The Presidency of Joseph Lane

What effect would a Lane Presidency have?


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The election of 1860 ends with no one gathering the number of electoral votes required. Election is thrown to the House where it is deadlocked. The Senate confirms Joseph Lane as Vice-President-Elect. By March 4th, with the House still deadlocked, Joseph Lane is inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States. What would his presidency be like and what effect would it have long term? Would a Republican simply win the next election and cause the civil war to begin in 1865? Who would the civil war if this is the case?
 
Well, he was from the south so obviously the CSA wouldn't exist and I can't see the north seceding either so I think the war would just be averted until another president came along.
 
Well, he was from the south so obviously the CSA wouldn't exist and I can't see the north seceding either so I think the war would just be averted until another president came along.

Lane was born in North Carolina and his family moved to Kentucky when he was a young child. So he was a "southerner" in that sense, but lived in the North (first Indiana, then Oregon) from 1820 on. What was much more important was that he was pro-Southern in a political sense, siding with Buchanan against Douglas, and running as Breckinridge's running mate. So of course he would be thoroughly satisfactory to the South.
 

Japhy

Banned
The North isn't going to secede. There was no movement to pass convention ordnances in the event of the Democrats winning anywhere in the North and outside of a few abolitionists no one supported the idea.

A Lane Presidency will be more of Buchanan, the collapse of Northern Doughface politics, flare ups of violence in the west and disastrous efforts playing with popular sovereignty. Debate about a Federal Slave code and the rest strengthening the growing Republican vote and setting the stage for an 1864 win by the GOP. And on top of all of that years of obstructionist deadlock and debate over Presidential Powers further weakening the Republic.

Not a good time all around. And the weak cries of middle state compromise that barely echoed in 1860-61 will probably be even more impotent and irrelevant in 1864-65.
 
The North isn't going to secede. There was no movement to pass convention ordnances in the event of the Democrats winning anywhere in the North and outside of a few abolitionists no one supported the idea.

A Lane Presidency will be more of Buchanan, the collapse of Northern Doughface politics, flare ups of violence in the west and disastrous efforts playing with popular sovereignty. Debate about a Federal Slave code and the rest strengthening the growing Republican vote and setting the stage for an 1864 win by the GOP. And on top of all of that years of obstructionist deadlock and debate over Presidential Powers further weakening the Republic.

Not a good time all around. And the weak cries of middle state compromise that barely echoed in 1860-61 will probably be even more impotent and irrelevant in 1864-65.
Do you think it would be any different under Douglas, Breckinridge, or Bell?
 
Elevating Joseph Lane by ways of 1824-ish shenanigans won't exactly be super helpful for supporting faith in constitutional institutions, in the North or elsewhere; this, combined with other ways the slavery issue was still coming to a head (e.g. Lemmon v People of New York), makes me sure at the very least that the civil war is not averted, nor is it guaranteed to be put off until the next election.
 
Elevating Joseph Lane by ways of 1824-ish shenanigans won't exactly be super helpful for supporting faith in constitutional institutions, in the North or elsewhere; this, combined with other ways the slavery issue was still coming to a head (e.g. Lemmon v People of New York), makes me sure at the very least that the civil war is not averted, nor is it guaranteed to be put off until the next election.
Do you think it would be immediate like with Lincoln or maybe they'd give Douglas a bit of time before they found an excuse to secede?
 

Japhy

Banned
Do you think it would be immediate like with Lincoln or maybe they'd give Douglas a bit of time before they found an excuse to secede?
I don't remember the wording of the ordinances to call for conventions so I'm not sure. It would need a bit more work to woo the pretend-patriots of the Constitutional Democrats and Constitutional Unionists.
 
Breckinridge, and Bell, not really.

Douglas is an up in the air thing since the deep south hated him.

I think it's very unlikely that Douglas would be elected (Illinois was the only state with a Douglasite majority in its House delegation) but if he were I am reasonably sure the South would not secede. Secession was actually a close enough thing even with Lincoln, as I explain at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ncoln-becomes-president.424396/#post-15481060 Even the most extreme South Carolinian would realize that their state would be totally isolated if they used Douglas's election as an occasion for secession. True, Douglas did poorly in the Deep South, but still he got 15 percent of the vote in both Alabama and Louisiana, and 11 percent in Georgia; and many of the Bell voters in the South would have no particular objection to Douglas (indeed, even some moderate Breckinridge supporters, like Andrew Johnson, would have no problem with Douglas). The situation differs radically from that of Lincoln, who got virtually no votes in the slave states apart from Delaware, St. Louis and a few German counties of Missouri, and the Wheeling Panhandle of Virginia.

Indeed, there really seems little sense in acquiescing in a Bell presidency but not a Douglas one. Bell, like Douglas, had opposed the Lecompton Constitution; and unlike Douglas, he had opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill.
 
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