L’Aigle Triomphant: A Napoleonic Victory TL

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Aluma

Aluma

Pax_Nihil said:
3rd

How does DoD deserve it? More people arguably had better lives in the world as a whole than were harmed by the slavocratic uber-US.
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I think that depends on wheter we think a TL where the world is doing well but a particular place in that timeline is Hell on Earth would earn the award
 
Pax_Nihil

Pax_Nihil

Aluma said:
I think that depends on wheter we think a TL where the world is doing well but a particular place in that timeline is Hell on Earth would earn the award
Click to expand...
I think the whole world has to be in a very negative state as compared to OTL but I am not sure where to go to ascertain the actual award parameters lol
 
The American System - Part I
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    • KingSweden24

    The American System - Part I [1]​

    Henry Clay was inaugurated on a chilly March 4, 1821, aged only 43 years old, already the youngest President of the young American Republic. He was Virginia born, but had made his career in Kentucky, crucially through business and enterprise in the state's rapidly-growing capital of Lexington rather than via the slave trade. He was the first President thus to represent the New West, the states beyond the Appalachian Mountains and west of the Mississippi that had begun to be admitted to the Union in the aftermath of the Constitutional Convention; being the first President born after the Declaration of Independence, he was also one of the first Presidents whose adulthood and career had been forged not in the fires of revolution and the subsequent failure of the Articles of Confederation, but in the functional constitutional republic that followed.

    Clay's legacy is a complicated and controversial one to this day in the United States. The only President to serve five terms, albeit non-consecutively, depending on who one asks he was either the most innovative statesman of his time or a ruthless semi-despot whose National Party clung to power through a restricted franchise; his policies were either brilliantly developmentalist at a time when state capacity across the world was nearly nonexistent, or they were a paternalistic sheen on a government totally in hoc to mercantile and banking interests. He had taken on antislavery views as early as his young adulthood in the 1790s, but was resistant to the more ardent abolitionism that had emerged and while he kept slave families together on his own plantation, he rejected the calls of those who encouraged him to emancipate them until gradual emancipation was adopted by Kentucky in 1841. The simple answer, of course, is that Clayism, as it is best understood - called the "American System" by its proponents - was both an ideology of governance as well as the program of a man, and thus one explains its contradictions.

    The President Clay of the early 1820s, however, was not the force that he would become in later years. Congress would not properly convene until the autumn of 1821 to account for the harvest, and the Old Republicans that feuded openly with Clay's National Republican faction, and had not forgiven him his defeat of President Crawford nor his alliance with the Federalists, were still in charge of the House under Speaker Philip Barbour, though it took six ballots to elect the man. Insofar as Clay had a political agenda to implement then, it was not apparent; he appointed a capable Cabinet of men regarded as bonafide political talents, giving the office of Secretary of State to his close friend and ally John C. Calhoun, while the Attorney General would be John Quincy Adams, the son of the former Federalist President and who would before long be Clay's first appointee to the Supreme Court, where his legal talents could truly excel. But for the most part, while his Nationals were well-represented in the Cabinet, Clay in 1821 did little to outwardly antagonize Congress or the Senate, instead choosing to focus on finding a solution to the Missouri Compromise.

    The former Speaker, John Taylor of New York, had been a dogged advocate of Missouri entering as a free state, but it was clear that this was not going to be possible. Clay found the Southern insistence that slavery must be equalized state-by-state to "preserve their standing" in the Senate a gauche and factionalist statement, and not just because of his own opposition to slave power; to him, such sentiments by their very nature threatened the preservation of the Union, and the difficulty of even Missouri to have much of a slave population revealed the limits of slave power in the short term. Clay's immediate solution, then, was to fold on the question of Missouri - especially with Old Republicans still narrowly ahead in both Houses of Congress - but refuse any commitment to future expansion or non-expansion of slavery anywhere else in the country. The "territorial rights" of future states, he maintained, should be sacrosanct, and not dictated from Congress for the interest of "extant polities." In the short term, this effectively guaranteed that no more territories other than Maine, which was admitted in 1822 to balance out Missouri, would be made states until the Old Republicans had been sufficiently cowed, when Michigan joined in 1839 as the first new state in nearly two decades, towards the end of Clay's fourth term.

    Having solved the thorny issue of Missouri in a way that satisfied the Old Republicans, Clay then set about effectively going to war with them. The Panic of 1818 had devastated the economy and ended the North American land boom, particularly in Clay's beloved West; state governments were selling land allotments to finance the construction of schools as part of the Northwest Plan adopted by Jefferson, as were territories, but Clay envisioned a much broader reform. The nascent emergence of industries across the Northeast and parts of New York and Pennsylvania were now threatened by the collapse in speculative sales in land on which many banks leveraged their assets, and Clay and others like him were loathe to be increasingly dependent on British lending, which was threatened by the unstable British economy coming out of the Napoleonic Wars, and France's banks, heavily leveraged themselves, were increasingly invested in Europe. As such, American industry needed a lifeline - protective tariffs, in other words, both to keep out the growing stock of British manufactured goods that still led the world in the early 1820s, and to provide needed revenue to the United States.

    While a tariff was entirely within the auspices of the federal government, Old Republicans had generally been highly resistant to them; indeed, it was one of the great points of controversy between Crawford and Clay in the ugly election of 1820. Clay, however, had a secret weapon in Calhoun, a South Carolinian who was one of the country's most ardent nationalists, with a convert's zeal regarding what would in time become the American System, and the 1822-23 elections quickly became a referendum on a tariff to protect against "foreign goods." The campaign was not a huge success across the South, where Old Republicans maintained their margins, but the effort and the organizing capabilities of the young radicals broke through in much of the West, particularly Kentucky and Ohio, where promises of new roads and canals financed in part by Washington carried sway. With the Federalists now fully absorbed into the National Republicans, who were referred to on ballots simply as "the National Candidate," Clay would by late 1823 finally have his majorities in Congress to pass the Tariff Act of 1824, a revolutionary law that provided an unprecedented level of revenue for the federal government, passed by his re-empowered ally in John Taylor, binding the North and West together under one faction.

    The Old Republicans were in disarray quickly thereafter, but struggled to find a proper challenger against Clay. The obvious figure was the controversial Andrew Jackson, Tennessee's junior Senator and a war hero of the Creek and Seminole conflicts; Jackson was himself not necessarily a strict constructionist of the Jeffersonian school, favoring a powerful executive and reminding far too many Old Republicans of Napoleon Bonaparte in his demeanor. As such, the Old Republicans, still nostalgic for a Jeffersonian conservatism, went back to the well and nominated James Monroe, the three-term Secretary of State. Monroe in another time, another life, may have made an excellent President; as it were, in 1824, he was an old man, sixty-six years old and in obvious physical decline, struggling with financial difficulties at his home at Oak Hill near the University of Virginia. Though candidates did not campaign on their own behalf in those days, the poor Monroe was unable to contribute much of his own money towards a campaign and the disarrayed Old Republicans struggled outside of their core strongholds; Clay carried every state with the exception of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, becoming the first National Republican to win the four new slave states of the West in West Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri. National Republican state legislatures were elected or re-elected, and the Senate that was sworn in in March of 1825 and reconvened that November was strongly and majorly in his favor, as was the new House, once again with John Taylor as Speaker and now including key Clay allies such as Daniel Webster or Joseph Vance.

    When Clay arrived in Washington in March for his second inauguration, in 1825, it was a very different city, with the factional dispute almost entirely resolved in his Nationals' favor, with the Tariff Act passed and internal improvements financed by it earmarked, and the economic depression over. And in order to keep it that way, Clay had in his sights the crown jewel of his domestic policy - the formation of a Second Bank of the United States, the policy so stubbornly refused by Crawford and the tertium quids for the last decade...

    [1] The title of this is fully a nod to "The American System" by @TheHedgehog which I would consider the definitive Henry Clay/Whig Party TL on this site; the USA being a bit ancillary to the thrust of this story is intentional, so this is just a quick check-in. Go read it, now, if you haven't - it's some of my favorite work.
     
    Last edited:
  • Index
    • TheHedgehog

    TheHedgehog

    KingSweden24 said:
    The American System - Part I [1]​

    Henry Clay was inaugurated on a chilly March 4, 1821, aged only 43 years old, already the youngest President of the young American Republic. He was Virginia born, but had made his career in Kentucky, crucially through business and enterprise in the state's rapidly-growing capital of Lexington rather than via the slave trade. He was the first President thus to represent the New West, the states beyond the Appalachian Mountains and west of the Mississippi that had begun to be admitted to the Union in the aftermath of the Constitutional Convention; being the first President born after the Declaration of Independence, he was also one of the first Presidents whose adulthood and career had been forged not in the fires of revolution and the subsequent failure of the Articles of Confederation, but in the functional constitutional republic that followed.

    Clay's legacy is a complicated and controversial one to this day in the United States. The only President to serve five terms, albeit non-consecutively, depending on who one asks he was either the most innovative statesman of his time or a ruthless semi-despot whose National Party clung to power through a restricted franchise; his policies were either brilliantly developmentalist at a time when state capacity across the world was nearly nonexistent, or they were a paternalistic sheen on a government totally in hoc to mercantile and banking interests. He had taken on antislavery views as early as his young adulthood in the 1890s, but was resistant to the more ardent abolitionism that had emerged and while he kept slave families together on his own plantation, he rejected the calls of those who encouraged him to emancipate them until gradual emancipation was adopted by Kentucky in 1841. The simple answer, of course, is that Clayism, as it is best understood - called the "American System" by its proponents - was both an ideology of governance as well as the program of a man, and thus one explains its contradictions.

    The President Clay of the early 1820s, however, was not the force that he would become in later years. Congress would not properly convene until the autumn of 1821 to account for the harvest, and the Old Republicans that feuded openly with Clay's National Republican faction, and had not forgiven him his defeat of President Crawford nor his alliance with the Federalists, were still in charge of the House under Speaker Philip Barbour, though it took six ballots to elect the man. Insofar as Clay had a political agenda to implement then, it was not apparent; he appointed a capable Cabinet of men regarded as bonafide political talents, giving the office of Secretary of State to his close friend and ally John C. Calhoun, while the Attorney General would be John Quincy Adams, the son of the former Federalist President and who would before long be Clay's first appointee to the Supreme Court, where his legal talents could truly excel. But for the most part, while his Nationals were well-represented in the Cabinet, Clay in 1821 did little to outwardly antagonize Congress or the Senate, instead choosing to focus on finding a solution to the Missouri Compromise.

    The former Speaker, John Taylor of New York, had been a dogged advocate of Missouri entering as a free state, but it was clear that this was not going to be possible. Clay found the Southern insistence that slavery must be equalized state-by-state to "preserve their standing" in the Senate a gauche and factionalist statement, and not just because of his own opposition to slave power; to him, such sentiments by their very nature threatened the preservation of the Union, and the difficulty of even Missouri to have much of a slave population revealed the limits of slave power in the short term. Clay's immediate solution, then, was to fold on the question of Missouri - especially with Old Republicans still narrowly ahead in both Houses of Congress - but refuse any commitment to future expansion or non-expansion of slavery anywhere else in the country. The "territorial rights" of future states, he maintained, should be sacrosanct, and not dictated from Congress for the interest of "extant polities." In the short term, this effectively guaranteed that no more territories other than Maine, which was admitted in 1822 to balance out Missouri, would be made states until the Old Republicans had been sufficiently cowed, when Michigan joined in 1839 as the first new state in nearly two decades, towards the end of Clay's fourth term.

    Having solved the thorny issue of Missouri in a way that satisfied the Old Republicans, Clay then set about effectively going to war with them. The Panic of 1818 had devastated the economy and ended the North American land boom, particularly in Clay's beloved West; state governments were selling land allotments to finance the construction of schools as part of the Northwest Plan adopted by Jefferson, as were territories, but Clay envisioned a much broader reform. The nascent emergence of industries across the Northeast and parts of New York and Pennsylvania were now threatened by the collapse in speculative sales in land on which many banks leveraged their assets, and Clay and others like him were loathe to be increasingly dependent on British lending, which was threatened by the unstable British economy coming out of the Napoleonic Wars, and France's banks, heavily leveraged themselves, were increasingly invested in Europe. As such, American industry needed a lifeline - protective tariffs, in other words, both to keep out the growing stock of British manufactured goods that still led the world in the early 1820s, and to provide needed revenue to the United States.

    While a tariff was entirely within the auspices of the federal government, Old Republicans had generally been highly resistant to them; indeed, it was one of the great points of controversy between Crawford and Clay in the ugly election of 1820. Clay, however, had a secret weapon in Calhoun, a South Carolinian who was one of the country's most ardent nationalists, with a convert's zeal regarding what would in time become the American System, and the 1822-23 elections quickly became a referendum on a tariff to protect against "foreign goods." The campaign was not a huge success across the South, where Old Republicans maintained their margins, but the effort and the organizing capabilities of the young radicals broke through in much of the West, particularly Kentucky and Ohio, where promises of new roads and canals financed in part by Washington carried sway. With the Federalists now fully absorbed into the National Republicans, who were referred to on ballots simply as "the National Candidate," Clay would by late 1823 finally have his majorities in Congress to pass the Tariff Act of 1824, a revolutionary law that provided an unprecedented level of revenue for the federal government, passed by his re-empowered ally in John Taylor, binding the North and West together under one faction.

    The Old Republicans were in disarray quickly thereafter, but struggled to find a proper challenger against Clay. The obvious figure was the controversial Andrew Jackson, Tennessee's junior Senator and a war hero of the Creek and Seminole conflicts; Jackson was himself not necessarily a strict constructionist of the Jeffersonian school, favoring a powerful executive and reminding far too many Old Republicans of Napoleon Bonaparte in his demeanor. As such, the Old Republicans, still nostalgic for a Jeffersonian conservatism, went back to the well and nominated James Monroe, the three-term Secretary of State. Monroe in another time, another life, may have made an excellent President; as it were, in 1824, he was an old man, sixty-six years old and in obvious physical decline, struggling with financial difficulties at his home at Oak Hill near the University of Virginia. Though candidates did not campaign on their own behalf in those days, the poor Monroe was unable to contribute much of his own money towards a campaign and the disarrayed Old Republicans struggled outside of their core strongholds; Clay carried every state with the exception of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, becoming the first National Republican to win the four new slave states of the West in West Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri. National Republican state legislatures were elected or re-elected, and the Senate that was sworn in in March of 1825 and reconvened that November was strongly and majorly in his favor, as was the new House, once again with John Taylor as Speaker and now including key Clay allies such as Daniel Webster or Joseph Vance.

    When Clay arrived in Washington in March for his second inauguration, in 1825, it was a very different city, with the factional dispute almost entirely resolved in his Nationals' favor, with the Tariff Act passed and internal improvements financed by it earmarked, and the economic depression over. And in order to keep it that way, Clay had in his sights the crown jewel of his domestic policy - the formation of a Second Bank of the United States, the policy so stubbornly refused by Crawford and the tertium quids for the last decade...

    [1] The title of this is fully a nod to "The American System" by @TheHedgehog which I would consider the definitive Henry Clay/Whig Party TL on this site; the USA being a bit ancillary to the thrust of this story is intentional, so this is just a quick check-in. Go read it, now, if you haven't - it's some of my favorite work.
    Click to expand...
    Thanks for the shoutout!
    Love that we get a 5-term Henry Clay, though I'm not sure if that will be very healthy for American democracy lol
     
    A Random Man

    A Random Man

    Interesting chapter, I do wonder how the slavery issue will be handled in the US, hopefully the future is bright for Black Americans. Would like to see more of Clay and his stranglehold over the White House. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍.
     
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