The Great Compromiser
Presidents of the United States of America (First Washington Government: 1789 - 1870)
1841 - 1841: William H. Harrison† / John Tyler (Whig)
1840: Martin Van Buren / none (Democratic)
1841 - 1841: John Tyler‡ / vacant (Whig)
1841 - 1845: John Tyler / vacant (Independent)
1845 - 1849: Henry Clay / Theodore Frelinghuysen (Whig)
1844: James K. Polk / George M. Dallas (Democratic)
1849 - 1855: William L. Marcy† / John K. Kane (Democratic)
1848: Daniel Webster / John Gayle (Whig); Joshua R. Giddings / James G. Birney (Liberty)
1852: Samuel Finley Vinton / Waddy Thompson, Jr. (Whig); Joshua R. Giddings / Marcus Morton (Liberty)
1855 - 1856: John K. Kane† / vacant (Democratic)
1856 - 1858: James Murray Mason / vacant (Democratic)
1856 (cancelled): John K. Kane / Benjamin Fitzpatrick (Democratic); Henry Clay, Jr. / Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart (Whig); David Wilmot / Caleb Cushing (Liberty)
1858 - 1860: Henry Clay, Jr. / Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart‡ (Whig)
1857: James Murray Mason / Henry C. Murphy (Democratic); David Wilmot / Caleb Cushing (Liberty)
1860 - 1862: Henry Clay, Jr. / vacant (Whig)
1862 - 1870: Andrew Jackson Donelson / George Washington Woodward (Democratic)
1861: Samuel Fessenden / John Van Buren (Liberty); John J. Crittenden / none (Whig)
1865: William Czar Bradley / Abraham Lincoln (Liberty); various Whigs
1870 - 1870: William Porcher Miles / James S. Rollins (Democratic)
1869: John Van Buren / William D. Kelley (Liberty); William Porcher Miles / James S. Rollins (Democratic)
Presidents of the United States of America (Second Washington Government: 1870 - present)
1870 - present: William Porcher Miles / James S. Rollins (Democratic)
Presidents of the United States of America (Philadelphia Government: 1870 - present)
1870 - present: John Van Buren / William D. Kelley (Liberty)
† = died in office
‡ = expelled from party / resigned
Henry Clay had tried to reach the Presidency twice before - in 1824, and then in 1832, but, as the proverb said, "third time lucky," and so it was that in 1844, Henry Clay narrowly managed to defeat the 'dark horse' Democrat James K. Polk. Clay's presidency would be a fateful one. In his inaugural address, he reiterated his promise that he would not pursue an annexationist path, but, rather, would follow a policy of "free and republican association with our sister-republics."
Immediately, the plans to annex the Republic of Texas and expand into the Oregon Country were scrapped - Clay had Secretary of State Daniel Webster's Jeffersonian Memorandum sent directly to President Anson Jones of Texas and to the Oregonian Executive Council, which, emulating President Thomas Jefferson, declared President Clay's unequivocal support for the continued independence and strength of Oregon and Texas. While this action would send Texas and Oregon into political turmoil (leading to the impeachment of the pro-annexationist Texian President Anson Jones and the victory of the solidly pro-independence Osbourne Russell over the pro-annexation George Abernethy in the first Oregonian presidential election) President Clay was content.
Turning away from foreign affairs, Clay looked to do what he had wished to for a long time - reestablish the Bank of the United States. Clay's proposals to this effect had been vetoed by President Tyler - indeed, that had led to his expulsion from the Whig Party. While the Whig majority in the Senate had been lost, it was still narrow enough that with Vice President Frelinghuysen's tie-breaking vote, the Bank was given a new charter.
But other than this, it seemed as though Henry Clay did not know what to do with his presidency. These actions having been completed, Clay, it seemed, did very little else. Come 1848, and the Democrats, still incensed over Clay's opposition to annexation, nominated the pro-expansionist William L. Marcy, a former Senator and Governor of New York. While Marcy was a Northerner, he was sufficiently pro-slavery for the South to be appeased, and his running mate, the rather notorious Pennsylvanian Judge John K. Kane, an arch-Jacksonian, was the same way. The Whigs, meanwhile, chose Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was paired with a Southern running mate, John Gayle, the former Governor of Alabama. However, the pro-slavery leanings of the two tickets caused many anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats to bolt to the Liberty Party, which nominated Joshua R. Giddings, a Whig congressman and, for Giddings' running mate, the de facto founder of the party, James G. Birney, was chosen.
"Marcy, Kane, Marcy, Kane - they'll make America great again," went the refrain, and, sure enough, Marcy's pro-annexation platform was enough to win him the election over Webster, while Giddings garnered nearly 6 percent of the vote, serving as a spoiler, which greatly overjoyed the Libertarians, as members of the Liberty Party came to be called. Marcy spent the first two years of his administration attempting to "right the wrongs" of the Clay administration, which essentially translated to annexing Texas and Oregon.
While President Moseley Baker of Texas politely but emphatically declined annexation, with his nation agreeing, the people of Oregon were much more receptive to annexation. American money essentially bought the defeat of President Asa L. Lovejoy and the victory of the pro-annexation William Gilpin in 1851, who campaigned on a platform of annexing Oregon to the United States. Within weeks of his victory, Secretary of State Robert J. Walker was in Corvallis, where he and Gilpin signed the Treaty of Corvallis, which ended the Republic of Oregon, and remade it into the Territories of Twality, Yamhill, Clackamas and Champoeg, which had formerly been the four Districts of Oregon, with Gilpin appointed Governor-General of the four Territories.
Turning his attention to the south of Oregon, Marcy sought to buy California, to give the United States more Pacific dominion. He sent Secretary Walker to Mexico City, where he offered to pay Mexico up to $30 million to buy California. However, when Walker arrived, he found an envoy from Texas prepared to do the same. In the waiting room (it is said), the two men negotiated on which country would take which part of California - ultimately, the only tenable proposal was for California to be divided along the 37th parallel, with the United States taking the northern half (which was connected directly to the Champoeg Territory), and Texas the southern. After negotiation, cajoling, and even threats of military force, the Mexicans finally acquiesced to the Treaty of Mexico City. Marcy joyfully renamed the portion of California the United States had bought 'Jefferson,' and proclaimed the capital to be Yerba Buena, while the Texians kept the Mexican names. Indeed, many said that William L. Marcy was the second Jefferson; in terms of sheer land acquisition, the only president to surpass Marcy is Jefferson.
His land acquisitions proving popular, Marcy won reelection in a landslide over Whig Congressman Samuel Finley Vinton and his running mate, Waddy Thompson, the former Minister to Mexico, although Joshua Giddings doubled his percentage of votes to nearly 12 percent, and won a faithless elector in Vermont, with Massachusetts Governor Marcus Morton having been chosen to attract anti-slavery Democrats. During his second term, President Marcy also passed a number of pro-slavery laws, most of which had to do with slavery in the 'Five Territories' (Twality, Yamhill, Clackamas, Champoeg, and Jefferson), as they came to be known. Against the objections of the Libertarians, and of many Whigs, Marcy allowed slavery in all five, with the rather logically named Five Territories Act, despite the fact that none were exactly conducive to slavery. This also effectively ended the Missouri Compromise, leading former President Clay to mourn that "the republic's end is nigh."
Soon after signing the Five Territories Act, President Marcy fell sick, and died, on July 4th, 1855, leading many Southerners to theorize that he had been poisoned by the Libertarians. While there is no truth in this claim - after all, Marcy was nearly 70, and was in ill health - it severely inflamed relations between North and South. Vice President Kane assumed the presidency, as John Tyler had done, and sought to govern much as Marcy had done. As 1855 turned into 1856, President Kane sought the nomination of his party, which he received, choosing Alabama Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick as his running mate. The Whigs, soon afterwards, nominated the (comparatively) young Senator from Kentucky, and the son of former President Clay, Henry Clay, Jr, who pledged that he, like his father, would be a "great compromiser," and would "restore amity between the North and South." However, to placate fears that he was not, as the Whig Senator of Louisiana, Judah Benjamin, called him, "a Libertarian in Whig's clothing," he chose Virginia Governor Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart. The Libertarians held their party's convention last, and chose David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania who had forcefully led the opposition to Marcy and Kane.
In the early October of 1856, President Kane died. James Murray Mason, of Virginia, the president pro tempore of the Senate, became Acting President, as the Presidential Succession Act of 1792 dictated. With the President's death occurring in election year, Acting President Mason dictated that the election was to be held in the December of 1857, in vague accordance with Section 10 of the Presidential Succession Act. When noted Libertarian Samuel Fessenden sued the United States over this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Mason's actions were constitutional, because Kane's term was not technically his, and so the term was not technically about to expire, as Article 10 dictated. Many Libertarians found this logic to be absurd, and soon, polling places sprung up in the North, where angry Libertarians cast their ballots for Wilmot, who also decried this decision. These men soon came to be known as the 'Fifty-Sixers,' and they would hold presidential elections in what they deemed to be the "mandated" years - 1856, 1860, 1864, and 1868.
With Mason remaining in the presidency for one more year, the country became more and more divided. Henry Clay, Jr.'s calls for amity proved more and more tempting to the nation, while the Fifty-Sixers became more and more militant in their support of Wilmot. Acting President Mason, for his part, was nominated by the Democrats, and chose New York Congressman Henry C. Murphy as his running mate, as an attempt to appeal to Northerners. Ultimately, Clay won the presidency, becoming the youngest-ever president.
When historians look back on Henry Clay, Jr., they see a man who sacrificed his party and himself to attempt to save his country from civil war. Clay was narrowly able to repeal the Five Territories Act, and effectively restore the Missouri Compromise, but soon became a pariah within his own party. His Vice President, who had supported the Five Territories Act, resigned in 1860, and while Clay sought to pass an a Constitutional amendment to outlaw any federal action regarding slavery, but it failed, ignominiously. By 1862, Clay faced impeachment from his own party, but was spared that final humiliation when he declined to run for reelection and swore to never be involved in politics again. Clay did not even attend his successor's inauguration - he returned home to Ashland, his family's estate and drank.
The Whigs knew that they could not win in 1861. Although they had repudiated President Clay, much of the Southern portion of their party had effectively bolted to the Democrats; indeed, Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart, the former Vice President, was a candidate at the 1861 Democratic Convention. They were forced to nominate Clay's Secretary of State, John J. Crittenden, for President. Crittenden was an old man, the last, dying breath of his party, and, in what was perhaps an act of mercy on his part, he ran without a running mate, as Martin Van Buren had done in 1840, to spare his colleagues the humiliation.
The Democrats chose Andrew Jackson Donelson, Andrew Jackson's nephew, and a Senator from Tennessee, who chose Pennsylvania Governor George Washington Woodward as his running mate. The Libertarians, meanwhile, chose Samuel Fessenden, the leader of the Fifty-Sixers and now Governor of Maine, and paired him with John Van Buren, Secretary of State for New York, and the son of President Martin Van Buren, who had become a member of the Liberty Party later in life. People were nostalgic for the days of Jackson and Marcy, and with the Whigs relegated to miserable obscurity, only barely winning Kentucky, Donelson won the presidency.
Donelson had an impossible job - unite a country practically falling apart by the seams. Desperately, he tried to create a sense of national unity by fighting a war with Spain - when several American sailors were detained in Cuba, Donelson swore to defend them, and declared war on Spain. The war was grueling - tens of thousands of Americans died in Cuba. By 1864, the territory was won, with a hero of the war, General Robert E. Lee, appointed Military Governor, although many found themselves asking why the United States had fought this war. With the Whig party slowly dying, Donelson's main opposition came in the form of the Libertarians, who were adamantly opposed to the Cuban War. By 1865, the Whigs were too divided to nominate a single ticket, and so various state tickets were nominated, while Vermont Senator William Czar Bradley and Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln, both solid opponents of the war, were nominated by the Libertarians. Donelson narrowly won reelection, but it was a very close thing.
As 1869 came around, it was clear that the United States was very close to unravelling. The Whig Party having finally dissolved, the Libertarians and the Democrats were the only major two parties. The Libertarian nominee, New York Governor John Van Buren, was one of the most strident abolitionists the party had ever nominated. His Democratic opponent, Congressman William Porcher Miles, meanwhile, was practically his opposite. Miles' running mate, Missouri Governor James S. Rollins, was a former Whig who, upon his party's dissolution, joined the Democrats. Van Buren won the popular vote by a considerable margin, but neither he nor Miles won a majority in the electoral college, and so the election was decided by Congress, which, with a slight Democratic majority, chose Miles and Rollins.
Van Buren, amid a large throng of Fifty-Sixers, declared the result to be illegitimate, and that he would be assuming the presidency. The North backed him, and he began governing in Philadelphia, the old capitol of the United States. Miles, meanwhile, elected by "the slavers' Congress," as Van Buren called it, governed in Washington, neither government recognizing the other.
The United States has truly become a house divided.
