emancipationist hotbed into a fire eater hotbed in the 1840s and 50s as regional tensions built. The school did still have a few gradual abolitionist faculty in that era, but they were increasingly marginalized.

A war with a European power in the 1840s that allows for a calming of regional tensions and the rise of a new generation of iconic figures in the northern South could have done a lot of good. Who was considered a great leader in Virginian eyes after Jefferson and Madison? In all honesty one would have to wait until the Civil War for there to be another.

 

[Dancing Fool]

I think this is unfair criticism of President Reagan. But why couldn’t something like this happen for real for President Pierce?

 

[Dancing Fool]

They saw a war coming and believed it would be at its root over the inherent political power of the North vs South not any one issue.

So there’s a handful of no-slavery Western states, and the southern states all but self-destruct?

 

[jmc247]

So there’s a handful of no-slavery Western states, and the southern states all but self-destruct?

I will put it this way they felt that Civil War could be averted if they averted the rise of regional political parties and you continued to have parties that had a foothold in all regions.

 

[Dancing Fool]

Good Screenwriting — you have an active main character who surmounts every obstacle. This would be true for the movie Patton (1970) starring George C. Scott. This would also be true for virtually all the James Bond movies.

What I’m advocating is bad screenwriting. For example, that someone lucks into something, half-asses something, just is in the right place at the right time. For example, if southern politicians believe it’s a crisis situation . . .

the very fact that Franklin Pierce is such a non-entity,

The southern politicians figure, Holy Shit, we can’t even bully or threaten the guy into doing something. We really are going to have to solve this on our own.

 

[EWHM]

IMO the easiest way out of the Civil war would be to eliminate the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia. Without it, it isn't unlikely that Virginia eventually becomes a free state. That's likely to spread to several other states like Maryland and Delaware. If that happens, the Deep South will likely tone down their rhetoric because they'll see the correlation of forces as way different without Virginia.

By the time Pierce is in office, he can't do that. But he could possibly provide the little push Delaware needed for their gradual abolition effort. And he could also crack way down on the violence in Bleeding Kansas. If he did that, and was perceived as doing so in a fairly even handed manner, he might even manage to butterfly Harper's Ferry and John Brown's Body. A gradual buyout strategy would be way cheaper, even if you consider blood worth nothing.

 

[Dancing Fool]

if they averted the rise of regional political parties

I agree that regional parties do not bode well for democracy. But, holy cow, to accelerate the war which leads to your destruction.

Of all the over-reactions in history, and there’s been a bunch, this has to rate in the top 10, wouldn’t you think?

 

[jmc247]

I agree that regional parties do not bode well for democracy. But, holy cow, to accelerate the war which leads to your destruction.

Of all the over-reactions in history, and there’s been a bunch, this has to rate in the top 10, wouldn’t you think?

I mean if you are looking for quotes that secession would be diving head first into a two inch deep creek you have no shortage of them from the men seen today as most connected to secession.

Spoiler

Alexander Stephans: "I do not anticipate that Mr. Lincoln will do anything, to jeopardize our safety or security, whatever may be his spirit to do it; for he is bound by the constitutional checks which...at this time render him powerless to do any great mischief". "This appeal to go out[of the Union], with all the promises for good that accompany it. I look upon as a great, and I fear, a fatal temptation."

Jefferson Davis: “The stars on our flag, recording the number of the States united, have already been more than doubled; and I hopefully look forward to the day when the constellation shall become a galaxy covering the stripes, which record the original number of our political family, and shall shed over the nations of the earth the light of regeneration to mankind. It has sometimes been said to he our manifest destiny that we should possess the whole of this continent. Whether it shall ever all be part of the United States is doubtful, and may never be desirable; but that in some form or other, it should come under the protectorate or control of the United States, is a result which seems to me, in the remote future, certain. It waits as the consequence upon intellectual vigor, upon physical energy, upon the capacity to govern, and can only be defeated by a suicidal madness, of which it does not belong to the occasion to treat.”

You had no figure universally respected like Washington until the war whose opinion actually mattered deeply to southerners by that point.

It was an angry stampede pushed by names who are mostly all but forgotten about in history.