How big was the pool of potential presidents in the early USA?

Thande

Donor
Bit of a vague and open-ended question I know, but...

I'm currently reading Decades of Darkness properly again and it struck me that an awful lot of timelines draw from the same fairly small pool of presidents as OTL. I.e. if there's an allohistorical president between the foundation of the USA and about 1860, it's either the losing candidate from an OTL presidential election, or perhaps the vice-president of an OTL president who never got to be president in OTL. You don't seem to see many people who were just Congressmen or Senators in OTL deciding to run for the presidency and win, or people who in OTL became supreme court justices for example.

Basically I just wanted to ask people whether you think this tendency is just because people don't want to do the research/prefer using more recognisable figures, or whether the early USA really did only have a small pool of people who could realistically have become president - say because they belonged to big rich political families or had access to political machines and so on.
 
Until you get to the early 1800s, the pool of candidates really is rather small. But this is true of almost any TL very shortly after the POD. However, it's easy enough to start making up new candidates by the mid-1800s, definitely by the 1860s. I think the main reason people call upon OTL figures is simply the novelty of it. It's just more interesting to see how Lewis Cass or Stephen Douglas would have handled the Presidency than to see some made-up or lesser-known character occupying the White House.

Personally, I like to avoid just picking and choosing from OTL's failed Presidents or VPs. I love it when I stumble upon a Senator or Governor who seems perfect for a role in some TL or another. However, I think the biggest hurdle taking this route is the lack of available information on anyone who did not play a big role OTL, which could be rather daunting for many writers who don't feel comfortable putting attributes to a guy they're really not sure fit to him.

To answer your question, no, there was definitely not a small, select group of individuals who could be President. Franklin Pierce is the perfect example of how a no-name could become President by virtue of simply being in the right place at the right time (and, indeed, exactly because he was a no-name).
 
Last edited:

Thande

Donor
Until you get to the early 1800s, the pool of candidates really is rather small. But this is true of almost any TL very shortly after the POD. However, it's easy enough to start making up new candidates by the mid-1800s, definitely by the 1860s. I think the main reason people call upon OTL figures is simply the novelty of it. It's just more interesting to see how Lewis Cass or Stephen Douglas would have handled the Presidency than to see some made-up or lesser-known character occupying the White House.

Personally, I like to avoid just picking and choosing from OTL's failed Presidents or VPs. I love it when I stumble upon a Senator or Governor who seems perfect for a role in some TL or another. However, I think the biggest hurdle taking this route is the lack of available information on anyone who did not play a big role OTL, which could be rather daunting for many writers who don't feel comfortable putting attributes to a guy they're really not sure fit to him.

To answer your question, no, there was definitely not a small, select group of individuals who could be President. Franklin Pierce is the perfect example of how a no-name could become President by virtue of simply being in the right place at the right time (and, indeed, exactly because he was a no-name).
Yeah, I suspected that was more likely. To be honest I find the same thing with potential PMs, even those from relatively recently: it's much harder to find out the detailed views of someone who remained a backbencher for their career than someone who was a minister but failed to become PM.
 
Yeah, I suspected that was more likely. To be honest I find the same thing with potential PMs, even those from relatively recently: it's much harder to find out the detailed views of someone who remained a backbencher for their career than someone who was a minister but failed to become PM.
Often, the situation, or at least the perception of the situation, is made worse by the fear that, if you do pick some random guy and you do mold him into a candidate, someone here on AH.com is going to pop in and humiliate you because they know something about him that you were never able to find in your research and that really makes your scenario unrealistic or even ASB.
 
A lot of the problem IMO is with the lack of information on the less influential political figures. Most of the information I am able to find on senators is just which committees they were on, but there isn't very much about their voting record or possible policies. For instance, I'm trying to find a number of Bourbon Democrats for Union and Liberty as the Democratic Party is heading that way in the late 19th century, but Wikipedia only lists a few prominent figures on the Bourbon Democrats page.
 
I guess this is somewhat explainable by presidents tending to come from rich and prominent families and the POD not making these families less powerful. And then the same names will remain common so...you could well still get the sajme folk appearing despite the ATL
 
Top