Post by raharris1973 on Mar 19, 2024 2:49:06 GMT
PoD is 1843 or 1844. Former President Martin Van Burn makes a strong run for the Democratic nomination. He never publicly volunteers his personal viewpoint that he is against the annexation of Texas, and without that holding him back, is able to secure the Democratic nomination based on his cultivated political networks and name recognition, preventing the emergence of any dark horse Presidential candidate like James Polk of Tennessee.
Meanwhile, Henry Clay is the nominee of the Whig Party.
Clay wins, advantaged by the salience of economic issues and outside of committed Democratic partisans, memories of Van Buren's association with the Panic of 1837.
Clay, at least in the early years of his term, has a working Whig majority and passes elements of the Whig program, the American system. He declines to annex Texas. Outgoing President Tyler fails to secure a resolution annexing Texas, and seeing it unlikely to succeed in passing Congress, probably does not make the attempt.
Clay is not excessively doctrinaire against expansion, but he does not want to do it at risk of foreign war, or internal rupture to the Union. That ruled out Texas. In the case of Oregon, it ruled out threatening Britain with war to get them to yield control over Oregon Country to the 54-40 line, but it permits a negotiated boundary along the 49th parallel, with a favorable exception allowing Britain to possess the entirety of Vancouver island.
Also, Clay cannot and does not really seek to squelch internal expansion, and Florida is admitted as a slave state in 1845. This is followed by admission of Iowa as a free state in 1846. With that, parity between free states and slave states in the Union and Senators in the Senate is maintained.
In 1848 Wisconsin is admitted into the Union as a free state, giving the free states a one state, two Senator advantage over the slave states. Meanwhile, for the Presidential election, Henry Clay is lame duck, pre-pledged to not run for a second term by Whig Party ideology. The Whig Party seeks its next nominee, whom I have not figured out yet.
Daniel Webster would likely be a competitor for this nomination but is not assured of winning it.
This loss of Senate parity rallies the south more solidly to the Democrats, and the Democrats to an expansionist agenda, with the southwest and/or Cuba in mind, with the idea of “righting the balance”. Northern Democrats, at least western ones interested in more Pacific frontage and California gold, or with pro-southern sympathies, don’t object to the concept and are motivated going into the 1848 election, in which Clay is not standing. They also have their libertarian, Jacksonian complaints against Clay’s American system, and mobilize the immigrant vote, especially Catholic immigrant vote.
Polk is too ill to be the Democratic standard bearer. Cass is one of the more likely choices, though it may be someone else.
Disruptive of the Democrat’s expansionist plans, in the meantime, by the end of Clay’s term, jilted Texas has received Belgian recognition and a long-term, sustainable interest Belgian loan to manage its debts, and the self-confidence instilled among Texans and boost to American immigration made Texans pickier about the terms of annexation and revived the political fortunes of pro-independence, and at least independence-inclined, Mirabeau Lamar, who wins the 1848 Texas Presidential election.
This result, with the aggressive Lamar in charge, leaves the Belgian lenders a bit nervous. But they ride it out, ultimately speculating on profit from Texas cattle and cotton futures. They had made their loan offer under the more circumspect Houston administration, and lacked the anti-slavery qualms of more ant-slavery influenced British and French financiers.
The Cass (or alternate Democratic) Administration is unable to push for further expansion through reopening of the now settled Oregon question. Certainly, there is no appetite for war to reopen the question. If there is an independent California Republic** set up at some point there may be feelers or invitations about joining the Union, but any California Republic may have a slavery ban, and that could leave Cass’s southern Democratic supporters objecting to union with a California republic. Similar problems may bedevil and diplomatic exploration of a purchase of Alaska from the Russians.
Southerners would have greater enthusiasm for an annexation of Cuba, and the Democratic Administration puts out its ATL version of the Ostend Manifesto. There may be some filibuster expeditions, but they fail. There is not a Congressional consensus for war, purely for territorial expansion, without any sort of decent pretext or convincing provocation.
Frustrated in its expansion goals, and perhaps with only limited success in its anti-American System economic goals, and with a slightly more southern tilted caucus, after midterm losses in the north, the Democratic Administration and remaining Democratic Congressional majority in office from 1851 champions undoing the strict Missouri Compromise line of 36-30 and supports the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which proposes dividing the Unorganized territory north of Indian Territory between Kansas in the south and Nebraska in the south, and allowing the voters themselves to vote, when becoming eligible for statehood, for state constiutions, with, or without, legal slavery. The clear expectation of the Democrats is that Kansas territory, at the same general latitude as Missouri and Kentucky and Virginia, will choose legal slavery, and become a state sooner than other plains states, helping restore Senate balance, even if plantation slavery is unlikely to become the *predominant* mode of production in the state.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act provokes a firestorm of outrage in the north in 1851, among free state Democrats and ex-Whigs alike, that is channeled into the free-soil movement. It leads to the foundation of the Republican Party by the end of the year, which marries the Free-Soil platform and support for a populist Homestead Act and neutrality on immigration matters with a mostly Whig economic program, while steering clear in its campaign strategies and public image of old-style Whig and Federalist elitism.
The Democrats still prevail over the new party in the 1852 election. First Republican candidate wouldn’t be Fremont most likely. During their term, there is still no Spanish-American war for Cuba, no new states are “ripe” for admission. (There may be arguments by some northerners that Oregon is ripe, due to its popularity as America’s only west coast, and territory adjacent to California and California gold, and that its entry is being purposely delayed). Neither Texas nor California are annexed.
Judicial effects of changing the 1845-1848 Presidential term from Whigs get 3 appointments instead of Dems, but OTL, the Whigs got one of these as a do-over next term. So presuming Dred Scott was the same time, The majority could be 5 to 4 instead of 7-2.
A Dred Scott analogous case may come up in 1853 or 1854, with a similar ruling, but a smaller majority going along with the Chief Justice’s emphatic ruling.
The result, despite missing something escalatory events on the sectional conflict ladder (Bleeding Kansas, or much of it, John Brown’s Raid and sectionally different reactions) especially if there is a ‘Panic of 1855’ or ’56, potentially influenced by the alt-Dred Scott, and/or a split of the Dems between northern and southern wings.
1856, Republicans win, with Lincoln or somebody midwestern or lower north. Among other things they are emphatic against slavery in the territories expansion of slavery into new states or expansion into territory that has the institution (like Texas, Cuba, Puerto Rico), but OK with expansion where it does not exist – California.
Texas, even if internally coming around to pro-annexation by 1854-55, finds it too late, because Republican congressional majorities oppose it.
South secedes, beginning with South Carolina.
Civil War is fought. During the war, Minnesota and Oregon enter the ranks of Union states, so does West Virginia, as a split-away from occupied Virginia. The Union has a more difficult time as it lacks California gold and produce. Also, the blockade is much more leaky, because the Texas Republic border remains open throughout the war.
However, the CSA suffers from the lack of Texas military manpower – which is busy fighting Comanche anyway, and Texas cattle and produce and related revenue. Texas uses war-related revenue to improve its credit and hasten repayments.
The Union largely follows the Anaconda Plan along with headlong strikes at Richmond and coastal descents. And the Union has more success in the Confederate west than east, conquering the length of the Mississippi and bisecting the Confederacy at the river by the 2 or 2.5 year mark. The overall war takes at least as long as OTL, lasting past the 1860 election, because of the leaky blockade factor.
But after the bisection of the CSA the impact of the Texas blockade loophole to the eastern and Tennessee Valley battlefronts becomes much less and constant pressure, attrition and maneuver, inevitably grinds down the Confederates.
The Republicans win the election of 1860, and secure Confederate surrender and occupation of the south in 1861 or possibly 1862.
During mid-war, when many parts of the Confederate interior become exposed to Union advances and raids, many slaveowners lease their slaves in Texas, with minor or female family members, or Texan partners. Some lacking in confidence migrate. In the final year of the war, an exodus, especially from unoccupied Trans-Mississippi areas, crosses over, forcing slaves along with them, as able. Ever increasing numbers of slaves resist evacuation and escape on these marches however.
Finally, in the last four to six months of the war, increasingly aware of imminent Confederate doom, and impending neighborhood with an angry American Army, and hearing vocal US protests against the movement of “contraband”/slaves in rebel hands who have been declared Emancipated but have been absconded to Texas [as well as complaints about Texan commerce and provisioning to rebels]. Texas bans cross-border movement slaves, and effectively, all blacks, accepting on white refugees, on humanitarian grounds, to which the USA does not object. Texas also tightens measures to ensure no matter what payment is offered, recognizably new Texan goods are not showing up in Confederate hands as the last Confederate territories and forces are getting plowed under by the Union tide. One demographic effect of Confederate refuge movements at the end of the war is that Louisiana turns from a nearly evenly matched black-white population ratio to a clear black majority, and the black proportion of Arkansans also substantially rises.
**Speaking of a hypothetical California Republic, here is the place I will discuss it, and the fate of the alternate northern Mexico, and Mexico in general.
As discussed, there is no US annexation of Texas, nor US-Mexican War of 1846-1848. Meanwhile, in 1848, a Mormon migration to Great Salt Lake in northern Mexico has occurred, and gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill in northern California, leading to to an influx of prospectors and other migrants, from the USA, Mexico, and the world over, to northern California for the rest of 1848, 1849, and into 1850.
The Mexican Republic is unable to control the influx, and newly springing up communities make their own law via vigilance committees. The Mexican government does try to expand its troop and naval presence to the Presidios and to collect revenue, for near non-existent services, which serves to irritate local communities. This serves to provoke a local California Republican revolution likely in 1850, or 1851 at the latest.
The resulting map of the area north of Mexico looks like below.
www.flickr.com/photos/22187058@N03/53596711386/in/photostream/lightbox/
Mexico retains control over the Rio Grande Valley and its traditional settlements of Santa Fe, and southern Alta California, and the deserts and mining districts in between.
Mexico is spared the Mexican - American war and its costs, but does face some costs associated with a California rebellion, and does not get the compensatory funds associated with the Mexican Cession or the Gadsden Purchase.
The effect of Mexico's future is uncertain. There is no guarantee that the Conservative versus Reforma War of the late 1850s will still happen as it did in OTL, but the societal issues between centralizing Catholic conservatism, and federal liberal anticlericalism seem like they would still be salient. And there is no certainty Mexico would fall as deeply into debt by 1861, nor that a tripartite Franco-Anglo-Spanish intervention to collect debt, followed by France's Mexican Empire adventure would ensue. One aspect that would be different would be that the USA would be free of its Civil War by the time of the multilateral debt collection mission started to turn into the Imperial adventure, so that might be a deterrent to Louis Napoleon's design. On the other hand, in this ATL, the USA, lacking possession of Texas and California, would not have a direct border with Mexico, to easily intervene against European forces.
Meanwhile, Henry Clay is the nominee of the Whig Party.
Clay wins, advantaged by the salience of economic issues and outside of committed Democratic partisans, memories of Van Buren's association with the Panic of 1837.
Clay, at least in the early years of his term, has a working Whig majority and passes elements of the Whig program, the American system. He declines to annex Texas. Outgoing President Tyler fails to secure a resolution annexing Texas, and seeing it unlikely to succeed in passing Congress, probably does not make the attempt.
Clay is not excessively doctrinaire against expansion, but he does not want to do it at risk of foreign war, or internal rupture to the Union. That ruled out Texas. In the case of Oregon, it ruled out threatening Britain with war to get them to yield control over Oregon Country to the 54-40 line, but it permits a negotiated boundary along the 49th parallel, with a favorable exception allowing Britain to possess the entirety of Vancouver island.
Also, Clay cannot and does not really seek to squelch internal expansion, and Florida is admitted as a slave state in 1845. This is followed by admission of Iowa as a free state in 1846. With that, parity between free states and slave states in the Union and Senators in the Senate is maintained.
In 1848 Wisconsin is admitted into the Union as a free state, giving the free states a one state, two Senator advantage over the slave states. Meanwhile, for the Presidential election, Henry Clay is lame duck, pre-pledged to not run for a second term by Whig Party ideology. The Whig Party seeks its next nominee, whom I have not figured out yet.
Daniel Webster would likely be a competitor for this nomination but is not assured of winning it.
This loss of Senate parity rallies the south more solidly to the Democrats, and the Democrats to an expansionist agenda, with the southwest and/or Cuba in mind, with the idea of “righting the balance”. Northern Democrats, at least western ones interested in more Pacific frontage and California gold, or with pro-southern sympathies, don’t object to the concept and are motivated going into the 1848 election, in which Clay is not standing. They also have their libertarian, Jacksonian complaints against Clay’s American system, and mobilize the immigrant vote, especially Catholic immigrant vote.
Polk is too ill to be the Democratic standard bearer. Cass is one of the more likely choices, though it may be someone else.
Disruptive of the Democrat’s expansionist plans, in the meantime, by the end of Clay’s term, jilted Texas has received Belgian recognition and a long-term, sustainable interest Belgian loan to manage its debts, and the self-confidence instilled among Texans and boost to American immigration made Texans pickier about the terms of annexation and revived the political fortunes of pro-independence, and at least independence-inclined, Mirabeau Lamar, who wins the 1848 Texas Presidential election.
This result, with the aggressive Lamar in charge, leaves the Belgian lenders a bit nervous. But they ride it out, ultimately speculating on profit from Texas cattle and cotton futures. They had made their loan offer under the more circumspect Houston administration, and lacked the anti-slavery qualms of more ant-slavery influenced British and French financiers.
The Cass (or alternate Democratic) Administration is unable to push for further expansion through reopening of the now settled Oregon question. Certainly, there is no appetite for war to reopen the question. If there is an independent California Republic** set up at some point there may be feelers or invitations about joining the Union, but any California Republic may have a slavery ban, and that could leave Cass’s southern Democratic supporters objecting to union with a California republic. Similar problems may bedevil and diplomatic exploration of a purchase of Alaska from the Russians.
Southerners would have greater enthusiasm for an annexation of Cuba, and the Democratic Administration puts out its ATL version of the Ostend Manifesto. There may be some filibuster expeditions, but they fail. There is not a Congressional consensus for war, purely for territorial expansion, without any sort of decent pretext or convincing provocation.
Frustrated in its expansion goals, and perhaps with only limited success in its anti-American System economic goals, and with a slightly more southern tilted caucus, after midterm losses in the north, the Democratic Administration and remaining Democratic Congressional majority in office from 1851 champions undoing the strict Missouri Compromise line of 36-30 and supports the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which proposes dividing the Unorganized territory north of Indian Territory between Kansas in the south and Nebraska in the south, and allowing the voters themselves to vote, when becoming eligible for statehood, for state constiutions, with, or without, legal slavery. The clear expectation of the Democrats is that Kansas territory, at the same general latitude as Missouri and Kentucky and Virginia, will choose legal slavery, and become a state sooner than other plains states, helping restore Senate balance, even if plantation slavery is unlikely to become the *predominant* mode of production in the state.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act provokes a firestorm of outrage in the north in 1851, among free state Democrats and ex-Whigs alike, that is channeled into the free-soil movement. It leads to the foundation of the Republican Party by the end of the year, which marries the Free-Soil platform and support for a populist Homestead Act and neutrality on immigration matters with a mostly Whig economic program, while steering clear in its campaign strategies and public image of old-style Whig and Federalist elitism.
The Democrats still prevail over the new party in the 1852 election. First Republican candidate wouldn’t be Fremont most likely. During their term, there is still no Spanish-American war for Cuba, no new states are “ripe” for admission. (There may be arguments by some northerners that Oregon is ripe, due to its popularity as America’s only west coast, and territory adjacent to California and California gold, and that its entry is being purposely delayed). Neither Texas nor California are annexed.
Judicial effects of changing the 1845-1848 Presidential term from Whigs get 3 appointments instead of Dems, but OTL, the Whigs got one of these as a do-over next term. So presuming Dred Scott was the same time, The majority could be 5 to 4 instead of 7-2.
A Dred Scott analogous case may come up in 1853 or 1854, with a similar ruling, but a smaller majority going along with the Chief Justice’s emphatic ruling.
The result, despite missing something escalatory events on the sectional conflict ladder (Bleeding Kansas, or much of it, John Brown’s Raid and sectionally different reactions) especially if there is a ‘Panic of 1855’ or ’56, potentially influenced by the alt-Dred Scott, and/or a split of the Dems between northern and southern wings.
1856, Republicans win, with Lincoln or somebody midwestern or lower north. Among other things they are emphatic against slavery in the territories expansion of slavery into new states or expansion into territory that has the institution (like Texas, Cuba, Puerto Rico), but OK with expansion where it does not exist – California.
Texas, even if internally coming around to pro-annexation by 1854-55, finds it too late, because Republican congressional majorities oppose it.
South secedes, beginning with South Carolina.
Civil War is fought. During the war, Minnesota and Oregon enter the ranks of Union states, so does West Virginia, as a split-away from occupied Virginia. The Union has a more difficult time as it lacks California gold and produce. Also, the blockade is much more leaky, because the Texas Republic border remains open throughout the war.
However, the CSA suffers from the lack of Texas military manpower – which is busy fighting Comanche anyway, and Texas cattle and produce and related revenue. Texas uses war-related revenue to improve its credit and hasten repayments.
The Union largely follows the Anaconda Plan along with headlong strikes at Richmond and coastal descents. And the Union has more success in the Confederate west than east, conquering the length of the Mississippi and bisecting the Confederacy at the river by the 2 or 2.5 year mark. The overall war takes at least as long as OTL, lasting past the 1860 election, because of the leaky blockade factor.
But after the bisection of the CSA the impact of the Texas blockade loophole to the eastern and Tennessee Valley battlefronts becomes much less and constant pressure, attrition and maneuver, inevitably grinds down the Confederates.
The Republicans win the election of 1860, and secure Confederate surrender and occupation of the south in 1861 or possibly 1862.
During mid-war, when many parts of the Confederate interior become exposed to Union advances and raids, many slaveowners lease their slaves in Texas, with minor or female family members, or Texan partners. Some lacking in confidence migrate. In the final year of the war, an exodus, especially from unoccupied Trans-Mississippi areas, crosses over, forcing slaves along with them, as able. Ever increasing numbers of slaves resist evacuation and escape on these marches however.
Finally, in the last four to six months of the war, increasingly aware of imminent Confederate doom, and impending neighborhood with an angry American Army, and hearing vocal US protests against the movement of “contraband”/slaves in rebel hands who have been declared Emancipated but have been absconded to Texas [as well as complaints about Texan commerce and provisioning to rebels]. Texas bans cross-border movement slaves, and effectively, all blacks, accepting on white refugees, on humanitarian grounds, to which the USA does not object. Texas also tightens measures to ensure no matter what payment is offered, recognizably new Texan goods are not showing up in Confederate hands as the last Confederate territories and forces are getting plowed under by the Union tide. One demographic effect of Confederate refuge movements at the end of the war is that Louisiana turns from a nearly evenly matched black-white population ratio to a clear black majority, and the black proportion of Arkansans also substantially rises.
**Speaking of a hypothetical California Republic, here is the place I will discuss it, and the fate of the alternate northern Mexico, and Mexico in general.
As discussed, there is no US annexation of Texas, nor US-Mexican War of 1846-1848. Meanwhile, in 1848, a Mormon migration to Great Salt Lake in northern Mexico has occurred, and gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill in northern California, leading to to an influx of prospectors and other migrants, from the USA, Mexico, and the world over, to northern California for the rest of 1848, 1849, and into 1850.
The Mexican Republic is unable to control the influx, and newly springing up communities make their own law via vigilance committees. The Mexican government does try to expand its troop and naval presence to the Presidios and to collect revenue, for near non-existent services, which serves to irritate local communities. This serves to provoke a local California Republican revolution likely in 1850, or 1851 at the latest.
The resulting map of the area north of Mexico looks like below.
www.flickr.com/photos/22187058@N03/53596711386/in/photostream/lightbox/Mexico retains control over the Rio Grande Valley and its traditional settlements of Santa Fe, and southern Alta California, and the deserts and mining districts in between.
Mexico is spared the Mexican - American war and its costs, but does face some costs associated with a California rebellion, and does not get the compensatory funds associated with the Mexican Cession or the Gadsden Purchase.
The effect of Mexico's future is uncertain. There is no guarantee that the Conservative versus Reforma War of the late 1850s will still happen as it did in OTL, but the societal issues between centralizing Catholic conservatism, and federal liberal anticlericalism seem like they would still be salient. And there is no certainty Mexico would fall as deeply into debt by 1861, nor that a tripartite Franco-Anglo-Spanish intervention to collect debt, followed by France's Mexican Empire adventure would ensue. One aspect that would be different would be that the USA would be free of its Civil War by the time of the multilateral debt collection mission started to turn into the Imperial adventure, so that might be a deterrent to Louis Napoleon's design. On the other hand, in this ATL, the USA, lacking possession of Texas and California, would not have a direct border with Mexico, to easily intervene against European forces.
