TLIAD: The Most Fallen Man

Japhy

Banned
The Most Fallen Man: James K. Polk After the Presidency

“[Van Buren] is the most fallen man I have ever known.” - James K. Polk in reference to Van Buren’s support in the creation and acceptance of the nomination of the Free Soil Party of 1848


Historical Quote, 1848
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From Vanity Fair, 1861

THE IMMINENT MEETING OF EX-PRESIDENTS

[Caricatures of Former Presidents Sit at a table, sipping tea in their finest drag.]

VAN BUREN --- “I think I should preside at this meeting, for I laid the foundations of this treason by splitting the Democratic Party on the Buffalo Platform.”

PIERCE --- “I think I deserve special consideration, for I put Jeff Davis in my cabinet as Secretary of War, after he had been rejected by the people of Mississippi for his disunion sentiments.”

BUCHANAN --- “God knows I should have precedence, for with Floyd and the rest of my Cabinet I brought about the present rebellion.”

JOHN TYLER --- “I deserve the first place, for I am identified with the traitors as openly working for the disruption of the Union.”

POLK --- “I think I have the preeminent claim for leadership here, the sectional crisis being founded on my seizure of Texas and New Mexico.”

FILLMORE --- “As positive councils are now only available, and as I am not in that line, I’ll leave.”

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"Mr. Buchanan is a man of immense talent. He is fully competent to discharge the high duties of the President as he was to be a Senator, as my Secretary of State, as a Minister abroad and as a Representative but it is one of his weaknesses (and perhaps all great men have such) that he exerts massive energies on the minute and is slothful in the face of the great." - James K. Polk, December 1860. Modified Quote.

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"Governor Johnson is a Democrat in name only, who's support for Vice President Breckenridge and our Party and our Nation was next to non-existent in the recent national debate. This is not new, while I occupied the White House and he served in the House his opposition to me was both political and personal.

Now he stand against our state, our party and our southern brothers, seeking to force our state to remain in a Republic that no longer supports our Constitutional Rights. It would be better for us all if he were to admit a simple truth, though he lacks the courage to do so: Andrew Johnson is nothing more than a Black Republican." -James K. Polk in the aftermath of the first failed vote on Tennessee's Secession.
[Not a Historic Quote]
 
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Japhy

Banned
HEY THIS SPOT IS RESERVED. BECAUSE JAPHY IS A LOSER WHO STILL HAS TWO UPDATES TO GO ON THE BLOWING UP MAO TIMELINE. NO ONE GETS TO INTERRUPT THIS UNTIL I HAVE MY TALK WITH HIM.

EDIT:

Oh, OK, here we go.

Yes, I had to write a lot of stuff for the end of Bombard the Headquarters

That took long enough.

Five Weeks to be exact.

And yet having failed at that, you're still happy?

So it was a timeline in a "while", there was the Holidays and the Trip to my Fiance's In-Laws and work in the midst of all of that. You always go on about how I never finish anything, well something finally got wrapped up. I feel great about that.

Got it done, Thats Great. Took you years to finally pull that off. And now you start the same thing over again.

Yeah but this one wont take five weeks?

Why should I believe that?

Much smaller subject matter than regime change in Maoist China. And I didn't put some stupid TLIASLOP sticker on it for attention. At most this should take the week. I'm hoping to have it done this weekend.

I've heard that one before.

I'm not listening to you, I'm not listening to you.

I'm part of you, you idiot, you have to listen to me.

No I don't I finally finished at timeline. And now I'm doing one which is a partial, overview biography of one man living several years longer because he relaxed for a year or so before going on a Southern Goodwill tour.

Oh Good, Throw the POD out here, its not like Darth_Kiryan already asked about that or something, or that it should be part of the timeline.

Its irrelevant to the actual work, and I'm still not listening to you Bold Japhy...

...

Hey wait a minute, what about the Haggesian Crusade? And fighting the Atlantic-centric bullshit of the site?

I'll not giving up on that, I just delivered a China-centered Timeline, am working on the rewrites for a North Korean centered timeline, and have plenty of other projects in Asia, South America, and Africa to play with. It doesn't mean I'm never going to do Atlanticist works again. So this is one to toss out there, and there's at least one more coming down the pipe, but the Crusade lives on.
 
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Japhy

Banned
James K Polk 1860? Is the POD not his death? or maybe around the Mexican American war?

Yes its that. I don't know where the Mexican American War idea would really come from.

Anyway, I'll be back when I kill a lot more Chinese Leaders in a massive blood letting that will end the leadership struggle in the CCP in 1971.
 
Yes its that. I don't know where the Mexican American War idea would really come from.

Well, one kinda leads to the other. But i guess that relatively depends on whether or not the Presidency wares down the body hastening their death. Polk is a definite example of this.
 

Japhy

Banned
Well, one kinda leads to the other. But i guess that relatively depends on whether or not the Presidency wares down the body hastening their death. Polk is a definite example of this.

I'd say the responsibility of things defiantly has an impact. But there aren't really any reports of Polk being particularly unhealthy before he was President. Just that he was an exhausted, rapidly aged and worn down man by the time he left office. His victory lap though the South comes off as what more or less killed him, especially as like Stephen A. Douglas he probably caught something on the trip. So here the POD is simple, he goes home to Tennessee and stays at Polk Place for a year, and thus, regains some strength for the quiet Post-Presidency he thought was inevitably his.

Incidentally its worth noting that according to some research I've heard over the years and can't source that the age of ones mother is generally a more accurate depiction of how long someone will live rather than that of their father. Polk's Mother lived to be 76, dying in 1852, that is several years after her son left office. Not that its going to be exact, but with that in mind Polk's "natural" death should have occurred some time in 1871. He'd have been 65 at Lincoln's election, which while not young does allow for some shenanigans.
 

Japhy

Banned
Part I: Polk and the Last Compromise

By 1850, former President Polk felt rejuvenated, at ease with his retirement in a way he had never been during the four years of his presidency. Ever popular in the southern states, he finally begain at a gentle pace his long delayed tour of a region feeling rife and isolated, as a direct legacy of his term in office.

The Wilmot Proviso fight had reignited sectional tensions long pretended not to exist, and had in the two years since Polk had left office been joined by a litany of others national divisions of partisan and regional lines, which with disturbing rapidity moved towards being one and the same.

The continued economic disaster that was the former Republic, but now State of Texas, that states land claims, was paired with California’s imminent entry into the Union as a Free state and its land claims for all land west of the Rockies and its denial of the only naturally viable land in the Mexican Cession for slavery. On the other end of the nation the entrenchment of Personal Liberty Laws in the North, infuriated a South that suddenly called for with scarcely an ounce of hypocracy, a Federal response against nullification. There was a fight brewing over the continued existence of Slavery in the District of Columbia, following Polk’s approval of the Virginia retrocession of 1846 to safeguard the slave trade port Alexandria’s livelihood. And all of the former were fed on and fed by the rapid decay of the Whig Party following its four way split between complete dissolution in the deep South, crippled isolation in the upper South rallied around the dying Henry Clay and the breakup of the Northern wing between the conscience William Seward and the old visionless Whiggism of the also dying Daniel Webster.

Nearly all of this could be, and was by editorialists across the nation, placed at the foot of its author James K. Polk. Some praised him for it, others denounced. As such his tour from city to city never went further north than his native Tennessee or neighboring North Carolina. As the crisis raged across the nation, Polk visited the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and even the state that he had brought to the nation and started a war for, Texas. In each, great crowds of southern Democrats and increasing numbers of the dying Southern Whig cheered him on, mobbed him for handshakes and went wild as he spoke of the right of the Minority in the Republic --- that being the rights of the southern minority, in defense of their “institutions”.

At the time, it was expected that former Presidents in the republic make themselves apolitical. Martin Van Buren though two years ago had returned to the scene and help see the Barnburners shred the Democratic Party in two, in the name of containing slavery. With that in mind, Polk felt no need to hold himself back, as he declared he had always been for expanding the Missouri compromise line to the sea, which would require either California’s borders to be redrawn, or in the face of the new information reaching the country about Goldfields and the bountiful farmland of the Central Valley “The whole thing following its southern half.” and becoming a second, richer, Missouri. The argument of 1848 Democratic nominee Lewis Cass was one Polk was glad to cite, saying that the voters of California, so many of them southern whites, be allowed to vote, and be allowed to bring the state into the Southern fold as Polk was sure they would.

Texas too, he felt should receive at least its claims of all land below the Compromise line, and east of the Rio Grande. In his speeches there was no mention though, of Texan debts, the man who had vetoed Federal Improvements for the nation was unwilling to embrace the idea that the Federal government should take over the payments of a state, even a bankrupt, incompetent former Independent Republic.

And then on the sectional divide he stood firm, all of this was the fault of the Whigs and the fault of the North who suddenly flush with triumph were apparently no longer willing to accept the system as it was and had always been. In New Orleans he declared that it was the new tactic of Webster and “his” new Northern Whigs to cut the south out of the system, and to secure a “Solid North” to dictate to the Southern Minority, and to chip away at the rights of the citizens and their sovereign states. To uproarious applause he spoke time and again as to why: The Whigs were determined to end slavery.

Polk was approached by Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois who supported first the extension of the Compromise Line and eventually became Clay’s pointman on his compromise effort, William L. Yancey of Alabama who wished for the former President to stand with the “Alabama Compromise” calling for the complete removal of Federal authority on Slavery in the Territories, and by Senator Cass who hoped that Polk’s California stance would open him up to the idea of Popular Sovereignty for the whole of the West. Polk though, declined to support each one fully, and instead continued to enjoy his slow, triumphant journey, with every stop filled with banquets, balls, cheers and toasts.

When Zachary Taylor, whom Polk had tried to destroy while still an officer under his command in the last War, suddenly died Polk was privately elated, the traitorous Southerner who had been moving to decisively side with Seward was gone. In Taylor’s place came the more “level-headed” leadership of Millard Fillmore who declared his support for Clay’s compromise: A limited Texas with its debts assumed, a Free California, Popular Sovereignty in New Mexico and Utah, and the passage of a harsh new Fugitive Slave Act.

Polk, aware that Fillmore was saving the country and dooming his party came out quickly in support of the new President, and by the time he returned to Polk Place, was claiming the final triumph of his old adversary Henry Clay as his own. The former president was lauded throughout the nation once more, for his work in helping assure the passage of the Compromise by the Democrats of the Deep South.

Those laurels laid, the nation felt that the uneasiness of the compromise would soon lead to an age of a lazy peace. Many of what were thought to be the final editorials on the subject felt that as one New York paper declared "Polk has offered his final service to the Nation, and will now justly enjoy the quiet retirement he has earned."

But the national sentiment, that the Republic and Polk were now bound for Peace, proved to be tragically shortsighted.

 
PIERCE --- “I think I deserve special consideration, for I put Jeff Davis in my cabinet as Secretary of War, after he had been rejected by the people of Mississippi for his disunion sentiments.”

Surely Pierce's claim should rest on the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
 

Japhy

Banned
Part II: Polk and the Elections of 1852 & 1853

In the election of 1852 James K. Polk found himself witnessing the departure of one Whig President and his replacement on that party's final ticket with Winfield Scott, who had joined the US Army when Washington was president and whom Polk had done everything in his power to politically cripple on his victorious drive on Mexico City. After the victory of that other great Whiggish rival-subordinate Zachary Taylor it was impossible for Polk to not take the nomination personally, and he was soon on an semi-active campaign throughout the whole South pushing for a Democratic sweep.

His own party in the meantime would spend the start of June in Baltimore, Maryland to decide their own nominee. With Martin Van Buren persona non-grata following his escapades with the Barnburners the previous election, and Tyler being a Democrat-in-fact-only, Polk was alone as he was lauded by the convention. Unity towards Polk was about one of the only events that could bring the party together at that grand meeting. Platform fights saw some hemorrhaging to the Free Soil Party as the Democratic Party pledged its support to filibusters in Latin America, against any Federal Internal improvements and for a return to the days of the Gag Rule.

In the presidential fight, Polk saw though the deadlock a handful of votes go his way, which he repeatedly declined to accept. Polk placed his support initially behind his former Secretary of War, William L. Marcy. But deadlock between Marcy, his old counterpart at Polk’s State Department James Buchanan and Senators Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas dragged on Polk moved to support any “sufficient” ticket which could keep the majority of the party united. On the 35th Ballot as one-time Senator, and one-time Political General Franklin Pierce had his name placed in contention, it was Polk who offered one of the flurry of quick speeches that helped over the next 14 ballots secure Pierce the nomination.

And with that loud and triumphant victory Polk headed home, and after that November Pierce would head towards a tragic train crash, and a long, painfully mournful term at the White House. While Polk was given some leeway on suggesting patronage jobs, Pierce --- whom had never been a particularly sociable man --- was never all that interested in talking shop, haunted as he was by the death of his son Benjamin before his eyes in a train derailment.

…..

Back in Tennessee, Polk had much more power to exert. Pierce saw to it that the United States Attorney, as well as officers of the Treasury in the state were loyal to the former President and his Western and Central Tennessee faction of the party. The great issue over the next few years would be that of Polk’s conflict with the Eastern Tennessee Democrats, whose nominal leader was Andrew Johnson, whom had served in Congress for a decade.

Polk’s Western Tennesseans represented a “run of the mill” Southern Party. It was they who opposed internal improvements, praised the “Principle’s of ‘98” and were at their core a party run by by plantation owners, slave traders, and the a population by and large determined to maintain slavery. The Eastern Democrats were cut of a different cloth, factories, rail lines, and mines were the basis of the economy in the East, and it was there that the last Whig holdouts in the states remained, where Irish labor settled, side by side with the plantations and slave quarters. Johnson and his faction saw a new future for the Democrats, just as before the party of Slavery but now a party that embraced many whiggish ideas about the role of government, and saw the south's future as an industrial one, with slaves working in the cheapest factories and immigrant voters working in the more profitable ones. At its core the debate was not one about human dignity or the rights of the black man, which neither side could accept, but a question of if the South’s future would be led by the first families on their plantations or by the whole of the white population.

The divide was also a personal one, Polk had long found Johnson to be a cowardly, hateful man, whom was barely a Democrat at all, and had failed to respect the office while Polk was president. Johnson on the other hand found Polk to be not a leader but a figurehead of the “Old South” trying to hold Tennessee, the Party and the Country back, and whom sought to deny him the ability to rise up as far as he could climb.

In 1853 these two visions of the Tennessee Democrats and the personal rivalries of the two men would come to a head, in the states elections for Governor and Senator. The once popular Whig governor, “Bloody Bill” Campbell was on his way out, having clearly seen which way the wind was blowing in the South after Nashville had been home to the 1850 conference where the leaders of the South had openly pledged a threat of secession, and his denunciation of such talk had negated all of his Mexican war heroics. In the Senate John Bell, the Whig ally of Henry Clay was seeking another term, potentially exposed thanks to the collapse of his party. The entirety of the Tennessee Democratic party was ready to act to see both offices seized. The question of course became, by who?

Johnson wanted the Senate seat for himself. Polk in private conversations felt that that was the same thing as letting Bell keep the seat unopposed. And while Polk wanted to do nothing more than leave Johnson in his house seat, he knew that the best compromise available was to send Johnson to the Governor’s Apartment. The Governor of Tennessee not having the right to approve or veto anything, was a man who didn’t do anything except make a nuisance of himself. Which Johnson was already doing. The problem with this of course was that Johnson knew it and definitely wanted to go to Washington over Nashville.

The state convention would see Polk yet again enter the political area. The major push of the Western Democrats was to try and anoint Polk as the Senate candidate against Bell, but Polk declined, nothing that while John Quincy Adams was willing to violate precedence, Polk continued to have no interest in breaking the “natural role of the former executive” and remain away from Washington.

In the end Polk was able though to take the support in the convention for himself and transfer it to former Governor William Trousdale, whom while from the Western faction of the state party was acceptable to many Eastern Democrats. With the Senate race secured with a popular Democrat who had only lost his attempt for a second term by 1500 votes, Johnson was cornered, in the face of losing patronage while remaining in the House and the powerless office and bully pulpit of the Governor’s office, he took the later, which Polk would contain him in for the next three terms, successfully blocking Johnson’s next attempt in to replace James C. Jones following his death in Johnson’s second term. Jones a former Whig who crossed over to the Democrats halfway through his term would in turn be replaced by Polk loyalist Cave Johnson. But with the neutering of Johnson, and despite his occasional use that office as a Bully Pulpit over his next four terms, Polk’s supremacy as the “Grand Old Man” of the Tennessee Democrats was paired with the actual power of a Boss and Kingmaker.​

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Notes: With the exception of Washington's appointment as General-in-Chief of the Army during the Quasi-War and the Election of John Q. Adams to Congress, the Jeffersonian tradition was strong in the United States in the days before the Civil War, with precedent eventually dictating that it was not even the place of a former President to even visit Washington DC. This would be broken IOTL in 1860 and 1861 as the living former Presidents were forced to respond to the coming Civil War.

Johnson IOTL was similarly forced into the Governor's Office (But not a house, the Governor of Tennessee didn't have an official residence, just an official hotel room, there was an attempt after JKP's death to buy Polk Place for such a purpose but it failed and the Chief Executive would remain without Veto or Home until after the Civil War.) Of course IOTL Johnson was after two two-year terms able to take a Senate Seat, where he would seize his destiny in 1861 by refusing to vacate his seat.

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Anyway, hope everyone is enjoying this, I admit there hasn't been much in the way of drastic changes yet, nor is there going to be some sort of amazing historical break, but I hope its at least interesting.
 

Japhy

Banned
Part III: Polk, Kansas and Cuba



The year 1854 would be a dramatic one for James K. Polk, as he sat back in Polk Place and determined the policy not only of himself but of many Southern Democrats in reaction to the two great upheavals of the year.

Bell was still a Senator and Johnson a Governor when at the start of the year Stephen A. Douglas, now a Senator himself proposed his Kansas-Nebraska Act to the nation. The implementation of Popular Sovereignty, not only in the previously agreed New Mexico and Utah slavery disputes but now above the Missouri Compromise line threw the nation into a debate only “Great” by the size of the issue.

Polk was torn on the issue, he had never been a supporter of the Popular Sovereignty doctrine, his journals including much thought on the idea that if it was left to the voters of a territory, the Southern minority was bound to lose, California’s Free State status being proof that even when the population was mostly Southern, the results would follow that of the more populated Free States. But, like many Southerners he saw the opportunity offered, Kansas was a nearly empty territory, its population nearly non-existent just in 1850, with its only border to a state being that of slave-holding Missouri and its prarie ripe for the growing of foodstuffs the idea of Corn and Wheat plantations filled the minds of Polk as it did many of his Southern contemporaries. As such Polk would join the voices of men such as Alexander Stephens who declared the old Missouri compromise had been unfair in the first place to the South.

Opposition in the South was led by Sam Houston of Texas and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri who each denounced the attempt to break the national peace. As neither man was truly a “loyal” Democrat Polk took little time before beginning to write speeches and editorials, some anonymous some with his name clearly labeled denouncing them as being Whig allies of the likes of William Seward and Charles Sumner.

The debate would rage for months, with Polk and John Bell both leading their Tennessee parties in opposite ends of the debate, Bell going so far as voting against the memorandum passed by the state legislature to support the bill, in this he would be attacked by Robert Toombs, and Alexander Stephens in the Senate and by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Bell along with Sam Houston would be the only two Southern Senators to vote against the Bill.

But the bill passed none the less by the summer. But as Polk had feared what should have guarenteed a “natural” entry of Kansas into the Union as a Slave state soon turned into a great rush of what he deemed squatters to the region, funded by what Polk would soon start referring to as the “Abolitionist Power” with groups like the New England Emigrant Company seeking to secure the state against the spread of slavery.

Polk prepared to use the Whig stance to eradicate the party from his state once and for all. And began to ponder if it would not be better for him to run against Bell in 1859 himself. Those discussions would further entwine himself with the new more determined school of Southern Democrats across the nation. And in this capacity he offered quiet yet firm support for those Missourians who sought to “remove” the issue of Yankee Squatters from their Western border.

…..

1854 would begin with one bang and end with another which was based on and inevitably drew the response of Polk, this time on the international stage as much as the domestic.

Polk claimed as his defenders would for decades to come that he achieved every goal as President he had set out for himself as the start of his single term. While his works were impressive in scale if not in their detail, there was at least one sore point: Cuba.

Since Jefferson had been President America’s foreign policy towards the Spanish colony had been that it was inevitable that it would become an American state, but that such things could wait until the natural time for the transfer. Until then America’s Cuba policy was simple: Cuba could not become British or French. In 1848 Polk decided the time had finally come, and pressured the Spanish government to accept a $100 Million dollar purchase for the island. Spain, more than content to retain its colonies in the Caribbean and aware that Polk could not create another war or war crisis in his term refused and simply ordered the navy to Havana. Hat in hand, Polk was forced to back down, his political capital sinking in the face of Whig gains and his inability to secure his prefered goals for the treaty with Mexico.

Now with the nation unhappy with the issue of slavery spreading to its Western lands, President Pierce and his Secretary of State William L. Marcy decided that Cuba would serve as a nice offering for compromise. As such Polk’s old Secretary of State James Buchanan, now Minister to the Court of St. James and his counterparts in France and Spain met quietly in Ostend, Belgium and Aix-la-Chapelle, Prussia and worked out a proposed policy to force the sale of the Islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain.

Their report which would enter history as the infamous Ostend Manifesto would declare that Cuba’s annexation by the United States was a basic requirement of national security, least the island be used as a springboard against the South, or worse would become a “second St. Domingo” (That is, another Haiti, the site of another victorious slave revolt state). As such and with the “obvious economic advantages of the island joining the North American Republic”, the manifesto concluded justified in “wrestling” the island away from Spain by “the great law of Self-Preservation.”

This report’s contents were not kept secret by Pierre Soule the Minister to Spain, and soon the uproar abroad and at home forced the Pierce administration to release the entire text of the document. Anti-Nebraska Democrats and Conscience Whigs of the North were horrified, the developing solid South found Buchanan and Soule to be heros. The governments of France, Spain and Britain united in condemning the report, and Soule was forced to resign.

Polk though in Tennessee read the Manifesto and found in it a sound case, giving voice to his opinions in 1848 with great vigor. To the newspapers and people of Tennessee he would declare in contrast to Horace Greeley’s statement that the document was “Manifesto of Brigands” that he would “urely stand by any so-called brigand in the name of securing for this Republic its natural extent.”

Polk’s declaration, wildly popular throughout the south would bring ahead a new tour of the south, including meeting the returning Soule at the Port of New Orleans with a handshake and a cheering crowd. To Polk this was no great policy change. But to men such as William Walker who had invaded Mexico and made himself president of two failed “republics” in Lower California and Sonora it was a revolution. An American president, abit a former one was now on the side of American land seizures in Latin America.

And Polk embraced them, within two years he was lobbying his fellow Tennesseans recognition as the President of Nicaragua, while dreaming about bringing William Walker home for a political career, victory or failure, back in the Volunteer State.


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Notes: Text of the Ostend Manifesto from the University of Virginia, its all in their all its wonderful text about the need for annexation due to race war. And we elected one of its authors President.

Polk's stance on annexations by force of arms can be traced back of course to his support for the Texan Republic, for his own war with Mexico for land, for his actual threats fro Cuba, for his threats for Oregon, and in his late in the war support for the seizure of Yucatan as American territory. Walker's initial attempts also mind you, were entirely part of Polk's original goals for land seizures from Mexico, taken together point Polk in a direction embraced by many others of his fellows, support for Walker and a move more and more towards the drastic actions the Southern Democrats would take. Mind you I'm not trying to smear the man, just take a look at where his politics would lead as time goes on.
 
So Polk is pro-southern (to be expected, imo) and pro-slavery regardless? That is the vibe i am really getting.

Still, Polk fighting against Benton and Houston, two ardent Jacksonians was surprising.
 

Japhy

Banned
So Polk is pro-southern (to be expected, imo) and pro-slavery regardless? That is the vibe i am really getting.

Still, Polk fighting against Benton and Houston, two ardent Jacksonians was surprising.

The view at the time by and large in the south was that Benton and Houston were abandoning the region and Jacksonianism. Which they were, Benton was a bitter-ender for a just cause, though he supported Buchanan over his son in law in the end in 1856. Houston would shortly be a Know-Nothing throwing the Jacksonian tub out with the bathwater, and would end his career as a Oppostionist/Constitutional Unionist.


And while Polk had often been able to work with them in the past, the man showed a politicians ability to turn on friends easily when wedges were thrown in the way. His journal that he kept while President is an interesting look into how the man operated and thought. Johnson, Houston, Benton? In the end they'd be nothing more than enemies if they stood in the way of his solutions for the party and the nation.

And as for being Pro-Slavery regardless, well he was, his whole "rights of the minority" doctrine was about defending the poor, oppressed minority of Slave-owners.
 

Japhy

Banned
So its not going to be a day I admit, gone a bit crazy in trying to handle what comes next but thats that. For the sake of this draft I'm not going to do any drastic gear shifts. Right now the goal is just to knock out the project over the course of at least the weekend, and I intend to do just that. Hope to have at least one more update tonight.
 
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