Upside Down Again, Mark II

Another go at my initial "Upside Down Again" TL I started a couple years ago. Updated, modified, etc.

So without further ado:

Two Presidents-Elect and Two Presidents


January-April 1853


On January 13, 1853 the Democratic President-elect was killed in a train wreck in Andover Massachusetts, along with his wife Jane and young son Benjamin when an axle broke, derailing the coach in which he was riding en route to his home state of New Hampshire.

As the nation mourned for Pierce, questions were raised about who should become president next. The laws of the country stipulated that the Vice-President was to be promoted to the presidency if the president died during his term, but there was no procedure in place for the death of a president-elect. Just as some had insisted a decade before that John Tyler was merely "Acting President", several Whig politicians suggested that another presidential election had to be held. Complicating the situation was the status of Pierce's running-mate, William Rufus King, who was terminally ill with tuberculosis and in Cuba for this reason. However, the majority view that King had been promoted to President-elect because of Pierce's untimely death won out without serious opposition. Under these circumstances, King was inaugurated as President of the United States on March 4, 1853 while he was still in Cuba; the privilege of taking the oath on foreign soil was extended by a special act of Congress for his long and distinguished service in government.

King's presidency surpassed that of William Henry Harrison's as the shortest in length: the dying President only held office for forty-five days before passing away after he arrived at his plantation in Alabama on April 16.

According to the presidential succession established in the 1792 Presidential Succession Act, President pro tempore of the Senate David Atchison was sworn in as President of the United States on April 17, and plans were made to hold another presidential election that November.
 
The Firebrand President and the Gadsden Affair

April-June 1853


David Atchison brought several presidential "firsts" with him when he reached the highest political office in the United States in the spring of 1853. At the age of forty-five, the senator became the youngest President of the United States up to that point. Although he was born in Kentucky, Atchison hailed from Missouri, and thus became the first president from beyond the Mississippi River.

Atchison also brought a fiery dedication to the expansion of slavery and state's rights, as well as an inability to compromise at this key point in the history of the nation. Many Northern senators were uneasy at the prospect of such a fervent pro-slavery politician in the White House.

Atchison's foreign policy moves during his term in office did nothing to ease such concerns. Immediate negotiations with Spain over the purchase of Cuba and the reaching of an "understanding" involving Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast with Great Britain worried Northern senators who feared the spread of slavery.

The major crisis of Atchison's administration was the Gadsden Affair. Soon after he became president, Atchison sent James Gadsden to negotiate a purchase of territory from Mexico, ostensibly for a southern transcontinental railroad. When Gadsden returned from Mexico with a signed treaty in June, the president revealed it to Congress, against the advice of his Secretary of State, William Marcy. The signed treaty compensated Mexico with $50 million for the sale of the provinces of Baja California, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to the United States.

The anti-slavery senators were livid. Atchison was clearly trying to increase the number of slave states. Vicious debates over the Gadsden Purchase in the Senate were continuing when the party’s met to nominate candidates for the upcoming special election.
 
The Election of 1853

June-November 1853


When the Whigs and Democrats met for their conventions in 1853, factions within each party were determined to improve their results upon those of the previous year, which had, in both camps, led to compromise candidates. The revelation of the Gadsden Purchase just prior to the conventions exacerbated these intraparty divisions and resulted in the most contentious party conventions in American history to that point.

The Whigs had been spared significant intraparty bickering between northern and southern wings of the party by the nomination in 1852 of General Winfield Scott, a northern, anti-slavery Whig, and by the adoption of a pro-slavery platform. The disastrous results of the previous election had led both the Northern and Southern Whigs to believe that a more consistent ticket-platform relationship would allow a Whig to return to the White House. Both factions, of course, assumed that it was only logical that their preferred view win out, and the atmosphere in Philadelphia’s National Hall was tense from the beginning.

Banking on the unpopularity of the currently-debated Gadsden Treaty in the North, and simmering unhappiness about the 1850 compromise, the extreme anti-slavery Northern Whigs nominated New York Senator William H. Seward, a figure who repulsed Southerners in the extreme with his frequent anti-slavery rhetoric. The New England delegates nominated Massachusetts Senator Edward Everett as a more moderate nominee that could still use his opposition to the spread of slavery to gain votes in the North.

The Southern Whigs rejected both of these candidates, and proffered former President Fillmore as a candidate to the convention. The northerner who had signed the Fugitive Slave Act was anathema to most Northern Whigs, and was viciously attacked by the Northern Whigs throughout the convention’s proceedings.

The delegates deadlocked for a then-record sixty ballots, with support from Seward and Fillmore slowly drifting to Everett and then remaining at relatively steady levels, with Everett having nowhere near the necessary amount of support to be nominated as the party’s candidate. On the 61st ballot, however, Everett’s supporters began to drift back to Seward, and on the 69th ballot, Seward passed the 50% mark of delegates. Infuriated, a majority of the Southern Whigs and several pro-slavery Northern Whigs stormed out of the convention en masse, to booing and hissing from the anti-slavery northern delegates. Fearing the imminent catastrophe of the party’s split, the convention chairman adjourned the convention for two weeks.

In late June, the Whigs’ National Convention convened again in Baltimore, MD. A few of the southern delegates who had stormed out of National Hall two weeks previously returned to Baltimore, lured by promises that Seward would not be selected. On the 3rd ballot of this second Whig convention, Everett was unanimously nominated for President. Solomon Downs of Louisiana, a former senator and a slave-owner himself, was nominated unanimously on the second ballot for Vice-President. The party’s official platform was a short document that mostly consisted of anti-immigration measures requested by Fillmore supporters, and, importantly, was ambiguous on the question of slavery.

As the Whigs uneasily settled on a compromise ticket, the Democrats, too, experienced a heated convention. Four major contenders for the Presidential nomination emerged: Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, Secretary of State Marcy, and President Atchison. Each had his electoral strengths and weaknesses. Douglas, Cass, and Marcy were Northerners, and therefore automatically more palatable to the Northern Democrats. All three had differing stances towards slavery; Douglas, least-favored in the South, was one of the architects of the Compromise of 1850, which limited the possible expansion of slavery to the recently-created New Mexico and Utah territories. Cass had been the party’s presidential candidate in 1848, and ascribed to the doctrine of popular sovereignty: that each new territory ought to be able to decide for itself whether to be a free state or a slave state. His status as a previous electoral loser and his age (seventy at the opening of the convention) counted against him. Secretary of State Marcy was the most pro-slavery Northerner, but was tarnished in the eyes of most Northern Democrats by his hand in the hotly-debated Gadsden Purchase. Finally, President Atchison was wildly popular in the South, but his rash actions as President had caused the ire of the anti-slavery Democrats to be focused directly on him.

The Democratic National Convention eventually ended up being drawn out even longer than the extended Whig convention; opening on June 1 in Charleston, SC, and concluding on July 6, it easily became the longest national convention ever in the United States, lasting 36 days.

52 ballots were held over the first week of the convention, with the delegate counts of each of the major four candidates rising and falling several times, although a plurality consistently held for Atchison, the most divisive candidate. An attempt to bring forward James Buchanan, the pro-slavery Pennsylvanian ambassador to Great Britain, as a compromise candidate faltered as most of Atchison’s delegates refused to switch to a candidate until the other candidates released their delegates. While Douglas and Cass were willing to do so, Secretary of State Marcy refused to release his powerful New York delegation, in part due to Atchison’s ignoring of his advice regarding the Gadsden Purchase. Before the 67th ballot, Cass released his delegation to Marcy, and Marcy soon appeared to be picking up steam. Douglas was prepared to release his delegates to Marcy when Atchison informed him that he would sooner break up the party and leave with the Southern delegation than allow his “insubordinate” Secretary of State to win the nomination: Douglas reluctantly kept his delegates. When word of this “deal” got out to Marcy’s camp, his delegates threatened to march out of the convention. The DNC chairman, Benjamin Hallett, saw that the Whig Party’s convention was being drawn out and did not hesitate to adjourn the convention on June 11 to prevent a complete fracture of the party.

While Hallett had intended the convention to convene again on June 20, several Northern delegations actually left Charleston to discuss with their state Democratic institutions as to how to proceed. It was not until June 24 that all of the delegations finally returned to Charleston. With only two days before Sunday, the delegates mostly discussed the platform, and it was not until Monday June 28 that the convention finally returned to the business of nominating a candidate. It is certain that Atchison met with members of the Douglas camp and disgruntled members of Marcy’s New York delegation before the next round of voting began, although rumors that he talked with Douglas in person are unfounded. Either way, pro-slavery Texas Senator Sam Houston was proposed as a compromise candidate to the convention, and received immediate support from delegations belonging to Atchison, Douglas, and even a few members of Marcy’s New York delegation. Marcy was furious, but enough of his delegates eventually broke for Houston, who was nominated with just over two-thirds of the delegates on July 1 on the 88th ballot. In an unsuccessful attempt to placate Marcy, his fellow New Yorker Congressman William Tweed was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, winning the nomination on the 5th ballot.

The Democratic platform was another source of division. The eventual platform included a plank of popular sovereignty, which alienated the anti-slavery Democrats. By the time the Democrats concluded their convention, it appeared that there would be no repeat of their dominant victory over the Whigs in the previous election.

This was an accurate assessment. Houston’s firm advocacy of slavery played poorly in the North, and his equally firm opposition to the extension of slavery did not inspire many southerners to vote for him. Houston’s repeated statements that directly contradicted his own party’s pro-Popular Sovereignty platform were an additional embarrassment to the already unenthusiastically-supported Democratic ticket. Marcy coldly refused to support Houston in New York. While the popular vote was relatively close (Everett gained 51% of the vote to Houston’s 47%), Everett won the Electoral College handily (208-88) to become the fifth Whig President of the United States.

GREEN: Whig Party, Edward Everett (MA)/Solomon Downs (LA)
RED: Democratic Party, Sam Houston (TX)/William Tweed (NY)


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Death of Manifest Destiny, Birth of Nebraska

November 1853-June 1854


Despite Everett’s victory, the divided (albeit demoralized) Democrats still controlled Congress. In the last four months of his administration, Atchison pressed the Senate to ratify the Gadsden Purchase, fearing that Everett would renounce the treaty. Instead, the Gadsden Treaty failed to pass the Senate with the required two-thirds majority by a mere two votes.

Southern politicians were furious at the rejection of Gadsden's treaty. With their hopes for the extension of slave-state territory to northern Mexico and a southern transcontinental railroad dashed, they turned to a Northern senator to extend slavery's domain further.

Stephen Douglas was the Democratic Party’s leader in the United States Senate, the chairman of the Committee on Territories, a promoter of railroads, and, although he was instrumental in the slavery-limiting Compromise of 1850, had hinted that he could be swayed to support popular sovereignty. Douglas desired a transcontinental railway, and he especially desired it to terminate in his home state of Illinois' largest city, Chicago. After meeting with prominent southern senators, Douglas came to an agreement with them. In exchange for their support for a northern railway route, Douglas would propose a Nebraska Act to organize the western territories adjacent to Missouri. More importantly, the principle of popular sovereignty would be included in the act forming the territory, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In a whirlwind of legislative activity in the winter and spring of 1854, Douglas fought through immense opposition from anti-slavery Democratic and Whig senators to pass the bill by the end of March. After another ten weeks of heated debate in the House, the Nebraska Act was passed. President Everett reluctantly signed the law under pressure from the Southern Whigs on June 10. The act established the Nebraska Territory between 37'45'' and 42' latitude, extending to 100’ longitude and allowed for the organization of the rest of the territory formerly comprising the Nebraska Territory.

Both Northern Democrats and Whigs who had risked their political futures in order to satisfy their southern colleagues were completely horrified when news arrived from the Caribbean the next day.

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Quitman's Filibuster

June-August 1854


American leaders had cast desirous looks across the Caribbean at the island of Cuba for decades. Southern leaders looked on with fear and greed at Spain's tenuous hold on its rebellious, mulatto- and black-populated colony. Adherents of Manifest Destiny in the North, known as Young Americans, believed it was the right of the United States to expand across the North American continent and into the Caribbean. The leaders of the Young Americans, such as Stephen Douglas, had also seen in Cuba an outlet for the expansion of slavery, in order to keep the careful balance between free and slave states in the union. With the torturous passage of the Nebraska Act, however, the Northern Democrats were convinced that no further expansion of slavery would be attempted: it would tilt the balance too far in favor of the slave states and provoke a tremendous reaction in the North.

This was precisely the reaction which was triggered when news came to Washington of the landing of a filibustering expedition numbering nearly 4000 men near Havana under the command of John Quitman, a former Mississippi governor and a major general in the Mexican-American War. Quitman's filibusters, supported by Cuban rebels, were relatively well-organized, and succeeded in marching to and besieging Havana within a few weeks.

The uproar in the North that resulted from Quitman's filibuster (hurriedly launched before preparations were complete in order to land in Cuba before the passage of the Nebraska Act) was compounded when his goals were published in several Southern newspapers in late June. Not only was he planning to conquer Cuba with the goal of annexation by the United States, but he planned to come to an agreement with the current Cuban planters in order to re-enslave the free emancipado blacks.

Quitman's invasion spurred the creation of "Republican committees" across the North. In addition to the complete transfer of Northern Whigs directly to the ranks of the unofficially-named "Republicans", northern Democrats who had opposed the passage of the Nebraska Act joined these ranks in remarkable numbers. Even a few senators and representatives who had voted for the act began to make noises about joining the new movement in protest of the actions of "Slave Power".

Spain deliberately prepared for war, handing back the American minister's passports. Only events in Cuba prevented actual conflict breaking out in the Caribbean: Quitman died of malaria a week into the siege of Havana, and most of his leaderless filibusters soon gave up the attempt and returned to the United States. A small group numbering around 200 were captured and imprisoned by Spanish troops. To the scarcely-concealed delight of the North and the dismay of the South, the leaders of this small group, including John "Rip" Ford of Mexican-American War fame, were executed on August 20.
 
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This is quite good, Douglas. I like the idea of a stronger Whig Party (okay, mainly because of the name, but still :p) providing more presidents.

Hope to see this continued soon.
 
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