WI: Lincoln Presidency Without the Civil War?

What happens if the Southern states do not secede in the wake of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860? How does Lincoln's time in office differ without the Civil War?
 
If the southern states don't secede, on the legislative front, the Lincoln administration won't accomplish much, since the Democrats controlled if not the House, then the Senate. The Homestead Law, the Morrill Tariff, the transcontinental railroad would all be dead on arrival.

However, what Lincoln can accomplish is to appoint Republican office holders in the southern federal offices, like postmaster, tarrif collectors, and build a nucleus of the republican party in the slave states.
 
Why don't the disloyal states secede?

Best,

POD. The Whigs do a little better in 1852, and as a result, more northern Whigs get elected in the House of Representatives. It's only a handful, but enough to block the Kansas Nebraska Act.

As a result, the Whig Party does not disintegrate into Northern and Southern wings, and the Anti Nebraska Party, which became the Republican Party, does not form.

Thus, with no Kansas Nebraska Act, there is no bleeding Kansas, no caning of Charles Sumner, etc, and the situation becomes less volatile than in OTL.

In 1860, after an economic depression, the voters turn out the Democrats from the Presidency and the Whigs once more hold the executive branch.

The Whig candidate? Abraham Lincoln. His VP? Alexander Stephens.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
POD. The Whigs do a little better in 1852, and as a result, more northern Whigs get elected in the House of Representatives. It's only a handful, but enough to block the Kansas Nebraska Act.

As a result, the Whig Party does not disintegrate into Northern and Southern wings, and the Anti Nebraska Party, which became the Republican Party, does not form.

Thus, with no Kansas Nebraska Act, there is no bleeding Kansas, no caning of Charles Sumner, etc, and the situation becomes less volatile than in OTL.

In 1860, after an economic depression, the voters turn out the Democrats from the Presidency and the Whigs once more hold the executive branch.

The Whig candidate? Abraham Lincoln. His VP? Alexander Stephens.

Then Lincoln is not the man he was in 1860, is he? It's like asking what an FDR presidency would be like absent the crash in 1929... And at least FDR made it to Albany; Lincoln is - at best - just another congressman.

Best,
 
Then Lincoln is not the man he was in 1860, is he? It's like asking what an FDR presidency would be like absent the crash in 1929... And at least FDR made it to Albany; Lincoln is - at best - just another congressman.

Best,

And Pierce in 1852 is just a former New Hampshire Senator. And Fillmore just a New York Congressman. And Garfield only a Ohio Congressman. And Chester Arthur only a collector of the Port of New York. Bryan is just a congressman, and Alton Parker is just a state judge.

It says Lincoln elected in 1860. There is nothing that states that the POD cannot be before 1860. The POD is still in 1852, only eight years before 1860, and who knows what Lincoln can accomplish. He could be elected senator, governor, etc as a Whig, since he is a well known and ambitious Illinois politician.

So yeah, I think fulfills it.
 
Could secession have been avoided after Lincoln's election? The usual answer is that *at the very least* South Carolina was sure to secede. And yet, even in South Carolina, there was one very prominent politician who *privately* did not regard the South's prospects in the Union as hopeless, even after Lincoln's victory: US Senator James Hammond. In a letter to Alfred Aldrich just after Lincoln's election, Hammond stated "I do not regard our circumstances in the Union as desperate." True, Hammond preferred a Southern Republic if he could be sure that the other southern states would follow South Carolina in seceding, but he had no confidence they would do so. For that reason, he did not want South Carolina to secede until other states had resolved to do so--advice that *if made public* and followed, could have doomed secession, given that even *with* South Carolina's prior secession, the victories for "immediate secessionists" in the Deep South state secession convention elections were often quite narrow.

Hammond explained why he thought staying in the Union was safer for South Carolina than attempting "go it alone" secession: "the South...can, when united, dictate, as it has always done, the internal and foreign policy of our country." (Note that Hammond is here admitting one of the Republicans' main allegations--that the South, far from groaning under northern oppression, had hitherto dominated the country.) Hammond explained that "at the North, politics is a trade." The spoilsmen "go into it for gain." (This was a typical South Carolina aristocratic view of the "mobocracy" which was seen as prevalent in other states, and especially in the North.) For that reason, no Yankee has "ever been twice elected President." Mr. Lincoln's administration will also break down "before it can accomplish anything detrimental", for its "antislavery agitation" will "not gain them spoils and power." (Quoted in William W. Freehling, *The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861,*, p. 405) https://books.google.com/books?id=AsjRsGPOXKMC&pg=PA405

Indeed, with delayers in control of both houses of the South Carolina legislature, and with Aldrich having Hammond's letter in his pocket, things looked bleak for the South Carolina ultras. But then came the "incredible coincidence" I described at http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/8b15a54b3f1a3dbd "A railroad had just been completed linking Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C. As the South Carolina legislature deliberated, leading citizens of the two cities took part in a celebration. The Georgians, carried away by the emotion of the moment, pledged their state's support for secession. Suddenly convinced that other states would follow, the legislature moved the secession convention up to December. The 'coincidence,' Freehling argues, changed history. Had South Carolina not taken this step, Unionists might have prevailed throughout the South."

As it was, however, Aldrich decided not to make Hammond's letter public at the secession convention--and Hammond acquiesced. Too much had changed since the letter was written, Aldrich stated. South Carolina was now too overwhelmingly in favor of secession for it to be blocked, and it was therefore better, Aldrich explained, for the state to present a united front to the rest of the world. Had the railroad not been completed just when it was, and had Aldrich promptly released Hammond's letter to the general public, things could have gone quite differently. South Carolina might have decided not to secede until another state did--which might never have happened...

Or it might have. The battle in the Deep South was generally not between secessionists and unionists but between "immediate secessionists" (also called "separate state action secessionists") and "cooperationists." The big question in determining how close secession was to being avoided is to determine whether cooperationism was just an alternate form of secession or--as the immediate secessionists charged--really a disguised from of Unionist "submissionism." The cooperationists claimed that they also favored secession if necessary but that it should be done not by separate state action but by a southern convention which could put final demands to the North and secede if they were not met. One problem with the cooperationists' position is that the more states seceded, the weaker it became. The immediate secessionists could (and did) say, "We are the *true* cooperationists--we are in favor of cooperating with the states which have already seceded!"

If South Carolina had decided to wait for the other southern states, the cooperationists might have prevailed against the immediate secessionists throughout the South. It is easy to say that this would simply result in Secession Later rather than Secession Now. Surely a southern convention would present Lincoln with demands he would not meet--e.g., abandon the Republican position on slavery in the territories. And yet...cooperationism would after all buy time for the Union, and the immediate secessionists were right to suspect this would strengthen the Unionist cause. They felt they had to strike while the South was still panicking over Lincoln's election. If you allow Lincoln to be in office for some time before acting, the panic will subside, southerners will see that slavery had remained unmolested and that the new president was not another John Brown. Even if the proposed Southern Convention would eventually come about, it might be dominated by Upper South moderates whom Lincoln could appease (e.g., by admitting New Mexico to the Union, at least nominally as a slave state, and by indicating his disapproval of Personal Liberty laws).

So, then, a victory by cooperationists in all the Deep South states *might* give the Union a chance. Was such a victory possible if South Carolina didn't jump the gun? I would say that it was because, as I noted above, even in OTL the "immediate secessionist" victories were quite narrow. In Alabama, the secessionists cast 35,600 votes, the cooperationists 28,100. In Georgia, the secessionists won by only (at most) 44,152 to 41,632. In Louisiana, the secessionists prevailed by 20,214 to 18,451. In Mississippi, there were 16,800 votes for secessionists, 12,218 for cooperationists, 12,000 for candidates whose position was not specified or is now unknown. Florida was somewhat more pro-secessionist than, say, Georgia, but even in Florida the cooperationists got about 40 percent of the vote. (My source for these figures is David Potter, *The Impending Crisis.*)

So preventing secession after Lincoln's election is very, very difficult but IMO not *quite* inconceivable.
 
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If the southern states don't secede, on the legislative front, the Lincoln administration won't accomplish much, since the Democrats controlled if not the House, then the Senate. The Homestead Law, the Morrill Tariff, the transcontinental railroad would all be dead on arrival..

The Homestead Act at least might well pass. Such an Act passed both houses in 1860 but was vetoed by Buchanan -- and iirc Congress came close to overriding the veto, but couldn't quite manage it. Given that the new Congress was only narrowly Democratic, this suggests it might well have passed even without secession, in which case Lincoln would undoubtedly have signed it.

I'm not so sure about the tariff, but I suspect that the railroad might have gone through if the sections (or at least the North and the Border States) managed to agree on a route.
 
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To follow up a little on the non-inevitability of (at least) immediate secession in the Deep South, especially if South Carolina had waited, as Hammond wanted it to do:

One thing that misleads some people is that in most cases the final vote in the conventions in favor of secession was pretty lopsided. What this fact sometimes obscures is that opponents of immediate secession sometimes showed considerable strength in *preliminary* votes. When it became clear, however, that the immediate secessionists had a majority, many of the cooperationists decided to vote in favor of secession for the sake of the state presenting a united front. (Of course another point is that some people originally elected as cooperationists may have become converted to immediate secession when neighboring states seceded. In other words, as more and more states seceded, "cooperation" in the remaining states *now* meant cooperation *with the states that had already seceded.*)

A good example of how misleading the final vote can be is Georgia. The vote for convention delegates was at most a very narrow victory for the immediate secessionists. (To complicate the problem of determining the popular will, the turnout was low, due in part to bad weather.) According to David Potter (in *The Impending Crisis*) their victory was at best 44,152 to 41,632. According to http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/georgia-secession-convention-1861 "the immediate secessionists finished with a slight majority of delegates. Political speeches, newspapers, and the contentiousness of state leaders reveal the deep divisions over the issue of secession at that time." The same article notes:

"Early votes indicated that there might be a close contest: one resolution demonstrated that the split between the immediate secessionists and the cooperationists was as close as 166 to 130 respectively. In the end, however, the final vote on January 19 revealed a major shift in the convention for immediate secession, when the cooperationists failed by a tally of 208 to 89."

In short, looking *solely* at the final vote on the Ordinances of Secession can lead to a serious underestimation of just how deeply divided a state was. (This is of course not the only case where looking only at the final vote is misleading. Some bills which passed Congress "comfortably" actually came close to being crippled by their opponents during preliminary votes.)

OTOH, it should be noted that even a coooperationist like Herschel Johnson set totally unrealistic conditions for Georgia remaining in the Union: "The Georgia state convention opened on January 16, 1861. It was an impressive assemblage, including Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, Eugenius A. Nisbet, Herschel Johnson, and Benjamin Hill; former governor George W. Crawford presided. Despite the closeness of the election, immediate secessionists had a controlling majority. The crucial vote occurred on January 18, when Nisbet offered resolutions for immediate secession and Johnson countered with a proposal for a convention of the southern states. Johnson's plan embodied the cooperationist formula of seeking redress for grievances in the Union, while reserving secession as the ultimate remedy. Georgia's conditions for remaining in the Union, as outlined by Johnson, included constitutional amendments opening all territories to slavery and providing for the unrestricted admission of new slave states, along with the repeal of personal liberty laws (laws that impaired the ability of slave owners to recover fugitive slaves) in the northern states. After debate, the convention passed Nisbet's resolutions by a 166-130 vote. The next day, January 19, the delegates voted 208-89 to adopt an ordinance of secession...." http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/secession

Given Johnson's conditions, it is easy to say that the victory of cooperationists in Georgia would only have meant delaying secession. But three things must be remembered here: First, any convention of all the slaveholding states would be dominated by the Upper (or at least non-Deep) South, and might therefore be satisfied with far less stringent conditions. Second, the mere passage of time--with the Republicans in office and slavery apparently unmolested--would cool secessionist passions and make it less likely that Georgia would reject the decisions of a Southern Convention if it called for far more moderate terms than Johnson had called for. Third, one should remember that Johnson, in calling for such extreme conditions, was desperately trying to stave off an immedite secessionist victory in a convention where it was apparent that immediate secessionists had at least a slight majority--*and in a situation where not only South Carolina but Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had already voted for secession.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Secession Johnson and the cooperationists could have afforded to ask for more moderate concessions in a situation where no state had yet seceded and in which cooperationists had a secure majority (as they presumably would have in the event that there had been no prior secessions). Remember that Johnson had been willing to serve as the running mate of Stephen A. Douglas, hardly a southern-rights firebrand. (Johnson explained his shift of position from 1850, when he had been a secessionist, very simply: "I had become satisfied that Slavery was safer in than out of the Union." http://tinyurl.com/jngnxhy )
 
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