Rough draft, because here things get a little crazy...
CLAY FEET
1824-1832
Though Americans were fairly happy with the Madison administration, westerners wanted a President that would support more internal improvements. As a result, John Quincy Adams, of the Federalist Party, won the 1824 election. Those elections also brought increasingly anti-slavery Congressmen, especially in the Senate. Westerners not only wanted federal support for infrastructure in the west, but the wanted slaveholding competition out.
Adams program helped expand roadways out farther West to aid the settlement of the Pacific coast region, and strengthened the Canal System. US steam technology, due to more cooperation with Britain, was also moving at a steady clip, and the US had begun deploying some steam-powered combat vessels and a transoceanic shipping line. Western entrepreneurs also started taking interest in a new concept of land-based steam locomotion that could make up for the canal advantage in the Great Lakes states.
But the dark clouds on the political horizon were about to burst.
Especially because of Hamilton’s policies, slaveholders were nervous about their future in the US. But things were only complicated in 1829, when American citizens in Cuba passed the 60,000 mark. Though the Senate was balanced and the House in favor of the South, a battle over the statehood of Cuba was sure to ensue. And even though the conditions of an average Cuban farm or plantation worker were not much better than his mainland counterpart, the Cuban laborers did have one thing to their credit: many were citizens under the liberal laws designed to avoid a revolt earlier. Combined with the influx of settlers and its position as a nexus of American trade, it seemed American society would soon erupt. The re-election of Adams and the Federalists wrought grumblings of secession in the South, who believed Congress was getting ‘too powerful’ with its regulation of trade through tariffs, and worries of future abolition.
When Cuba was voted into the Union after a number of Southern Congressmen walked out in 1830, Calhoun issued a scathing discourse against the centralized government of the Federalists, the excesses of Congress, and the ‘unconstitutionality’ of the restriction of territories to slavery. When parties were usually campaigning for the mid-terms, anti-Federalist radicals attempted to assassinate Adams, and militias were formed in the Carolinas and Georgia, where they vowed to ‘protect our property from Yankee Congressmen’. In the spring of 1830, Adams deploys troops to Franklin and begins marching more down through Virginia. Upon hearing this, Calhoun leads the states of Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama to secede and form the Confederate Republic of America. Casting themselves as ‘new American revolutionaries’, they muster troops to fight the incoming Federal troops. Entering South Carolina, the militia is beaten back for lack of organization and inferior weaponry when compared with the Whitney-Hall breechloaders in use by the Federal soldiers. US Navy steamships move to blockade the states from their vital source of income: cotton. When the CRA attempts to use clout from Britain, they find that the lack of control over other Southern states, Egypt, and India, has made their difference negligible.
Calhoun, and many other slaveholders (along with their slaves), flee to Brazil for the most part, fearing persecution by Adams and the other Federalists. At the end of the crisis in 1831 (amid a new Federalist majority aided by the lack of representation from a few states), Adams announces a program of ‘compensated manumission’ that includes a gamut of measures from the old serve-for-freedom programs of the Franco-American War to emigration programs to Liberia or Haiti.
As the entire affair unfolded, Mexico began to mobilize troops near their border, looking towards Tejas and Franklin eagerly, feeling the US is in a state of weakness. And with Napoleon and his allies looking towards increasing aid to Mexico, Adams began to hammer out the foreign policy he would become so famous for. Declaring that the Americas must remain a ‘sovereign domain’, he decided that US power would be used to prevent further re-colonization of South America, and that America would prevent coercive influence in other states in the Americas from being used against it.
Whether or not the world would heed his calls was another matter entirely.
