Indicus's maps, wikiboxes, &c thread

kratostatic · Jul 3, 2022

Indicus said:
The next few years saw Anderson publish his Constitutions, which standardized Freemasonry and, more notably, . The next few decades saw a schism between Moderns and Ancients, the Ancients believing in restoring a more "pure" Freemasonry, as well as the expansion of both forms across the empire, and even beyond.

There's a couple of missing bits in this passage - "and more notably." ,no description for the "Moderns".

Indicus · Jul 15, 2022

Carl Friedrich Gauss was a man with a long and illustrious career. Born in 1777, he was a child prodigy in mathematics. This attracted attention from the Duke of Brunswick, who sent him to university, where he made a great number of discoveries. He proved that a polygon could be constructed with a ruler and compass if the number of its sides was the product of Fermat primes and a power of 2, he proved the law of quadratic reciprocity and the prime number theorem, and he published a textbook which turned number theory into a true discipline all by the age of 21. For the rest of his life, he continued to work on mathematics, and he worked on other fields as well. In astronomy, he helped confirm the discovery of Ceres and independently developed the Fast Fourier Transform for interpolating orbits. In statistics, he discovered the normal distribution, as well as the method of least squares. To carry out land surveys, he developed the heliotrope, to measure positions by reflecting sunlight over vast distances. And finally, he was involved in the early development of magnetism.

In 1828, Alexander von Humboldt suggested to Gauss to apply his talents to magnetism, and in its wake, he made a number of notable discoveries and inventions. He created a magnetometer, to determine the strength of magnets, he discovered that magnetism obeys the inverse square law, and he measured Earth's magnetic field. But most notably, in collaboration with physicist Wilhelm Weber, he constructed the world's first electric telegraph to use induction in 1833. That Joseph Henry's discovery of induction made electric telegraphy viable in a manner that was impossible with static electricity is undeniable, but it required significant development. To test this, they constructed a wire connecting Gauss's and Weber's offices in the University of Gottingen, which transmitted electric current to make an electric needle on the other end move either positively or negatively. At first using this to set up a common time, they quickly realized they could transmit the alphabet using a common binary code, and thus is the origin of the Gauss-Weber code, often simply known as the Gauss code, consisting originally of 25 characters.

This quickly attracted the attention of the Hanoverian government. The Popular Revolution had resulted in the Hanoverian dynasty being removed from the British throne, and this resulted in the formerly-absentee dynasty being forced into exile in Hanover. This naturally made it very suspicious of revolution as well as the French nearby, and that the electric telegraph could help secure the electorate was quickly foreseen; that Gauss was well-known for his conservative politics reassured them that this was no university attempt to foster revolution. As a result, Elector Edward invested much money into the electric telegraph. The Gauss-Weber Code was further developed into a full system for the German language, and by the late 1830s it was spreading along with railways across German cities. By the 1840s, it was being used to create vast telegraph networks, not only in Germany but in France and even in the British Isles. New telegraphs were made to print code on paper tape, using short and long pulses rather than positive and negative currents to represent binary code, and from there it spread around the world. In 1844, the Gauss-Weber code was further used in Hanover to communicate using the very same sun mirrors Gauss had used to survey land, and this spread for more ad-hoc long-range communication.

And with that, electric telegraphs spread around the world. Vast oceanic cables were laid out around the world, and suddenly communication across continents was far quicker than before. And though the telegraph era would one day come to an end with the rise of photonics, the age of interconnectedness it inaugurated has never ended.

Indicus · Jul 18, 2022

The Council of State is an official council which advises the Chief Magistrate on the use of her powers, and it consists of eleven appointees. Most of them may be done at her discretion with the unofficial restriction that they must be nonpartisan, but three are from the civil service. The Clerk of the Council of State is the head of the British civil service, and his two Vice Clerks are also members of the Council.

The Council of State is rooted in the Privy Council of the old monarchy. The Privy Council is itself rooted in the medieval-era royal court; as it was divided into multiple bodies with a degree of independence from the monarchy, the Privy Council consisted of those who were directly tied to the monarchy, which accumulated executive, judicial, and legislative powers in one body. As the medieval era turned to early modernity, the Privy Council could therefore be used as a tool to circumvent Parliament and the courts. The most infamous example of this is the Star Chamber, a judicial body formed of Privy Counsellors which meted out extreme punishments to enemies of the King; ever since its abolition during the Puritan Revolution, it has become a metonym for tyranny.

The Privy Council was abolished during the Puritan Revolution, and a Council of State governed during the Commonwealth. When Oliver Cromwell established himself as monarch of the British Isles in all but name, it became his privy council. When the Stuarts were restored, the old Privy Council was restored as part of the process of overturning the Revolution. In practice, power was increasingly centralized into a committee of the Privy Council nicknamed the Cabinet. Following the Glorious Revolution, power was centralized further into them, and following the rise of the Hanoverians and the ascent of Robert Walpole as the British Isle's first Prime Minister, the Cabinet became the chief executive body, often meeting in the absence of the monarch.

The Privy Council effectively became a super-council, overshadowed by its committees. As a whole it nevertheless made Orders-in-Council, legislation strictly subsidiary to Parliament, but typically this was decided by the Cabinet. As the eighteenth century continued, because the monarch never removed members from the rolls except in rare situations, it included not only incumbent cabinet ministers but also former ones. Nevertheless, there were situations in which cabinet ministers were removed from the privy council rolls. Famously when in 1798 Charles James Fox gave a public toast to "our Sovereign's Health, the Majesty of the People", he was removed from the Privy Council for what was viewed as an extreme act of disloyalty.

In 1827, with the Popular Revolution, King Frederick fled and so did much of his administration. This left the Privy Council virtually devoid of members, with only the Whig members of the 1812 Moira ministry meeting. Led by Lord Erskine, who served as Lord High Chancellor in the Moira ministry, they met as the Privy Council along with some other notable Whigs. Here, they declared the convening of a Convention Parliament to determine the new government of the British Isles. During the provisional period, this Privy Council, with Lord Erskine as its president, committed itself to the tough job of governing the British Isles for the time being. The Convention Parliament framed for the British Isles a new government, along with an ambitious and far-reaching Charter of Liberties and Securities, and many residual powers of the Privy Council were removed while the Cabinet was made an official council. For the first time, Britain had a constitution.

The Frame of Government officially forbade any holders of offices of profit from being Members of Parliament, and for the first time this included the Cabinet; left unstated was whether this included Privy Counsellors who had emoluments. Following the 1829 election, members of the new Privy Council resigned from Parliament although cabinet ministers sat in Parliament as non-voting members. In the extremely chaotic atmosphere of the era, votes of no confidence were common but the wide Whig-Radical majority prevented unseating of the government. But in 1831, this ran out. Believing himself unfairly shunted from government, Samuel Whitbread organized a coalition between his Mountain Whigs and Radicals both within and without his government, and they successfully ousted the government in a vote of no confidence. Samuel Whitbread successfully secured himself as the new prime minister, and his coalition was the root of the modern Radical Party. But left unstated was what would occur to the old Privy Councillors. Though Lord Althorp ran for parliament immediately after his loss, the government declared his position as a lifelong member of the Privy Council made this impossible; that he had emoluments from such a role made him ineligible. Though he was irked by this, he nevertheless accepted this and resigned from the Privy Council. This therefore set a precedent, that upon an electoral defeat partisan members of the Privy Council would resign.

But as governments rose and fell, there emerged a division within the Privy Council, between those who shifted by administration and those who were permanent. Those permanent included those advisors of the Chief Magistrate and clerks of the increasingly-sizeable civil service, and those who rotated included members of the Cabinet and those directly subject to it. This division only expanded as the civil service increased in scale, and the tenure of Wilfrid Lawson securing the British Isles as republican led to this arrangement being considered a permanent one. But this division was not quite set by law. It took until the administration of C.J.F. Martineau for this division to be set by law, as part of his general reform of the systems of government. It established a Council of State to advise the Chief Magistrate on the exercise of residual powers. In 1927, it played a crucial role in the Chief Magistrate's extremely controversial decision to dissolve Parliament. With the Frame of Government declaring the assent to any law reducing the liberties and securities of the British people a form of treason, the Press Bill which seemed to threaten freedom of speech quite literally put his life on the line. The irregular election saw the ruling government defeated, but with his impartiality torn to shreds the Council of State advised the Chief Magistrate resign. Thus, the Council of State served its purpose. Since then, it has become more obscure. Councillors of State tend to include fewer old lawyers and instead more eminent personalities. But it remains an institution with high stature.

Indicus · Jul 27, 2022

The College of Conservators is a French government body which serves as the house of constitutional review for the legislature, in addition to serving the function of electing and removing the Grand Elector, who serves as France's ceremonial head of state for twenty-year terms.

Following the 18 Brumaire coup in 1799 by General Joubert and the dissolution of the French Directory, the newly-pliant Councils of Five Hundred and Ancients gathered a constitutional committee to write a new constitution that would hopefully conclude the French Revolution. Led by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, it put the constitutional theories that he, with experience throughout the French Revolution, had crafted in mind. According to this, the voting population of France, of five million, would draw up lists of communal notables with a tenth of their number, which in turn would draw up lists of departmental notables with a tenth of their number, which in turn would draw up lists of national notables with a tenth of their number. To organize the government, a College of Conservators would then select from these lists all members of judicial and legislative bodies, as well as electing the Grand Elector to serve as head-of-state-for-life who would then select consuls to run the executive branch. To select the Grand Elector, it was to hold a secret ballot each year, with the results stored in urns, and six urns at a time would be kept with old urns emptied; upon a vacancy in the Grand Electorship, it would vote on which urn to count its ballots, and its leading candidate would be made Grand Elector. Furthermore, it would extend its number through co-option, including the power to make any citizen of France a Conservator against their will (which in the act would force them to vacate all their public offices). It was a mode of government which Sieyès alleged could avoid the dangerous centralization of power and conflict of bodies that led to ruin during the Convention and Directory periods by disseminating power across numerous bodies which would nonetheless be in tandem with one another, and that it was a thinly-disguised oligarchy appealed to some after the tumult of the revolution. But nonetheless, this constitution got ratified, and so the first College of Conservators was constituted with Sieyès as its first Conservator.

For a time, this arrangement worked. While meeting intermittently, the College nonetheless exerted massive pressure by constituting all the bodies of government, and thus established France in the early nineteenth century as a decisively moderate state. The ambitious program of the ratification of the Cambacérès Code, as well as the expansion of French commerce all around the world following the end of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1804, saw France reap the benefits of stability and modernization. But disdain towards the blatantly undemocratic nature of the government nonetheless made itself known in the lists, and it saw expression among oppositionist Tribunes such as Benjamin Constant. Ultimately, this stability could not last, and when a French armada headed to the Caribbean was intercepted and nearly destroyed by a British fleet in 1822, war broke out between Britain and France. As this turned into a grand European war, the French administration proved less than satisfactory with dealing with these threats. In 1824, dissatisfaction with this turned into mass calls for recall of the government and its replacement for another, and to the horror of many this led to a Jacobin conspiracy inciting mob violence in Paris. While crushed, this led to the recalling of the College in an emergency session, and it officially removed the government by recalling Grand Elector Roederer and replaced it with one of moderate reformers. This period then saw numerous dramatic reforms, chiefly one allowing for direct election of the Legislative Body that ratified laws based on proposals from the Council of State or Tribunate, but also by reducing list sizes to give the people more say in the selection of their government officials. These reforms made France into a constitutional state with a broad electorate; it also weakened the College dramatically as the government ceased to be their mere property and instead it had to consider the will of the people. But nonetheless, it remained a influential body.

And this brought it into conflict. With the end of the war in 1830 and France being at peace once more, and now with friendly relations with the revolutionary state in the British Isles, the newly-wealthy middle classes saw in the College a body directly opposed to their interests. Over the 1830s, Consul Lafitte attempted to weaken them, but his party flew apart and he got little further than reducing the numbers of national notables to reduce their say over the legislature. This project was completed, however, by Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who won election based on his record as a general and effectively forced the Grand Elector to appoint him by winning the support of most members of the list of national notables. Through various threats, he forced the College to accept a constitutional amendment that would drastically reduce their power: the list of national notables would be elected directly by the people, and it would consist of 100 names of which half would be appointed to the Council of State and the other half to the Tribunate. In addition to the directly-elected Legislative Body, this effectively turned France into a quasi-bicameral state, and it made it impossible for anyone not commanding a majority of national notables to be consul. Now bereft of its power to nominate members, it reduced its powers to election of the Grand Elector and constitutional review of legislation. In practice, it could only use constitutional review sparingly, lest it cause a grand outrage, and all review needed to be forwarded by the Tribunate first as part of the legislative process - this limited that power. But it could be used.

Due to the appointment process of the College by co-option and its appointments being for life, it was insulated from public opinion. As a result, when the Radicals broke a long period of Unionist dominance and made their way into power in 1898, they faced an issue of the College being almost entirely Unionist. When it came time for the Radicals to present their sweeping reform agenda of funding unprecedented welfare reforms, though they got their reforms past the Legislative Body, the Unionist-controlled Tribunate requested constitutional review and the College declared them unconstitutional. Following two irregular elections and the College blocking the reforms each time, the College was finally forced to accept the law. But the outrage was such that it also led to numerous reforms. First, Conservators were now term-limited, with ten year terms offset such that each year would see ten new Conservators appointed assuming each seat is filled. Secondly, for each new nomination the Council of State, the Tribunate, and the Legislative Body would each nominate candidates and the College would be required pick one of them. Finally, the power of the College to constitutionally review laws was harshly limited. For a law to be forwarded to it, it would require two-thirds of the Tribunate to object, rather than a mere majority. The College was forced to accept this, and put to a referendum it won a decisive majority. Since then, the College has become a far less powerful body, more important as a ceremonial electoral college and an emergency check on power than as an organ of government.

The College of Conservators meets at the Tuileries Palace. The Tuileries has long been connected to the Louvre and serves as part of the museum most of the year, but it contains a debate chamber for the College, which meets intermittently. During its sessions, the halls connecting the Louvre to the Tuileries are closed. Conservators, wearing their formal dress of a tunic and red cape meant to be reminiscent of ancient Rome, enter the debate chamber. Here, they begin their sessions after electing a president by lot. Their sessions are typically ones of general review of the government, unless it has been convened irregularly by the Tribunate to review the constitutionality of laws. More particular are the annual sessions in which it holds secret ballot elections for grand elector, in which the results of these annual ballots are kept in an urn and, if there were already six urns, the oldest urn is destroyed without revealing its contents. The new urn is then sealed and labelled with its year, with urns kept securely away. Upon the death, resignation, removal, or expiry of term of a Grand Elector, the College votes on which urn to open, and the candidate with the most votes is then inaugurated as Grand Elector.

Radac · Jul 28, 2022

Indicus said:
The origins of the Partition of India are enormously controversial and heavily disputed; nevertheless, in 1946, the leader of the Muslim League Muhammad Ali Jinnah brazenly declared, "We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India", and the following year, both occurred. A line was drawn carving out Pakistan from India by a man who knew little of the ground situation, and even if he did there was no clean way to draw such a line with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other. The result proved to be horrific. Mass rioting broke out, and Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religious fanatics saw a clear opportunity to create a pure society through ethnic cleansing. Hindus and Sikhs on Pakistan's side of the border, and Muslims on India's side, fled onto trains to the other side, as they realized the only alternative was to be slaughtered. Entire peoples were created, such as the Punjabis of Delhi and the Mohajirs of Karachi. The result was massive amounts of destruction, and both India and Pakistan were left broken societies, left to make the long road to recovery. There are many who say they have yet to recover; there are still others who say they never will.

Pakistan was, further, left with the issue of being divided into two halves, one western and one eastern. The western half, centred around Urdu-Punjabi culture and dominant within the Muslim League, and the eastern half, centred around Bengali culture and having a majority of the population. In the western half, virtually all Hindus and Sikhs fled to India; the eastern half, even with mass flight, was 18% Hindu. This political division very quickly made itself known on the national level, when Bengalis who made up a majority of the state advocated parity between Bengali and Urdu. This quickly irked Jinnah, who himself abandoned his native Gujarati for Urdu and believed Bengalis should accept Urdu hegemony. In a speech given in Dhaka on April 21, 1948, where in addition to declaring Partition exclusively featured anti-Muslim violence, accusing his opponents of being communists, and declaring every Muslim should join the Muslim League, he declared that Pakistan's national language ought to be only Urdu and tarred those who said otherwise as enemies of Pakistan. This brazen statement was met with horror by Bengali society at large, causing agitations, all the while Jinnah refused attempts to enact any sort of compromise. Ultimately, with the constitution yet to be written, these protests dissipated.

At the same time, Islam was quickly framed as the founding principle of the nation. In a speech to the Karachi Bar Association on January 25, 1948, Jinnah declared that the issue of the constitution was resolved 1,300 years ago and it would be framed on the basis of sharia. Furthermore, he set up a Department of Islamic Reconstruction led by Muhammad Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss), and he requested assistance from Hassan al-Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, on writing a constitution to frame Pakistan's government as purely Islamic. At the same time, Jinnah spurned Islamic doctrine. He drank wine, ate pork sausages, and had a large collection of Saville Row suits. How could he justify such an asymmetry? Fundamentally, it was because to him Islam did not necessarily denote a religion; instead, it denoted a Perso-Arabic culture which, in the subcontinent, involved Urdu. That Bengalis do not fit such a culture and instead are "culturally Hindu", was the principal reason behind Bengali tensions.

The project of the writing of the constitution proved difficult. As Governor-General, Jinnah could not directly affect affairs of the Constituent Assembly despite his immense cult of personality, and thus instead it proved enormously inept. After India promulgated a constitution in 1949 to come in effect the next year, Jinnah realized there was a need to expedite the writing of the constitution. Using both his cult of personality and his power as Governor-General, he organized a special committee consisting of yes-men who write his desired constitution. According to this, Pakistan was to feature a very strong presidency - with few doubting who the president would be - and a very weak parliament. With Jinnah having a very low opinion of politicians other than him, the prime minister was to be abolished and instead the cabinet would be responsible to the president. Furthermore, the provincial governments were to include very weak powers, and the Bengali language was not to be official. Though this was met with an uproar, Jinnah successfully got this constitution passed in late 1951.

The result was rioting in East Bengal. It took a wave of suppression and mass arrests to end this, and this necessitated delaying elections. But at the same time, Jinnah came to realize some sort of compromise was necessary. And so, he declared that, within East Bengal, Bengali would have constitutionally-recognize provincial status, and that on the national level, an appropriately "Islamized" Bengali written with Perso-Arabic script would be a secondary language of business. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who broke away from the Muslim League and formed the Awami League over Jinnah's emphasis on Islam in state, quickly emerged as the leader of this Bengali regionalism.

In 1953, Pakistan faced yet another issue when Acting President Jinnah received a petition advocating the marginalization of members of the Ahmadi sect of Islam. This, Jinnah refused, and the result was mass rioting across Punjab. Jinnah denounced this publicly, declaring Ahmadi fellow Muslims who ought to be treated as such. However, few of the rioters agreed with this - indeed, that was why they were rioting - and so it continued. It took Jinnah declaring martial law to end these protests.

Finally, by 1954, a presidential election could be held. It quickly turned into a contest between Jinnah of the Muslim League and Suhrawardy of the Awami League. That Suhrawardy received endorsements from Hindu groups led his party to be nicknamed the "Hindu League", and the perception of his party being that of Hindus and "cultural Hindus" led him to be regarded as the candidate of Hindus. At the same time, Jinnah's extreme popularity in west Pakistan meant most saw his victory as self-evident. If there was evidence there was less popularity in East Bengal, it could be easily disregarded. For indeed, who would vote out the founder of the nation?

The results of the election showed that many would.

View attachment 54567

Across western Pakistan, for lack of any real competitor Jinnah won by massive margins, in some subdistricts by 90%+ margins; only in Balochistan did Suhrawardy make up a notable margin. In Kalat and some areas of the North-West Frontier Province, where due to rebellion elections were tough to hold, some fraud occurred, but for the most part this was a fair margin, representative of the intense reverence of Pakistanis towards Jinnah as well as the lack of political organization outside the Muslim League. In East Bengal, the story could not be any more different. It was not only Hindus who voted for Suhrawardy; it was a majority of Bengalis. But this majority was nowhere near the majorities Jinnah won by in west Pakistan, and there were enough Biharis in East Bengal and (at this juncture) pro-Jinnah Bengalis that despite East Bengal making up a majority of Pakistan's population, Jinnah won. But the margin was nowhere near what people thought, and it showed that Jinnah's status was far more insecure than commonly believed.

In the coming years, this proved a powerful driver for the adjustment of electoral laws and democratic backsliding; if even with Jinnah at the nation's head the Bengalis could come within spitting distance at taking the presidency, it was revealing of Bengalis having too much potential power. This displayed itself very quickly in the parliamentary elections in the coming weeks, where East Bengal was made to use proportional representation which no other part of Pakistan used. In the following years the Muslim League was entrenched as Pakistan's vanguard party. Though this all ensured that the Muslim League got to continue leading the nation, it also led many Bengalis to wonder if, indeed, being part of Pakistan was really a good thing....

Shabash!

Does Pakistan still pass the Objectives Resolution of 1949?

Indicus · Jul 28, 2022

Rooin Mahmood said:
Shabash!

Does Pakistan still pass the Objectives Resolution of 1949?

Thanks.

Something like it would definitely be in this Pakistan's constitution - the resolution summarizes quite well the ideology of the first generation of Pakistani nationalists.

Radac · Jul 28, 2022

Indicus said:
Thanks.

Something like it would definitely be in this Pakistan's constitution - the resolution summarizes quite well the ideology of the first generation of Pakistani nationalists.

That is true. It's a common myth that Jinnah was a secularist so it's nice to see someone break the mould and show him neither as the comically evil Islamist nor as the enlightened liberal secularist.

Indicus · Aug 6, 2022

Indicus · Aug 28, 2022

Following a long period as a Congressman and Senator, Henry Clay ascended to the post of Secretary of State in the cabinet of William Crawford in 1825. This was due to that Clay was at the time a strict constructionist much like him, and because he had shown himself to be skilled at foreign policy in the Senate. As Secretary of State, Clay dealt with the difficult foreign policy of the era, of a new European war afoot and of the difficulties in keeping the Mississippi border between Spanish Luisiana and the US open. He focused particularly on the latter, because as a Kentuckian he knew quite well the importance of the Mississippi. When Spain closed New Orleans, Clay made a last-ditch effort to negotiate, and when this failed he got Crawford on board a war with Spain. In brief, the Luisiana War (1825-28) saw the United States outmatch the Spanish on land, and it saw it hopelessly outmatched on sea. As a result, the US swiftly took most of Luisiana as well as the Floridas, but it found it almost impossible to stop Spanish ships from bombing Charleston and retaking the mouth of the Mississippi multiple times. But nonetheless, Spain was beaten in a land over which it never had firm control, and the two powers concluded a treaty which granted the United States control over Luisiana and the Floridas; Clay's attempts to get a border up to the Rio Grande failed, however. But nonetheless, this war was an enormous success for the United States, dramatically expanding its territory. And yet, it exposed numerous American state failures. The war caused currency and monetary disarray, and the American Navy was shown decisively to be small and incapable of a serious match with any European country. Clay ceased to be a strict constructionist as a result of them, and he moved towards a more expansive view of the government.

Crawford suffered a stroke in 1827; come 1828, he discounted a run for re-election. Instead, Clay ran for the presidency, and having credit for the Luisiana War's successes, he swept the field over a divided opposition. In his presidency, he immediately pushed a series of reforms. First, he established a Second Bank of the United States, to manage the national debt and issue monetary notes as on the Hamiltonian model. Using his mastery of parliamentary procedure in a Congress increasingly sympathetic towards such a position, he successfully constituted such a bank, despite the opposition it engendered. Second, he established a national naval academy, and it came in tandem with a dramatic naval expansion. Furthermore, he invested in internal improvements, with a special focus towards acquired Luisiana, and they served to connect the nation. But in 1832, he made an extremely controversial decision. Towards the end of a plan of import substitution, he sought a protectionist economic policy, and the Tariff of 1821 established unprecedented economic protection. But though popular in New England, it caused mass controversy in the South dependent on the export of slave-produced goods to other countries (particularly Britain). In the South, there were already many alleging the Clayite program of expanding the national government would one day destroy slavery (despite Clay being a slaveowner), and this stoked such fears.

In South Carolina, many spoke of the doctrine of nullification, of the right of states to nullify national law. John C. Calhoun, who previously had a record as a nationalist, endorsed nullification, and it received the direct endorsement of the South Carolinian legislature. And though its appeal in the rest of the South was much weaker, the sentiments of outrage over the Tariff continued. Thus, Calhoun ran for president in 1832, seeking the consolidation of the South and parts of the West against Clay's overreach, under a platform of nullification. He was immediately hamstrung when the so-called "State Rights" caucus in Congress, consisting of Congressmen opposed to the tariff but not to the degree of supporting nullification, held a convention in which it nominated Hugh L. White as president. While in the North, the former Governor of New York and longstanding politician DeWitt Clinton, at the age of 62, made a run for president, claiming Clay to be a crypto-Federalist - in practice, this was a vanity run by a man who dearly wished to be president. Yet, here too things got more complicated as the Anti-Catholic Party, consisting of those opposed to the recent Irish Catholic migrations caused by the famine, organized their own slate for the presidency; their power in parts of New England made them formidable. Attempts by Van Buren, who viewed Clay as little more than a Federalist and sought to establish a "true Republican" party in opposition, entirely floundered due to all these tickets.

This extreme fracturing caused attempts to tie up tickets; that the Nullifiers and State Righters were both entirely southern with overlapping vote bases made attempts to tie up imminent. Following the Thirteenth Amendment, elections were held per state by "presidential district" in popular vote, and so some attempts were made to negotiate district registration agreements between the two. But this backfired when Clay's talked of this as proof that State Righters were simply nullifiers in false garb, and the spectre of this diminished these attempts to prevent vote cancellation. While in the North, the Anti-Catholics entirely discarded the possibility of cooperating with Clinton as he previously had Catholic support; furthermore, he was a Freemason, which to many Anti-Catholics was almost as bad as being a Catholic.

At the same time to all of this, Clay's supporters brought up the spectre of a hung college. They claimed a vote for, say, White may lead to Clinton coming to power despite this being opposite to State Righter interests, and vice versa. This helped to ensure Clay gained supporters from those who found him the lesser evil. While Clay's base in the West and Upper South generally stood still, despite some encroachment on the latter; Clinton generally failed to properly attract New Englander migrants to his party. Furthermore, Clay's status as a slaveholder and a few choice remarks on "rabid abolitionists" meant that he was not a nonentity in most of the South.

All of this meant that Clay won a sweeping margin in the election despite controversy over his ideals and platform.

The election would be hampered further when Clinton died of a heart attack before electoral votes were to be certified by Congress; it simply certified his votes anyways, and they declared that in the case that the winner of a presidential election would die before certification, they would simply consider the office devolved on the vice president.

Clay's victory was ultimately down to him being the only truly national candidate. In the years that followed, this lesson was learned at heart by Van Buren, who sought to create an opposition party representing the old Republican values, and he ultimately succeeded in this goal. Furthermore, with it being proved the nation was behind him, Clay got passed a compromise tariff that ended the Nullification Crisis decisively. This was one of many things that earned him the title of the "Great Compromiser". But ultimately, the sectional division of the states came up once more within a few years of this election; slavery, here a mere subtext, would burst onto the national stage over the admission of Missouri. And few would see this coming...

Indicus · Aug 31, 2022

The Bank of England was first established in 1694 in the Kingdom of England. In the wake of a crushing defeat of France, King William of Orange desired a vast fleet to avenge it, but this required a series of loans. To back subscription to this loan, the English government established the Bank of England as a public-private partnership; privileges given to the Bank included the issuing of promissory notes, as well as possession of state monies. From these beginnings, the Bank of England helped finance the many projects that made England, and later Britain, powerful. The successes of this bank resulted in it getting repeatedly rechartered. But nonetheless, this loan and other loans continued to be managed by it, and in an age when national debt was viewed as a curse, this led to discomfort. Only later was the national debt viewed as a blessing rather than a curse.

Over the eighteenth century, the Bank of England financed Britain's rise to empire. Notably, the rise of the business opportunities of colonialism inspired a bubble which popped in 1772 when John Forsyth was bankrupted shorting East India Company stock, which hit his partners and inspired a credit crisis which resulted in the closure of many British banks, while the Bank of England was left with dangerously low reserves. When the badly damaged EIC requested a loan from the Bank of England, it got one. But to pay it back, it needed to increase its trade; lobbying Parliament, it got ratified the Tea Act which reduced tea duties to the Thirteen Colonies to allow the EIC to undercut illegal competitors; this proved to be one of the Acts of Parliament that led to the American Revolution.

During the American Revolution, the Bank of England proved prosperous as it financed the war effort; even George Washington maintained a share in it. This period of prosperity continued, and with the warfare brought on by the French Revolution, it continued yet further. But then, in 1796, the Great Irish Rebellion began, and to assist it a French army led by General Hoche landed in Bantry Bay. In England, this caused widespread panic, and holders of promissory notes panicked and traded them for bullion. However, as twice as many notes were printed as was bullion in reserves, many feared this would bankrupt the Bank of England, and indeed, the ratio between promissory notes and reserve monies got far more precipitous. This resulted in exchange being suspended for the duration of the war, even after the Great Irish Rebellion was suppressed and Hoche killed at Tara. In practice, this meant a suspension of the gold standard, as the Bank continued to print notes for financing the war effort. Postwar, the suspension continued, as the Bank needed to reconstruct its reserves; it was only in 1817, 13 years after peace with France, that the Bank allowed for conversion once more.

War began once more in 1821, when the British intercepted a French fleet in the Caribbean, and the Bank of England once more got to work in financing the war effort. Some promissory note holders converted to bullion out of fear of an imminent suspension, but not nearly as much as previously. And so, these years proved prosperous for the Bank of England as it financed the war effort. But this was less the case for the British people: the suppression of the movement for reform as treasonous was despised by many, and the war effort was unpopular. In 1825, various radical groups sought to make their message known by starting a run on gold; they in turn caused a panic which caused others unrelated to the radicals to convert their notes to bullion. This panic badly threatened the Bank of England, and so Parliament suspended conversion of notes once more and the government jailed dissenting radicals. This allowed the bank to continue to finance the war effort, despite criticism of this policy. But then in 1827, finally popular unrest broke out into revolution. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came to an end.

The provisional government sought to maintain the Bank of England as a bulwark, despite hard-money radicals calling for its dissolution, and despite much of its upper echelons fleeing the state. Thus, the Convention Parliament voted to continue the suspension of conversion over disdain by hard-money radicals. This helped to ensure it would not flee the state. But its dire reserve state continued, and the end of wartime streams of financing could only result in its situation getting more dire. Thus, though following the Convention Parliament it had the full support of the Althorp ministry, it needed to gain a better balance, to that end financing loans and colonial endeavours with impunity. This was particularly the case in Australia, where the bank hatred (as in the Canadas) was weak and the opportunities for profit were vast. But the weak Althorp administration was no confidence'd in 1831, and its replacement - the Whitbread administration - contained a good number of hard-money radicals and others who hated the Bank. Such feelings were mutual, as the bank was dominated by Traditionalists and non-radical Whigs. In this period, Parliament did not renew the suspension of note conversion, and the result proved to be a run on the bank damaging the reserves under reconstruction. This in turn inspired further financing of dubious colonial endeavours.

The end result of this was that in 1834, the bubble popped as venture after venture failed. The resulting panic proved to be vast, bankrupting most banks in the British Isles and diminishing the Bank of England's reserves to near-nonexistence. This in turn resulted in Bank of England stock to be sold in vast numbers, resulting in its value plummeting. Seeing all of this, the Whitbread administration made a decision to establish a United Bank of the British Isles in close tandem with the administration to serve as the national bank. Notably, it was required to keep promissory notes and reserves at a ratio of at most 1.5:1. It also decided to give it a monopoly over the printing of pound notes, and government deposits were forcibly moved there. Thus, the Bank of England was left as a private company. Attempting to survive in this state, it pushed for severe retrenchment and cut most of its loans and many of its branches. But this only allowed for other banks to take its place. And so, finally, the Bank of England wound down its operations in 1839.

Its building at Threadneedle Street would pass many hands; it is today a museum of modern art. Here, its history as the leading bank of the British Isles may still be seen.

Indicus · Sep 4, 2022

In his second term in office, Henry Clay continued his policies. He financed internal improvements to link together the nation, particularly over the new Louisiana territories. In the form of internal improvements, he financed links between the east and west, particularly in the form of roads, but also in the form of establishing canals. Famously, the government helped finance canals in the Susquehanna to link Philadelphia to Lake Erie. The Second Bank of the United States, which Clay so decisively got established, played a decisive role in cruising the United States through the economic instability caused by the collapse of the Bank of England. Naval buildup continued apace, although helped by the South unnerved at the possibility of Britain and France taking away their slaves. Only on occasion did Clay cause controversy, such as when he attempted to gain congressional support for the African Colonization Society - support that then failed, as Southerners alleged the ACS was part of a plot to gradually emancipate American slaves, much as had occurred in the British Isles (in a process ending in 1834). But nonetheless, Clay seemed to be a success. And as the territory of Missouri reached statehood numbers and came up for admission as a state, this continued to be the case. But then, as the bill was being discussed in Congress, one congressman proposed an amendment requiring it to suspend all slavery in its borders and gradual manumission. And all hell broke loose.

While slavery was an issue in the United States from the very beginning, by and large it had not entered Congress before this point, and northern antislavery types were satisfied by the southern belief of slavery being a "necessary evil" which should be abolished eventually. Such beliefs were broken by Saint-Domingue, till that point a nominal French colony led by the abolitionist former slave Toussaint Louverture, breaking away from France in 1822 as Haiti, following a bungled French attempt to impose a successor following his death. Haiti succeeded in part because it fought hard against all attempts to bring it back under colonial domination, and in part because an invasion was forestalled by Britain and France going to war. That this war ultimately ended with the British Isles consumed in revolution, the new regime which ultimately abolished slavery, only panicked the South more. And the French intervention in the Bahian War of Independence led to mass slave revolts across Portuguese Brazil, which similarly stoked fears in the American south. It led to a strengthening of the southern view of slavery as a "positive good". Thus, the North's desire to restrict slavery as much as possible came headfirst into this.

The north's population growth led to it being dominant in the House of Representatives. And so, the resolution for slavery restriction in Missouri won a majority of the House over the negative vote of the South. The debate got more and more acrimonious, as southern congressmen alleged this would lead to a Haiti-style revolution, and on both sides people spoke of a dissolution of the union being preferable to the alternative. The debate continued, and it also got outside Congress and became a truly national issue. The discussion of southern secession that occurred during the Nullification Crisis made a return, and it got stronger. "Minutemen" groups trained, and medallions were struck declaring Southern firebrand John C. Calhoun the "First President of the Southern Confederacy". As for Calhoun himself, he made open speeches in Congress about the right to secede, which went even beyond his talk of nullification. The debate was spinning out of control.

On this, Clay made an intervention. Having previously been reluctant out of fear of causing a Jeffersonian backlash, he believed he needed to. He was a slaveholder, but one who stood on the belief in eventual emancipation while still being opposed to "rabid abolitionists". On this issue, he made some remarks. Seeking to calm down the north which he believed extreme and threatening to put Southerners into the hands of Calhounists, he sought to defend slavery. He asserted the "inviolability of this species of property", spoke of the contendedness and "convenience" of slaves in Kentucky, favourably compared the "black slaves" of the south with the "white slaves" of the north, and asked gentlemen if they would "set their wives and daughters to brush their boots and shoes, and subject them to the menial offices of the family". But these remarks proved a mistake. To the North, it made him seem as if he was a stalwart defender of the South, and to the South, he was a nationalist who wanted to give the North the power to destroy slavery.

Amidst all of this, Clay immediately pushed a more conciliationist message, speaking of the union and a compromise. He proposed admitting Missouri as a slave state but restricting slavery to its north and west. But such efforts failed to pass Congress. He pushed for the holding of a National Republican convention. However, northern National Republican stalwarts like Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams refused to attend, and so did most Northern delegations. The southern-dominated convention nominated perhaps the foremost of the southern National Republican leaders at this point, Willie Mangum, even though he was hardly an impressive candidate. The northern National Republicans meanwhile held a more loose series of state conventions, which agreed on John Quincy Adams as candidate. He had served as a Federalist, if an atypical one, until both the Federalists and Republicans were torn apart by the events of the 1820s, and only afterwards he became a National Republican leader. His nomination, as such, was accused of being quasi-Federalist.

All the while, Martin Van Buren watched these events in panic. He had long despised Henry Clay and accused him of being a quasi-Federalist, and to that end he sought to create a coalition between the "republicans of the North" and southern planters to restore Jeffersonianism and shove them aside. For that, he supported the 1828 candidacy of Samuel Smith for president against Clay. In 1832, the field was too crowded and aside from Clay every candidate was purely regional; it was a catastrophe for Van Buren, who believed the whole point of party was to minimize regionalism. In the next four years, he attempted to make the groundwork for such a party. With the events over the admission of Missouri, his efforts went into overdrive as he feared a breakup of the union was imminent unless he could stop it. And so, to that end, he convened a party convention. His long attempts to find a candidate ultimately meted him Zebulon Pike.

Pike was long an American hero of epic proportions. In 1806, he was ordered by the government to make an expedition across Spanish Luisiana to map its terrain and maybe begin to encroach upon it. This expedition took him deep, and he famously made his way to a mountain now known as Pike's Peak. Finally, making his way south into New Mexico, he was arrested by the Spanish. Transported across the Sierra Madre, he was repatriated from New Orleans. The expedition made him an American hero of discovery in his twenties. Continuing in military service, he next entered the national scene during the Luisiana War. As general, he led the American effort in much of the Mississippi, and the grand American victory of the Third Battle of New Orleans was much his success. It made him even more of a national name, discussed as president. After having played roles in Ohioan politics, in 1836, upon his name's proposal, he was swiftly nominated by the convention.

This election was defined above all by the Missouri crisis, and Adams' men attempted to consolidate the north around him. But Adams felt increasingly unhappy, and he was disturbed at seeming polarization; this toned down his campaign and made it more moderate, despite his firm restrictionist stance and strong perception as abolitionist. Mangum, on the other hand, tried to hold a national campaign despite being perceived as of the south. But even in the south, there were many suspicious of the nationalism represented by the National Republicans, and in general . In contrast, Pike's campaign was focused around his record as a hero of discovery and war, and he said as little as possible about the Missouri crisis except that he supported the Federal Union. Furthermore, Van Buren's national party building efforts paid off, and in truth he was the only truly national candidate. It was, ironically, an inversion of the previous election. And finally, the election saw a decisive Pike landslide. Only National Republican stronghold Kentucky stuck with Mangum though he won some districts in much of the South and even beyond, while Adams had little presence outside New England.

Pike's election also saw the victory of more moderate-minded aligned Congressmen who were vague about Missouri but won nonetheless. It decisively proved nationalist sentiment. This calmed the Missouri crisis somewhat, but it still continued. Henry Clay, horrified at this, swiftly ran for Representative and won; in Congress, he drew up new plans for a compromise. Citing the Treaty of Galveztown declaring that the laws and customs of the Spanish would be respected in the territories of Luisiana, he stated it would not be possible to ban slavery in Missouri as it was one of those customs. But he did concede that further slaves could be disallowed from importation. He also conceded that slavery would be banned both to the north and west of Missouri, but allowed in Arkansaw Territory. To conciliate the South, Clay also proposed massively strengthening fugitive slave laws, allaying the southern fear that mass flight of slaves would turn Illinois and the upper south into free states. Furthermore, Pike proposed Indian removal, a proposal which many recognized would assist particularly the south in settlement, which was occurring anyways by the states forcibly opening up native lands for it; with the aim of opening specifically southern lands for settlement, Pike proposed removing them across the Mississippi northwards. After attempting to pass this as an omnibus failed, as separate bills they proved successful. Finally, the Missouri crisis came to an end with a compromise. It didn't stop northern dissent, Calhoun continued to talk about the South in peril, and the harshness of Indian removal saw much condemnation, but by and large the crisis was over. It didn't last, as the brutality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1837 deeply strengthened the northern abolitionist current, and Missouri unilaterally ending the ban on further importation of slaves in 1839 saw some outrage, but for the moment the issue of slavery was back in the bottle.

Ultimately, Pike moved his focus onto other issues. His party focused their ire on the Second Bank of the United States, which they viewed as a body of corruption, to massive amounts of controversy. While the issue of compensation for French depredation of American shipping became increasingly prominent; French ships impounding certain American merchant ships for their use in the illegal Portuguese slave trade only turned this into an issue of national honour. For the moment, the American mind looked there.

Indicus · Sep 9, 2022

Code:

Admission of States into the United States of America

Admission of States of the United States of America

1    Delaware        -    1787
2    Pennsylvania    -    1787
3    New Jersey        -    1787
4    Georgia        -    1788 
5    Connecticut        -    1788 
6    Massachusetts    -    1788 
7    Maryland        -    1788 
8    South Carolina    -    1788 
9    New Hampshire    -    1788 
10    Virginia        -    1788 
11    New York        -    1788 
12    North Carolina    -    1789 
13    Rhode Island    -    1790
14    Vermont        -    1791
15    Kentucky        -    1792
16    Tennessee        -    1796
17    Ohio            -    1803
18    Indiana        -    1813
19    Mississippi        -    1814
20    Illinois        -    1818
21    Yazoo            -    1821
22    Orleans        -    1830
23    Michigan        -    1832
24    Missouri        -    1837
25    Wisconsan        -    1844
26    Arkansaw        -    1859
27    West Florida    -    1861
28    Iowa            -    1861
29    Superior        -    1867
30    Minasota        -    1869
31     Platte         -     1869 
32    Kansas         -     1870
33    Tahosa         -     1871
34    New Virginia    -    1872 
35    Franklin        -    1872
36    Maine         -     1874
37    Cimarron*        -    1883
38    Pembina         -     1885
39    East Florida*    -    1889
40    Jefferson         -     1893
41    Kadoka         -     1908
42    Olympia         -     1917
43    Columbia         -     1926

* In 1868, an Act of Congress allowed for the admission of Cimarron and East Florida into the Union so long as they ratified constitutions matching constitutional requirements. Whether their 1868 constitutional drafts met their requirements was disputed, and whether or not their electoral delegations for the 1868 election would be certified as valid was the immediate trigger for the division of the United States into two governments in 1869 - the Richmondite government recognizing them as states and the Constitutional government not - and the subsequent Civil War. By the time the Civil War came to an end in 1876, their constitutions and statehood would be decisively regarded as invalid and, by the First State Readmission Act, they would only be admitted into the Union upon one-half of their respective populations swearing the Ironclad Oath. Cimarron met these terms and was admitted in 1883, while East Florida would only be admitted in 1889 under the terms of the looser Second State Readmission Act.

Indicus · Sep 11, 2022

The Justice Minister of the British Isles is the head of the British judiciary, as well as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in this role also serving as the main linking mechanism between the judiciary and the other branches of government, as well as the power to advise amendments to existing law.

The British court system prior to the Popular Revolution was fittingly as complicated as one would imagine for an ancien regime. In England alone, the common law was governed by the Court of Common Pleas, which covered "common" pleas between subject and subject but had been gradually undercut on this in all matters but real property; and the Court of King's Bench, which covered all cases which involved the monarch in some manner but had gradually acquired jurisdiction over some criminal matters by legal fictions, to the extent that the Common Pleas and the King's Bench had the same jurisdiction. Over the estates of the deceased, ecclesiastical courts used Roman-derived canon law to decide probate or testation of wills, and they also had the power of ruling on marriage and divorce. As the common law was at times considered overly harsh and inflexible, in other words "inequitable", the separate court system of equity was established which decided case on a series of legal "maxims of equity"; this was primarily done within the Court of Chancery, governed by the Lord Chancellor and its flexible remit encroached on all matters of common law even while being infamous for its slowness since the Elizabethan era; but it was also done within the Exchequer of Pleas, which absorbed much of the same legal remit to the point of being effectively synonymous with it. Hearing references from both the King's Bench and the Exchequer of Pleas was the Court of Exchequer, constituted from two justices from each. Common law and equity having the same jurisdiction resulted in court-shopping among litigants, which only consumed time more. And finally, above all of this, cases could be taken to the House of Lords, to be tried among its members learned in the law of the land.

But this was only in England. In Ireland, this exact same system existed, but in duplicate, a remnant of the age in which Ireland had been a separate "kingdom" modelled on England and run by an Anglo-Irish elite. In the colonies, cases could be taken as far as the Privy Council, or rather its members learned in the law, many of whom were also members of the House of Lords. In Scotland, on the other hand, the legal system existed entirely differently. The two high courts consisted of the Court of Session, judging civil law, and the High Court of Justiciary, judging criminal law. This was done not with common law, equity, or canon law, but on an entirely separate field of Scots-Roman law entirely separately developed and owing a lot in its development to pre-revolutionary France. Only civil law cases could be tried in the House of Lords, a remnant of the same rule having existed with Scottish Parliament pre-Acts of Union.

This haphazard justice system was one which was wholly unsuitable for the modernizing society the British Isles were rapidly becoming, and notably Jeremy Bentham's many legal reform ideas were thought of with the backdrop of this convolution. The attempts at small fixes by figures like Lord Mansfield could only do so much; with the overthrow of the British government in 1827 with the Popular Revolution, naturally many sought a more rationalized legal system. Here, Bentham's ideas proved influential: he advocated the codification and reform of the law into a single legal code, and in addition he wanted a radical simplification of the judicial system so that there would only be a single court of first instance per district and a single court of appeals above it, to avoid the issue of clashing jurisdictions. Overseeing this fractured judiciary would be a Justice Minister, tying them together and with both an appointive and dismissive power, and absolutely independent of the government. Believing that multiple justices would obscure responsibility for decision, he believed each court should only include one judge. Perhaps this was all too simple of a framework, but it served as a counterargument to the existing system. Simultaneously, many legal reformers looked to France's legal system, radically reformed following the Revolution, not in a Benthamic way, but nonetheless through codification and better-defined jurisdictions.

At the Convention Parliament, Bentham's reform proposal was met with much derision, but it nonetheless affected the reform process. The judicial system was finally formally made independent of the executive; furthermore, with many of the existing judges having fled to Hanover, the courts were now much weakened. Thus, the Frame of Government (1829) established a single Supreme Court of the British Isles, with absolute final jurisdiction over all matters of law, and it unified many of the topmost British courts of all three nations; this implicitly fused common law and equity together (although in the years that followed they proved tough to reconcile), and it stripped ecclesiastical courts of their jurisdiction. Above this all was established the Justice Minister, who would head the judiciary and also serve as Chief Justice, with Supreme Court judgements at least nominally being dependent on the verdict of the Justice Minister; in the old system, it resembled the judicial part of the Lord Chancellor's role. In Scotland, the end of its legal autonomy was initially shrugged off in the euphoria of revolution, but in the years afterward it helped foster Scottish regionalism and the rise of the Scottish Party in Parliament. The massive backlog of cases, Justice Minister Erskine sought to resolve by establishing Dispatch Courts travelling in circuits, and they ruled on cases with a newly-established summary procedure in an open court. This helped to clear the backlog with an extreme speediness, and the Supreme Court was typically disinclined to accept relitigating those cases, and when it did it typically upheld Dispatch Court opinions. In Parliament, the need to simplify the chaotic laws that had until this point existed resulted in a codification process, whose completion by Henry Brougham saw the ratification of the Criminal Code, the Commercial Code, the Procedure Code, and finally in 1843, the Civil Code. They were deeply affected by his background in Scots-Roman Law, even if affected by French ideas as well as English ones. But they meant both common law and equity in the British Isles came to an end. The Dispatch Courts, upon finishing their loads, were dissolved in 1846.

Brougham went on to become Justice Minister upon Erskine's death in 1848; with him having played the chief role in writing the Codes in the first place, many viewed him as the living embodiment of the law. His role, as a result, acquired many powers previously only theoretical. The government consistently asked him for advisory opinions, which he freely gave. He proposed legislative amendments readily, forwarding them to the Legislation Minister who brought them to Parliament. And he read reports from lower courts, and he at times interfered in them to ensure they were working efficiently. He also helped to establish a system of small-court arbitration, for the sake of improving judicial efficiency. All of this ensured that the Justice Minister would not merely serve as a court justice, but as the driving force of the judiciary and its link with other parts of government. And this remains the case today, even if the degree of power can hem and haw with the personality of the Justice Minister.

Indicus · Sep 25, 2022

Morse assumed that the federal government should control the electric telegraph. "It would seem most natural," he declared, to "connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department; for, although it does not carry a mail, yet it is another mode of accomplishing the principal object for which the mail is established, to wit: the rapid and regular transmission of intelligence." 8 6 The French optical telegraph was owned by its government (private persons were not even allowed to use it). With the Baltimore-Washington line having demonstrated practicality, Morse tried to get the administration to buy the rights to the electric telegraph. He persuaded Tylers postmaster general, but not the president himself. Henry Clay wrote to Alfred Vail shortly before the election of 1844 that he believed "such an engine ought to be exclusively under the control of the government." 8 7 But Polk won the election, and his platform declared against aid to internal improvements. Not even Amos Kendall, Jackson's postmaster general and kitchen-cabinet member, whom Morse named president of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, could win Polk over. The administration sold off the Washington-Baltimore link, and private enterprise strung the rest of American telegraph lines.

While systems of long-range telegraphy date to the 1790s with semaphore and optical telegraphy, this was hardly useful over the large and geologically diverse nation that is the United States. Originating with the great strides in the study of electromagnetism in the 1820s and 30s - most famously, with Joseph Henry's discovery of electric induction in 1832 - the once-theoretical concept of the electric telegraph became viable. The first electric telegraph was constructed in 1833 in Hanover with the use of Gauss code used today; they became quite common in the UK, when the need to communicate train failures across railway routes quickly resulted in the rapid construction of telegraphs in the 1830s. With railways making their entry in the United States with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, this only strengthened the many who sought to adapt and modernize telegraphy for an American context. Finally, in 1845, one Alfred Vail produced a cheap one-wire telegraph system able to use Gauss code, which undercut competitors, and he presented this to the government. It financed a telegraph line in 1846 with the use of poles between Baltimore and Washington along the B&O Railroad there, and its advantages quickly became apparent. Notably, this line was wholly under the ownership of the government; President Winfield Scott and the Unionists were only happy to push the telegraph as part of their internal improvements package. It set a precedent of government ownership; with influential Unionists believing the telegraph should be exclusively under the control of the government, it was brought under the control of the Post Office.

In the 1840s, railroads were constructed at an increasing rate criss-crossing the United States, and along with them came the state authorizing the construction of telegraphs across those routes. Furthermore, the Post Office constructed telegraph lines across its larger post offices, and in the telegraph stations along railroads it constructed new post offices; in the American mind, telegraphy came to be indelibly linked with the mail. Many Americans who would usually transmit their messages in the post now preferred to send a wire; with an additional cost, these transmitted packages could even be sent by mail to smaller post offices. But in truth, the growth of telegraphy was highly chaotic. Virtually any major railroad got a telegraph line, and so the state now had an increasingly irregular telegraphy network. This only got worse with the "Railway Mania" in the 1850s, as the government proved willing to back virtually any railroad project, no matter its profitability or viability, along with the construction of telegraph lines. But this could only last so long; in 1857 a large number of railroad companies went bankrupt, and thus went many state investment. President Stockton would be accused of corruption over his own personal investments in railroads, but short-term this only demonstrated the failure of this chaotic model of telegraph growth. It would come to little surprise that upon his inauguration in 1861, President Henry Clay Jr. immediately set out to organize the telegraph network. In 1862, he constituted the National Telegraphy Bureau to this end. State investment would hardly stop and indeed telegraph lines were only constructed further out west, but it was now more cautious and organized as an effort. It aimed at transforming telegraph lines into a network. This effort would prove successful.

With the victory of the antislavery Justice Party and its candidate Henry Winter Davis in 1868 and its fictitious "abrogation" by a rump Congress failing to meet the constitutional quota, the United States was thrown into civil war between slave and free states. The critical nature of telegraph lines meant that, during the disarray that marked the origin of the Civil War, both sides moved to controlling telegraph lines. The Richmondites' initial control of Washington meant that the Constitutional government was, in many circumstances, forced to cut lines. But as the Civil War progressed and the Constitutional government won vast victories and crushed the Richmondites, they now re-established these wires and they became critical to the war effort. With the war's end, it only secured the importance of telegraphy being directed by the state to national security.

With the rise of telephony in the 1880s, the government was quick to ensure that it would keep ahold of new telephonic lines in the same way as it did with telegraph lines, all within the National Telegraph Bureau. In practice, it often devolved some of the more specific telephonic work (such as operator switching) onto municipal administrations, and this was all done in full cooperation with private companies, but the idea that tele-communication belongs as part of the state was secure. With the rise of photonics in the twentieth century, the government recognized it could not achieve any sort of monopoly - but it did invest in photonics and included photonic stations as part of its network. Thus, as over the twentieth century telegraphy networks broke way for telephony and later televisory, and with the turn of the new century the infodex network, the increasingly misnamed National Telegraphy Bureau remains secure in its prominence in administering America's vast telecommunications network - as part of the Post Office's wide purview.

Callan · Sep 26, 2022

This is very, very,

Indicus · Sep 26, 2022

Callan said:
This is very, very,

I was pretty blown away by the idea of a nationalized telecom in the 19th century US as well. But one close election going the other way and it could’ve happened!

Of course, there would be no guarantee it would stick, but at the rate at which telegraphy expanded in the nineteenth century if it were to stick for long enough the American public would just think of the telegraph as the post on a wire.

Indicus · Oct 20, 2022

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) held one of the most significant careers in the Age of Revolutions, turning from a British radical to an American revolutionary to a Jacobin to a hated infidel. Born in the English town of Thetford, he got a rare education which he successfully leveraged to become a customs officer. Upon being appointed to the town of Lewes, he became involved in civic politics. Faced with impossibly -low pay, he went bankrupt and was sent to debtors' prison. After this, he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, in just the period when tensions between Britain and its wayward American colonies were escalating, and Paine took a letter of recommendation from him to emigrate to Pennsylvania. Upon his arrival, he created a magazine which achieved a widespread readership. History remembers him, however, above all, for publishing in January 1776 a pamphlet advocating the independence of the Thirteen Colonies as a democratic republic; this pamphlet, he named Common Sense. It achieved widespread readership and made him famous. The American Revolution confirmed his logic, and during it he wrote a number of other pamphlets to inspire the Patriot war effort. A brief appointment to the Committee of Foreign Affairs proved less successful, as his indiscretion proved scandalous, resulting in his dismissal but also his eventual vindication.

In the wake of the Revolution, Paine moved to London in 1787, but only two years later, a new revolution began, this time in France. In response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Paine responded with a manifesto, The Rights of Man (1791), both defending the French Revolution and advocating a series of revolutionary reforms of the British constitution including wealth redistribution. A bestseller, it resulted in government prosecution against its extreme radicalism. Paine was chased out into France and sentenced to death in absentia. Winning election to the National Convention, in its environment Paine's positions seemed moderate. For this, with the downfall of the Girondins and the rise of the Montagnards, Paine was arrested and imprisoned; he only escaped execution because the mark on his jail door was placed improperly. With the end of the Terror and American diplomacy on his behalf, Paine was released and became a Left-Thermidorean of some note, but under the suspicion of the authorities all the while. He published The Age of Reason, a defence of deism that made his name in Britain synonymous with blasphemy, and for this he was burned in effigy across Britain in the fashion of Guy Fawkes. Following the 1799 coup and the overthrow of the Thermidorean government, Paine tried to win some support for a French invasion of England, but to no avail. Paine instead moved to the United States once more in 1802, a thoroughly bitter man, and he attacked George Washington, viewing him as a false friend who did nothing to secure his release. For this and his deism, Paine spent his last days as a thoroughly despised man, and his funeral in 1809 was attended by five people. He was buried in his farm, as local Quakers wanted nothing to do with him.

His remains lay there at rest, in a grave unbefitting to a man who so thoroughly shaped world events, where they were little more than a local curiosity. And that they would have remained, if not for a British agrarian radical by the name of William Cobbett. Cobbett had a long career. Initially, he was a great reactionary and, as a British immigrant journalist to the United States in the 1790s, he harshly attacked Paine in a great reactionary spirit. With the election of Jefferson bringing such views into a decline, Cobbett moved back to Britain, where after a brief time as a Tory journalist, he was so radicalized he became a radical from a position of reaction. Paine's harsh attack on paper money especially appealed to Cobbett, and he began holding up Paine as an English hero. In 1819, having been forced to flee Britain from government prosecution, he fled to the United States. He dug up Paine's bones from his grave, and he returned to Britain with them. If he had thought he would have a grand response which he could leverage into a grand radical burial, he was wrong. Instead, he was aggressively mocked by the right for the absurdity of digging up a "blasphemer", and his fellow radicals were aghast at this act of grave desecration. And the Manchester Massacre a few weeks later brought everyone's thoughts far away from Paine's bones.

Cobbett would never get an opportunity to bury Paine's bones in a grand manner. Arrested in 1825, his son hastily buried them in their yard, and upon the Popular Revolution in 1827 Cobbett was too busy trying to achieve his vision of a renewed Britain to concern himself with them. With the promulgation of the Charter of Liberties and Securities and the Frame of Government in 1829, Cobbett served in Parliament, and even as he grew discontent with the path of the revolutionary government and returned to his reactionary ideology he continued to admire Paine. But he never had any opportunity to bury his bones in a grand burial, and so they remained among his possessions upon his death in 1835. The many creditors who called their debts in its wake came, and some of them even sought to take Paine's bones, but an officer of the Justice Minister confiscated Paine's bones as illegally-acquired [1] and, after the American minister to the British Isles refused the remains of such a controversial man, stored them in the Justice Minister's vault awaiting the day when the government would make a decision on what to do with them. But as Paine represented an extreme radicalism and the British government sought to associate itself with a more temperate radicalism, they did nothing except let them rot in a vault, without rest.

There they stayed until 1876. With a Radical government taking power early that year, it recognized that the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence was imminent, and with the end of the American Civil War (1869-1876) that year, it sought to commemorate that event, viewed as a valiant predecessor to Britain's own revolution. And with the British regime now better-established and with him remembered in a better light, what better way than to bury the remains of Thomas Paine, the Briton who ignited the American Revolution with his pen, in a grand event? And so, on July 4 1876, Paine was given a grand burial in London, in an event which was widely-covered on both sides of the pond. At last, his remains got a rest. In the following years, the British government established a grand tomb around them, paid through public contribution. If there were some bickers about his deism, they were minor; instead, he was remembered for the great eloquence of Common Sense, and as a figure of the Transatlantic bond between the British and American revolutionary traditions. Today, his tomb is visited by over a hundred thousand people annually. In this way, he has at last been given his due.

[1] In OTL, Paine's remains were entirely lost upon the death of Cobbett; though there are some who claim to have acquired them, such reports are unverified. One certainly hopes he was given some sort of reburial, but unfortunately nobody knows.

Walpurgisnacht · Oct 20, 2022

I'm rolling this post into a tube prior to using an industrial-grade pump to inject it directly into my veins.

Indicus · Oct 28, 2022

Indicus said:
Presidents of the United States

1801-1809: Thomas Jefferson (Republican)
1800: (with Aaron Burr) def. John Adams/Charles C. Pinckney (Federalist)
1804: (with George Clinton) def. Charles C. Pinckney/Rufus King (Federalist)

Winning the 1800 election on a repudiation of the Federalists, the Quasi War, and its associated abuses, and after fighting off an attempt by his running mate to take the presidency, Jefferson got to work on establishing the Republican vision of society. He ended the Quasi War and repealed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and he focused on establishing an agrarian economy. Policies of free trade depressed manufacturing, and the end of the French Revolutionary Wars opened up vast markets for American grain. And his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin got to work on ending the public debt, though he convinced Jefferson not to do away with the Bank of the United States because he found it useful. However, his policies were not as consistent as one would assume. Notably, piracy by the Barbary states saw the US go to war with them and ultimately win, and following the Haitian Revolution and the First Bahian War of Independence Jefferson got to work on expanding the US Navy to protect American slavery from foreign intrusion. And seeking to establish American claims of discovery on land in Columbia and Spanish Luisiana, he funded expensive scientific expeditions to them. At home, Jefferson's disgraced former vice president Aaron Burr organized a private army from many sources of funding acquired through contradictory promises, and in 1807 he organized an expedition to conquer Spanish New Orleans to make himself its ruler with the Mississippi-dependent American Southwest absorbed into it. But this expedition was badly-planned and it was swiftly dispatched by the Spanish army, and its main effect was cooling American-Spanish relations. Jefferson had Burr arrested the moment he crossed the Mississippi, and he had him tried for treason. But this was a time when few were sure if plotting secession or conquering foreign territory was treason, and Chief Justice Marshall ignored executive pressure and cleared Burr of all charges. But his reputation was nonetheless destroyed, and Jefferson was more popular than ever by the end of his presidency.

1809-1817: James Madison (Republican)
1808: (with George Clinton) def. Charles C. Pinckney/Rufus King (Federalist)
1812: (with DeWitt Clinton) def. John Marshall/Jacob Stout (Federalist)

Madison broadly continued Jeffersonian policies albeit with a more pragmatic impulse, and he governed in a period of prosperity. He refused to heed calls to renew the Bank of the United States and instead let it lapse and turn into a private bank. Furthermore, Treasury Secretary Gallatin continued to fight against the national debt, and by 1814 it was entirely paid off, to the joy of most Republicans. But some thought the national debt was a blessing which could unite the nation and fund projects, and in 1812 the foremost moderate Republican, DeWitt Clinton, made a run to win the nomination of the congressional caucus. Defeated, he was compensated by becoming Vice President, and they cruised to victory over a Federalist ticket headed by Chief Justice Marshall which, for all of his popularity, was still tainted by the fact that Federalism was worn out. In his second term Madison allowed some adjustment from the norm, including some congressional funding for Clinton's pet project of the Erie Canal, but the largest crisis he faced was a conspiracy to take the Southwest out of the Union - a conspiracy he foiled, but he discovered worryingly that it had support in the army. The semi-detachment and dependency on the Mississippi of the Southwest continued such feelings of resentment, however, and he knew the only long-term solution to this was the acquisition of Luisiana.

1817-1825: James Monroe (Republican)
1816: (with Daniel D. Tompkin) def. DeWitt Clinton/Caleb Rodney (Republican/Federalist)
1820: (with Daniel D. Tompkin) def. DeWitt Clinton/Simon Snyder (Republican/Federalist)

In a congressional nominating caucus, Monroe prevailed over dissenters to Virginia's domination of the presidency, namely Clinton and Crawford. Though he kept Crawford satisfied, Clinton ignored the caucus decision and ran separately with Federalist endorsement. Monroe was immediately faced with the crisis of the Year without a Summer in 1816, and the mass flight of impoverished New Englanders to the greener pastures of the West caused large amounts of public land speculation. The bubble this speculation generated popped in 1819, causing an economic panic, and Monroe's reaction of doing nothing to resolve it inspired disdain. Furthermore, following fighting between Maine and New Brunswick militias over disputed territory in 1818, a war scare erupted between the US and Britain, and it caused the election of War Hawks to Congress. All of this inspired Clinton to launch a second presidential run, with endorsement from the Federalists, on an antiwar platform. He was defeated, but he came quite close. Though Monroe resolved the immediate war crisis, with the opening of war in Europe in 1821 British impressment of American sailors caused perennial crises from which he only wanted to escape. With his diplomatic expertise, he did, but a war-hungry Congress was never satisfied. And all the while, Monroe's goals of ending partisanship floundered. The 1824 election demonstrated this.

1825-1827: William Lowndes (Republican) †
1824: hung electoral college: William H. Crawford/Nathaniel Macon (Republican), William Lowndes/Nathan Sanford (Republican), DeWitt Clinton/Richard Rush (Republican), Smith Thompson/Samuel Smith (Republican)
1865 (with Nathan Sanford) def. in contingent election William H. Crawford/Nathaniel Macon (Republican), DeWitt Clinton/Richard Rush (Republican)

The 1824 election saw the total collapse of the congressional nominating caucus, as it failed to impose its choice; instead states nominated their own slates. The result was a hung Electoral College, and in the subsequent contingent election, a very chaotic affair which resulted in reform (presidential elections were made uniformly popular with their votes consolidated in electoral votes apportioned from "presidential districts" carved by states, electors were abolished as useless, and in the case of a hung college a simple vote of a joint session of Congress from among the top two candidates would decide the president and/or vice president), William Lowndes won. A well-respected War Hawk and Treasury Secretary from South Carolina, he immediately got to work. His new Secretary of State Henry Clay got to work. His plans to go to war with Britain were ultimately pre-empted when Spain closed the mouth of the Mississippi to American access, and as a Kentuckian Clay knew how disastrous this would be. Following a last-ditch negotiation with Spain, Clay pushed for war, and this Congress accepted. American troops immediately crossed the Missippi, and they conquered Saint Louis. They charged to take New Orleans and the lower territory, but Spain's navy drastically outstripped the US's and as a result it failed to hold this territory. Furthermore, the Spanish Navy bombarded cities across the Eastern Seaboard, which the US with its small navy could do little against; in Charleston, Spanish troops landed, looted the city and took its slaves, and they left the city ruined. But the army was still able to conquer Luisiana and the Floridas, finally taking decisive control over New Orleans and St. Augustine. In its wake, Lowndes was able to open negotiations with Spain for peace. But his health, never particularly good, collapsed in 1827, and he died.

1827-1829: Nathan Sanford (Oppositionist Republican)

Following Lowndes' death, his vice president Nathan Sanford acceded to the presidency. He got sworn in as president rather than "Acting President", setting a precedent, and under him the Luisiana War finally came to a conclusion, with the US getting Luisiana and the Floridas in a treaty largely recognized as generous for the United States, despite that Clay had tried to acquire as much as up to the Rio Grande. When some were uneasy at territorial acquisition by conquest, Clay spun it as compensation for the sack of Charleston, which the public accepted in a patriotic frenzy. His tenure also saw the ratification of the Tariff of 1827, a tariff for protection rather than revenue that similarly saw widespread support from the patriotic public. Sanford attempts to assert himself as president largely failed, not in the least because he was a Clintonite and thus alienated from most of his cabinet. That Secretary of State Clay, who was wildly popular, was semi-openly preparing a presidential run, only undercut Sanford's own attempts to push himself in the public imagination; he nevertheless made a run for president, in which he was decisively defeated.

1829-1837: Henry Clay (Republican, then National Republican)
1828 (with John Sergeant) def. Hugh Lawson White/Littleton W. Tazewell (Republican), Nathan Sanford/None (Oppositionist Republican)
1832 (with John Sergeant) def. Hugh Lawson White/John Tyler (State Rights), DeWitt Clinton [died before certification]/Charles Polk Jr. (Oppositionist Republican), John C. Calhoun/Henry Lee (Nullifier), Samuel Morse/William Jackson (Anti-Catholic)

Winning election based on his grand successes as Secretary of State, Clay immediately got to work. With war crises with Britain at an end following its Popular Revolution and its pullout from the European war, he got to work on a treaty. The Calhoun-Tierney Treaty recognized the generous 49th parallel as the border between the US and BNA west of the Lake of the Woods, and the Aroostook dispute was resolving with the US getting all of its claims recognized. Clay re-established the Bank of the United States (albeit in Washington rather than Philadelphia), and public suspicion was assuagedby his arguments that it would end the monetary mismanagement seen in the Luisiana War. Furthermore, he established a system of internal improvements across the nation, most famously with the National Road which linked the eastern port of Cumberland, Maryland to the frontier town of Lowndes, Missouri Territory. In addition, he worked on opening up the Mississippi to navigation and funded a canal from Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes. He wrapped up expanded tariffs, internal improvements, and the national bank in what he called the "American System", an appealing platform intended to make the US a united power to rival Britain. He got to work on expanding the Navy to ensure its catastrophic failure during the Luisiana War would never occur again, and he established heavy funding for the American Colonization Society that sought to settle freedmen to West Africa - funding that ultimately dried up due to a South increasingly suspicious this was emancipation by the backdoor. Furthermore, he recognized Venezuela's independence from Spain and established lucrative commercial relations with it, and he issued the Clay Doctrine that declared the US would support the independence of any state in the Americas from colonial powers.

This all engendered opposition from all quarters of the nation. In particular, South Carolina declared tariffs for protection purposes nullified and threatened to secede. Clay's own Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun, resigned over this and turned almost overnight from a fierce nationalist to the prime nullificationist. In 1832, Clay attempted to resolve this crisis with a compromise tariff after negotiation with Calhoun, but while it did reduce disunionism, it was still alarmingly high, and Calhoun himself dropped his support of the Compromise Tariff following petitions by his constituents. The 1832 election therefore saw a glut of candidates who sought to win a contingent election - Clinton, who realized this would be his last attempt to gain the presidency; Calhoun, who sought the nullification of the tariff; Lawson, who harshly opposed the tariff but not so extreme as to endorse nullification; and Morse, the anti-Catholic mayor of New York, who sought to drastically increase naturalization requirements for immigrants. Over this fractured and regionalized field, Clay had more than enough support to win by a sweeping margin. In its wake, Clay ended the Nullification Crisis with both a Second Compromise Tariff that would gradually lower it and a Force Act confirming his power to crush treason. The Nullification Convention of South Carolina dissolved itself, but not before nullifying the Force Act, and this therefore brought the Nullification Crisis to an end.

And so, Clay continued his efforts to unite the nation. Most famously, he had established the Second National Road from Washington to New Orleans, and he initiated the first American forays into rail. All of this came with large popularity from the public as it coincided with great prosperity. When Missouri applied for statehood in 1836, few thought this would change. But it did when an antislavery congressman proposed an amendment to require it to abolish slavery. This provision passed the House by large margins over the South, only to be defeated in the Senate, and the former made it clear it would stop at nothing to bring up this amendment once more. The result was chaos both in and out of Congress; some even spoke of disunion. Following a second ratification of the amendment by the House, delegates from across the South met in Atlanta to consider further moves - including secession. Clay sought to resolve this grave crisis, and to this end he made a series of remarks. He asserted the "inviolability of this species of property", spoke of the contendedness and "convenience" of slaves in Kentucky, favourably compared the "black slaves" of the South with the "white slaves" of the North, and asked gentlemen if they would "set their wives and daughters to brush their boots and shoes, and subject them to the menial offices of the family". This pro-southern stance, intended to keep the South from going Calhounite, was a break from his public image as an antislavery slaveholder and it caused even greater acrimony, and his own party split over it as the northern National Republicans agreed on a slate of their own. And so, his presidency ended with the union in threat, and nothing he tried was working.

1837-1845: Zebulon Pike (Old Republican, then People's)
1836: (with Peter V. Daniel) def. John Quincy Adams/Richard Rush (Adamsite), Willie Person Mangum/Thomas Clayton (National Republican)
1840: (with Peter V. Daniel) def. Richard M. Johnson/John Davis (Unionist), James G. Birney/Thomas Earle (Liberty)

Formed out of the fractured opposition, the Populists were formed out of Van Buren's great political skills and his desire for a party to be made out of the "plain republicans of the north" and "planters of the south" to avoid sectional tensions, such as were occurring around Missouri, and to represent the "true people". He successfully got both northern and southern anti-Clay men behind Zebulon Pike, whose expedition to Louisiana and, by accident, New Mexico and beyond, and whose later role in conquering New Orleans for the third and final time made him a great hero, and this ticket won over the fractured northern and southern National Republican slates. That he was a Kentuckian like Clay was a coincidence that only made his victory much more sweet for anti-Clay men. But the Missouri crisis continued to coarse through the United States, the Atlanta Convention treated itself more and more like the embryo of a new state, and people on the street spoke openly about disunion. To resolve this crisis, Clay got himself elected to the House of Representatives, and through his mastery of parliamentary procedure and with the support of doughfaces elected along with Pike, he then wrote up the Missouri Compromise. In return for slavery to its south being expressly assured, a stronger fugitive slave law, and Indian removal, slavery to Missouri's north and west was to be forever forbidden, and in Missouri itself additional importation of slaves was also to be made illegal. Clay successfully got this compromise through, and despite Missouri later going back on the promise to forbid additional importation of slaves and doughface northerners seeing defeat after defeat in the 1838 elections, it stuck. And the Atlanta Convention dissolved itself after approving the Compromise, despite Calhoun speaking of restriction being war on the South.

When France refused to repay money for its raids on American commerce, relations between France and the US got much chillier, and when France forcibly searched American merchant ships illegally trading slaves from Portuguese Mozambique to Portuguese Brazil, this resulted in Congress authorizing Pike to take military action in 1839. This began the "Second Quasi War", which saw support from both among Populists and National Republicans. But the war continued on and on, and with the low Compromise Tariff this resulted in a government with little revenue spending lots of money, resulting in it going into more and more debt despite all of its anti-debt stances. And the war's popularity was in question. In 1840, both sides of the National Republicans, as well as a host of other anti-Pike politicians, united in the form of the "Union Party", whose expressed aim was to avoid all disunionism but in practice was a wider version of the National Republicans. In 1840, its nominee, Richard M. Johnson, did not exactly show his party in the best light. He gave erratic speeches on the campaign trail, and his common-law marriage with his slave Julia Chinn alienated him in the South. The Unionist platform of peace with honour fell down the wayside. Ultimately, Pike cruised once more to victory. He brought an end to the war in 1842, with the US reiterating its agreement to fight against the slave trade and France agreeing not to search or seize American ships.

But the lustre of winning the Second Quasi War did not last very long. Overspeculation in the new Luisiana territories had created a bubble, heavily fostered by Clay's roads and canals easing settlement, and Pike's policies only increased it as he freely distributed land to squatters, which filled land at a much quicker rate than the state could open up more for settlement. The bubble then popped, and the result was a massive panic. Though Pike and the Populists tried to bring this ire towards the Bank of the United States which had, indeed, greatly contributed to the bubble, this effort failed. For one, that Pike had already opposed the Bank on principle diminished his credibility to speak on this issue. Furthermore, the Bank was more than willing to do everything it could to diminish the panic, even if it meant putting itself in debt, and this contrasted with state-level Populist-aligned banks which only enlargened the scope of the panic by calling in loans and reducing credit to stay solvent. All the while, Pike's laissez faire lack of a response was greatly alienating. With his legacy as president in tatters, his party cratered to defeat.

1845-1852: Daniel Webster (Unionist) †
1844: (with Edward Bates) def. Martin Van Buren/John Tyler (People's)
1848: (with Edward Bates) def. John C. Calhoun/Silas Wright (People's), James G. Birney/Leicester King (Liberty)

Daniel Webster was a most unlikely president in an age of mass politics. He was a former Federalist, a party well-known for its elitism, and he himself had inherited much of that elitism. After making his entry into Congress as part of New England's rage at the Year Without a Summer, he was against war with Britain which he thought economically ruinous for the New England for which he was always identified. But he was all for war with Spain following its closure of the mouth of the Mississippi as he recognized its potential to destroy American commerce, and it was after this that he became allies with Clay and other War Hawks. As a Senator for Massachusetts, he was a close ally of Clay. But he truly became a national figure during the Nullification Crisis when, following a particularly harsh speech for nullification by Calhoun, he replied in a speech with great eloquence in defence of the Union. Webster's Reply to Calhoun was published across the nation to be read by an excited public, and it immediately became a legendary feat of rhetoric and eventually the virtual manifesto of the Union Party. In its wake, Clay made Webster his Secretary of State, and he served quite well in that post, successfully escaping the acrimony over Missouri by being involved in diplomacy for the duration of the crisis. In its wake, he returned to the Senate and opposed Pike's agenda with skill - though he did rally to the Second Quasi War. All of this made him prime material for the presidency despite all of his New England particularism, and he had the ambition for it. Running in a year of certain Unionist victory, he predictably swept his way into power.

Initially, he faced the fact that his party was unofficially led by Senator Clay, who attempted to dictate cabinet appointments. Webster refused to accept this dictation and appointed Thomas Ewing his Secretary of State and James Wilson his Treasury Secretary - both of whom were not Clay men. But nonetheless, Clay continued to serve as the leading legislator of the United States. With the low tariff making it hard to fund the government and protection being the great Unionist policy, Webster immediately pushed through a new tariff. But in a major break with the American System, he established a trade reciprocity treaty with British North America, as under the low tariff very strong trade links had been established between the North and BNA. Furthermore, he established renewed internal improvements across the nation, and particularly he focused them across the rapidly growing Midwest. And he believed the US needed a Pacific port to open up American commerce across the Pacific, and thus focused himself on that great project. First, he attempted to acquire San Francisco from Spain. However, he was harshly rebuffed no matter how much money he tried to leverage, as Spain believed this would be a stepping stone to the conquest of California. Next, he looked to Britain, with whom relations continued to be friendly ever since the Popular Revolution, and after much negotiation he got it to agree on the purchase of the Olympic Peninsula, including its many natural ports. This was, he knew, a territory dependent on the Columbia territory being friendly if not under American rule, and to that end he carved out trails reaching up to the Rockies to ensure that Americans would settle it and thereby make it friendly. And indeed, young men did in large numbers move to this territory, joining the many paupers and indigent who the British government sent to relieve its stresses. This great success of diplomacy, however, was ultimately overshadowed when, with southerner support, a filibuster attempt into Cuba, was launched and failed. Not one to accept such a blatant violation of law, Webster harshly prosecuted those responsible. With his reputation already as antislavery, this alienated many southern Unionists, and this struck in election year.

The 1848 Populist nomination was won by John C. Calhoun, who moderated many of his positions up to and including endorsing internal improvements, and he successfully beat out Van Buren with the western support this gave him. He narrowly averted a Burenite split by promising not to renew the national bank and agreeing in writing to cabinet appointments, and his newfound support of internal improvements appealed heavily to the west; it gave him a surprisingly strong position. In addition, he spoke favourably about Spanish Texas, speaking of linking it with the US and hinting at acquiring it. It put a chaotic issue on the table, which threatened to greatly strengthen the Populists in the South. This led Webster to firstly seek to appeal to southern votes and moderate his position on slavery further, alienating some of his abolitionist supporters, and secondly to endorse a Homestead Bill in a clean break with Unionist land policies but which highly appealed to the west. On this basis Webster won the election decisively, but narrower than many would have hoped considering Calhoun's former nullificationism. He then got passed a Homestead Act, which proved very popular in the west, but as it settled large swathes of land with northerners and in practice discouraged slavery, it made the south unhappy.

Webster's popularity would run out when directors of the Bank of the United States were revealed as artificially inflating stock value for the sake of dumping them at their peak. That Webster had, before being president, been on the Bank's legal retainer, and that a fellow New Englander Nathan Appleton was its president, led many to accuse him personally of corruption. Initially he did nothing about this report, but when it got confirmed, he was forced to push for new directors and got the accused to resign, including replacing Appleton with the Baltimore Unionist Reverdy Johnson as Bank president. This only made him look like he was covering up his own dirty hands, and his popularity promptly crashed. Furthermore, in 1851 in Spanish California a merchant discovered gold, and this caused a massive gold rush. The large involvement of Americans in this caused a flow of gold into the United States, which gave it a solid currency utterly undependent on bank notes, and it made the Bank look useless. The subsequent boom this caused was one for which Webster and the Unionists got no credit for whatsoever, and they diminished in stature. Webster would ultimately not live to see his party defeated, for in early 1852 he died of liver cirrhosis.

1852-1853: Edward Bates (Unionist)

Following the Sanford precedent, Bates got himself sworn in as President. He attempted to fix the Unionist situation by distancing himself from the Bank and reiterating the dogma of national unity. But he didn't have enough time to push himself in the national consciousness, and though he did get nominated by the convention, he lost decisively.

1853-1861: Robert F. Stockton (People's)
1852: (with Thomas Jefferson Rusk) def. Edward Bates/Rufus Choate (Unionist), John P. Hale/Leicester King (Liberty)
1856: (with Thomas Jefferson Rusk) def. John J. Hardin/William M. Meredith (Unionist), Sidney Egerton/William Goodell (Free Democracy)

Stockton had previously served as a naval officer. Leading the conquest of Cape Montserrado for the American Colonization Society, he made his name during the Luisiana War where, against a much larger navy, he achieved a number of successes. In its wake, he was involved once more in the American Colonization Society, up until the Second Quasi War when its African colony voted to join British Sierra Leone to avoid feared French raids, and instead he was involved in daring raids on the French Caribbean. In its wake, he became Pike's Secretary of the Navy, and afterwards he became a senator who made his name on naval reform and represented a moment of national pride. All of this made him prime material for a presidential candidate, and in the year of 1852 he won the nomination and swept his way into the presidency. In power, he was surprisingly pragmatic. He was willing to endorse internal improvements as much as any Unionist, except that he believed it should back fully-private companies rather than the public-private partnerships that were the norm, and this fostered the rapid development of railways across the nation - railways in whose stock Stockton personally held much in. Furthermore, he launched the navy around the world, which made tours in Europe and joined Britain and France in opening Japan and China. And personally, he spoke of international revolution, pitting the United States decisively on the side of liberty in Europe's great struggles. He also focused on the Bank, and he regarded it as a bad investment for the American people - its close affiliation to the Unionists did not help. With the California Gold Rush drastically diminishing the need for Bank notes, it was forced to call in loans and retrench, resulting in economic chaos. Stockton thus planned for another place to put government deposits, and he made his views known. Furthermore, he advocated expansion into Cuba and Texas, not in the name of the southern planter interest but simply because he believed it was America's manifest destiny, and he even advocated expansion into California with an expressed end goal of covering the entirety of North America. On this hyperexpansionist platform, as well as in the name of killing the Bank, Stockton won sweepingly, although the Free Democracy, a rebranded version of the abolitionist Liberty Party, won electoral votes which caused acrimony among southerners upon certification.

Over this, Stockton decided to dissolve the Bank. Its attempt to renew its charter - 12 years behind schedule - to avoid its own dissolution, failed and it only made it look farcical. He then pushed through a plan to create a National Exchequer, run by a board with the Treasury Secretary, the Treasurer, and three presidential appointees requiring congressional approval. Its role would be to look after government deposits and print promissory notes with a fixed 1.5:1 ratio in a much more sharply state-driven manner. With its ratification, Stockton removed deposits from the Bank and put it into the Exchequer. With that, the Bank was defeated, and Reverdy Johnson was forced to accept this. However, it lingered on, for its charter was to expire in 1869 - and by that time the Union looked quite different indeed. Furthermore, Stockton endorsed filibusters in Texas and Cuba, and in an attempt to attract the north he claimed them to be attempts to halt the trans-Caribbean slave trade. These filibusters ultimately failed, despite their vast scale, as they did not gather the popular support necessary to succeed, for Cuban planters believed Spain was necessary to keep the slaves from rebelling and the Hispanicized Irish of Texas were not particularly pro-American. And Stockton lacked the support to go to war with Spain. Furthermore, the railway bubble Stockton aggressively supported popped after a number of unprofitable ventures failed, and this combined with a slowing of California gold ending core economic assumptions to cause an economic panic. That Stockton had invested in the railways that remained sound led to talk that he was personally corrupt. Despite the internal weakness of the Unionists, ultimately this devastated Populist popularity and brought it to the nadir. Thus, like Pike, Stockton left office under a cloud.

1861-1865: Henry Clay Jr. (Unionist)
1860: (with Henry Gardner) def. Henry A. Wise/Daniel S. Dickinson (People's), Joshua Giddings/Lewis Tappan (Free Democracy)

In the shadow of his much more famous father, Senator Clay Jr. won the presidential election with surprisingly narrow margins and despite the Free Democracy doing quite well with a candidate who cut into the Unionist vote. But Clay Jr. was faced with a Union Party faced with the loss of its cohesion, as the Populists stole its clothes over internal improvements, and the Exchequer proved more than popular among Unionists as a purified pseudo-bank. Therefore, an attempt to abolish the Exchequer and move deposits back to the Bank floundered. On the other hand, the calamitous end of Railway Mania made a Congress extremely suspicious of internal improvements and resulted in it putting new plans under harsh review, and Clay Jr. lacked the parliamentary mastery of his father that would have allowed him to get it past that. That he all the while had a Unionist Congress only made the situation even more farcical. Thus, other than the restoration of the Neutrality Act, Clay Jr. got nothing through. The 1862 elections continued this, as the Unionists faced losses to both the Populists and the Free Democrats - the latter resulted in slavery entering the national stage despite Clay Jr. being, like his father, an antislavery slaveholder. But at the end of the day, party was losing its cohesion on the national level, and this felled the Clay Jr. presidency.

But this would all be overshadowed in 1864 when, following an extended crisis, the Provincias Internas of New Spain, consisting of Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora y Sinaloa, New Vizcaya, Coahuila, New Leon, and New Santander, declared their independence as the state of Buenaventura under a decree which abolished slavery. This inaugurated a war of independence, and that Buenaventura was abolitionist brought it into conflict with the Cuban planters of Texas which inevitably caused immense opposition in the South, even as the North was electrified and many young northerners joined up with the Comuneros fighting for its independence. Clay nevertheless endorsed its independence in accord with the Clay Doctrine of his father. American support of Spanish American states' independence, even of expressly abolitionist states, had hitherto never caused controversy, but in this case it suddenly did, for it was next door. And Clay Jr. opened this divide into a chasm through his words. Wisely, he chose to bow out in the Unionist convention, but its failure to pick a Northern candidate only caused the Northern Unionists to bolt and join up with the Free Democracy to create a joint slate. Suddenly, the Union was in threat, and the Union Party was split at a time when the Union itself was at the seams. The next election only ensured this split would be permanent.

1865-1869: George Washington Woodward (People's) [impeached, removed from office]
1864: hung electoral college: George Washington Woodward/Andrew Johnson (People's), William H. Seward/Salmon P. Chase ("Justice"/"Free Soil"/"Republican"/"Liberationist"), Alexander Stephens/Robert C. Winthrop (Unionist)
1865: (with Andrew Johnson) def. in contingent election William H. Seward/Salmon P. Chase ("Justice"/"Free Soil"/"Republican"/"Liberationist")

Woodward had, prior to his nomination, served as Chief Justice, and his politics' very obscurity was the entire reason he was nominated. With the Unionists divided between the technical southern-dominated ticket and the antislavery slate so hastily-established it had separate party names in separate states, most were confident that Woodward would cruise to victory. But he didn't, and instead the College was hung, sending the election to Congress. Due to Southern Unionists voting for Woodward, Woodward was elected president by a joint session of Congress, in addition to his vice president Johnson similarly winning election. His obscure politics helped him to achieve this. But in power, he showed his true self. He was not only a doughface, but his opinions verged on Calhounism. He openly endorsed slavery despite being a Pennsylvanian. He overturned recognition of Buenaventura and called for its rebels to stop disturbing the peculiar institution. But this didn't stop northerners from joining the Comuneros and thereby strengthening them. To stop this, Woodward enforced the Neutrality Act to its fullest against them, and he was willing to arrest people if necessary. At the same time, he ignored Southern support of the Spanish was effort. In and out of Congress, the Buenaventuro War of Independence and the American response became a topic for discussion, even as Woodward tried to clamp down upon it. His attempts to indict Comunero rebels only ended with northern juries nullifying the law. And in Congress, nothing Woodward tried could stop antislavery congressmen from discussing slavery.

When Senator Joshua Giddings made a particularly extreme speech condemning slavery and defending Buenaventura's fight, Senator Henry Foote of Yazoo shot him dead on the Senate floor, and a Washington court gave him a remarkably light punishment for this act of murder. The result was outrage across the North. But none of this stopped the victory of the Comuneros, and with it seeming imminent, the South sought to secure slavery within the borders of the United States. In a court case over a slave suing for his freedom, the Harris Court declared that Congress had no power to regulate slavery, a ruling which implicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise and, in the absence of congressional law, reactivated the old Spanish law allowing slavery from Kansas to the Rockies to Minasota. Woodward accepted this ruling despite its implicit extremism. Furthermore, to secure slavery once and for all, Woodward sought to admit slave states. East Florida and Cimarron requested admission and, despite not meeting quotas for statehood population, they were nevertheless allowed to hold referenda which, thanks to non-resident voters, "proved" both had the population to be admitted as states. Through the use of executive patronage, Woodward got the statehood of both through Congress. Furthermore, he inaugurated settlement in Kansas which saw both North and South aggressively push settlers into it and fight literally for its admittance as a free or slave state, with the territorial governor and council fighting unabashedly for slavery. In the subsequent congressional elections, the antislavery forces, consolidated following the contingent election fight as the "Justice Party", won a majority in the House and nominated a Justicialist as Speaker. In retaliation, South Carolina pulled its House delegation from Congress, and this made disunion even more thinkable than before. When Buenaventura won its independence in 1867, Woodward refused to recognize it as anything other than a rebel government, and Northern volunteer returnees' establishment of "Comunero Clubs" which served both as paramilitaries and Justicialist campaign headquarters, and southerners replying by establishing "Minutemen" groups to play the same role for them, only worsened tensions. Warfare in Kansas became much more brutal than before. In the 1868 election, Woodward's own party refused to nominate him, southerners preferring a southerner to a pro-slavery northerner, and ultimately in 1868 it happened. The Justicialists won.

Declaring the election illegitimate, southern notables declared hatred and semi-openly plotted secession. Outgoing, Woodward nevertheless sought to aid the south as much as possible. He cast doubt on the election and accused Comunero Clubs of rigging it, and he plotted with the most extreme southern voices. He made sure pro-southern men were in control of important army equipment and he semi-openly committed sabotage of a potential northern war effort. And finally, on February 10, 1869, Minutemen from Virginia and Alexandria stormed Congress after overpowering the weak military presence, interrupting the certification of election results, and they then ransacked the Capitol and destroyed the certification papers. Under their guard, southern and some doughface congressmen met and, despite failing to meet the quota, they creatively interpreted Article I Section V to give them the power of expelling nonattending congressmen to reduce the quota necessary to be a valid session of Congress. They threw out election results on the pretence of interference and, in a "contingent election", certified the southern candidate as the winner. The Justicialists replied by organizing a session of Congress in Philadelphia which in contrast met quotas for validity and certified the election's legitimate winner. It impeached Woodward and removed him from office and allowed his staunchly constitutionalist vice president to take power for the two weeks until March 4. But everyone knew this was only the beginning of a great fight for the nation.

1869-1869: Andrew Johnson (People's)

Johnson's rise was only accepted by the Philadelphia Congress - indeed, the Harris Court declared it illegal and its judges then got removed from office by Philadelphia - but nonetheless he organized military preparation. He revoked territorial governors and replaced them with Justicialists. In Kansas, this caused a miniature revolution when its proslavery governor and territorial congress were overthrown in revolution by local Comunero Clubs, bringing about a border war between it and Missouri. In New York City, its mayor declaring against the Philadelphia Congress caused him to be overthrown by local Comuneros, an act which caused vast riots across the city which damaged the war effort. While most slaveholding states refused to recognize the Philadelphia Congress, Johnson made sure that Delaware and Maryland recognized it, though he could not stop Baltimore from falling to slaver gangs. The landlocked and slaveowning southern-dominated midwestern state of Illinois saw more division as its governor refused to recognize Philadelphia, but Johnson secured the assent of its congress, which ensured that Illinois would see a civil war rather than a fall. By the time of March 4, Johnson ensured there would be a government for prosecuting a war for the constitution.

1869-1877: Henry Winter Davis (Justice)
1868: (with Robert Rantoul Jr.) def. William M. Gwin/Jefferson Davis (People's), Henry Clay Jr./Thomas Ewing (Straight-Out Unionist)

Note: After a mob occupied the capitol, a rump Congress convened on February 10, 1869, decertified the results of the 1868 election, and in a "contingent election" declared Gwim as president

1872: (with John Cochrane) def. George H. Pendleton/Rodman M. Price (People's)

Davis was an unlikely figure for an antislavery party, for he was a Marylander and a supporter of the ideals of Henry Clay. He was, while antislavery, an enemy of "rabid abolitionism". But nonetheless, as Senator he aggressively supported Buenaventura right until the state government forced him to resign, which made him a hero to the Justicialists. Returning to Congress as a Representative, he continued this effort and quickly became the most notable Justicialist south of the Mason-Dixon line. Opposing Kansan slavery, his position only strengthened further and, with the Justicialists recognizing they needed to portray themselves as moderate and non-sectional, he won nomination at the 1868 Justicialist Convention. He won election by sweeping the North, even while losing his native Maryland. But despite him being a Southerner and a moderate, it wasn't enough to stop southern extremism, and following the takeover of the Capitol by Minutemen, he organized a Congress in Philadelphia to create a constitutional national government. It inaugurated a long and difficult war, but ultimately the Union and Constitution prevailed. And the exigencies of war changed Davis greatly, turning him from a moderate to a radical, to the surprise of everyone.

The United States had gone through three great previous sectional crises in living memory. The first, over the tariff, began following the 1828 election; the pro-tariff Henry Clay rationalized the existing tariff system and increased them in a bill which caused widespread discontent across the agrarian South. The state of South Carolina would escalate this much further when it declared the tariff unconstitutional and set a deadline for when it would refuse to enforce it. After a number of compromise attempts failed and both sides escalated and threatened violence, after Clay triumphed to a second term he finally achieved a compromise and the Nullification Crisis came to an end.

The second crisis occurred over the admission of Missouri in 1836; a routine admission, it immediately escalated when an antislavery congressman proposed making its admission contingent on it manumitting its slaves. When the North-dominated House passed it and the sectionally-equal Senate voted it down, it resulted in an impasse which rapidly spread out of doors to the people, threatening to destroy the Union. It escalated further when delegates of southern states met to agree on common action, and they even pondered secession. The outgoing President Clay would bungle his attempts at a resolution when he made some inopportune pro-slavery remarks, to mass controversy. This crisis ended when the south-friendly Van Buren successfully achieved the election of the Kentuckian Zebulon Pike in the 1836 election with the support of the South within the new People's Party, and with the help of Henry Clay (who was elected to Congress soon after leaving the presidency to ensure he could stop the crisis) Pike achieved a compromise which consisted of restriction of slavery north and west of Missouri, a strong fugitive slave law, Indian removal, slavery being assured south of Missouri, and Missouri itself having slave importation into it banned, but with existing slavery assured in perpetuity. This compromise caused widespread controversy, but it got enough support that it stayed put. Missouri would break the terms of the compromise by allowing importation of slaves in 1839, but with the ongoing Second Quasi War, both parties agreeing to exclude talk of it from the halls of Congress, and the Panic of 1842, the outrage faded away.

The third great crisis occurred when, with the election of Daniel Webster in 1844, he and his Unionist allies instituted a new tariff. This caused widespread disdain across the agrarian parts of the South as it reawakened an issue that had seemed settled. In South Carolina, discussion of nullification made a return. But its leader, John C. Calhoun, made sure to keep a handle on all such discussion, and through doing so he would successfully moderate his image and win support which he leveraged to win the Populist nomination in 1848. He fought the ensuing election well, but by a narrow margin he was defeated. With this, Calhoun ceased to keep a handle on talk of nullification, and South Carolina invited delegates from across the South to meet for united action in 1849. However, the South was no longer so unanimous in opposition on the tariff as it was less agrarian and more industrial than it had been in 1832, and so this convention was ill-attended. Those that came had large opposition within their state congresses, and the convention's delegates were generally opposed to action as radical as nullification. With Webster threatening harsh action and Virginia and Georgia pulling their delegates, the convention collapsed, South Carolina was unwilling to take action by itself, and the Second Nullification Crisis came to an end.

These sectional crises had resulted in a number of things. First, the tariff was no longer the dividing line between north and south it once was, rather it was slavery and strictly slavery which divided the two. The Missouri Compromise had stood, but it was dependent on the north being willing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1837, which it was only willing to do intermittently. All the while, slaves continued to try to make the escape to British North America, with support from northern abolitionists. Simultaneously, the South, boxed in by the terms of the Missouri Compromise, sought to expand the United States to make way for slave states both to protect slavery from outside threats and to strengthen its position within the union, and though filibuster attempts failing and the Union Party's staunch opposition meant such attempts did not spiral and turn into a new sectional crisis, they did threaten the terms of the Missouri Compromise.

The independence of the Provinicias Internas, consisting of the Spanish American provinces of Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, Sinaloa, New Vizcaya, Coahuila, New Leon, and New Santander, as Buenaventura in 1864 threw a great wrench into this when its declaration of independence declared the abolition of slavery. The South, which sought to make the world safe for slavery, was driven into a great panic. It also emerged in a period in which party cohesion was weak; thus, the instrument of party which could so usefully crush sectional tensions was greatly weakened. President Henry Clay Jr., who initially endorsed Buenaventura's independence, was convinced to pull out of the 1864 election to reduce sectional tensions; instead, this caused the Unionists to split between the moderate organization and a free-soil party. In the ensuing election, the latter, nominating Seward for the presidency, was able to win enough votes to force a hung College. The ensuing contingent election was ultimately won by the Populists and their candidate, Supreme Court Chief Justice George Washington Woodward, with the help of the votes of moderate Unionists.

Woodward was nominated because, as Chief Justice, his politics were largely unknowable. But his politics turned out to be in defence of an extreme interpretation of states-rights, verging on Calhounist. He declared neutrality over the Buenaventura War of Independence, and when northerners joined up with its Comunero rebels, he enforced the Neutrality Act against them, and in contrast he turned a blind eye to southern support for Spain. But none of this could stop discussion outside of Congress as well as the backlash against it, and in the 1866 elections the large Populist majority turned into a small oppositionist majority. When in 1867 the Comunero rebels won Buenaventura's independence and Northern veterans returning to form paramilitary Comunero Clubs, the South's panic at slavery being boxed in increased greatly. A court case coming to the Supreme Court ended with all federal laws restricting slavery being declared unconstitutional, replacing restriction on territorial slavery with the old Spanish law protecting it. And Woodward was willing to enforce it. Furthermore, the south made a concerted effort to settle land to make them states, settling both Cimarron and East Florida and competing with the north - including with violence - over Kansas. With the use of patronage, Woodward successfully got enough doughface and southern oppositionists to accede to it to obtain the admission of both Cimarron and East Florida in 1868, and he sought to ensure Kansas would get admitted as well.

This was all in time for the 1868 election. The antislavery forces, organized into the Justice Party, sought to obtain enough votes for a majority. With the constitutionally-mandated election by presidential district, this would require near-unanimity, he knew, from the North, and to this end it nominated a moderate border southerner, Henry Winter Davis. In contrast, the southern-dominated Populists organized a southern-dominated ticket of Gwin and Voorhees with every desire to extend Woodward's policies. All the while, Henry Clay Jr. looked at these political developments in panic. Despite the collapse of any opposition to the Populists in his native Kentucky, he believed there needed to be a fight for the union against the two forces bringing it apart. And thus, he organized a Unionist ticket - one last ticket - with what little remained of non-Justicialist oppositionists.

As the election proceeded, it became clear that the nation was ready for a Justicialist. Henry Winter Davis campaigned well, and ultimately, he did win near-unanimity from the north. With the exception of votes for Gwin from New York and New Jersey - which were heavily tied to the southern economy - and Indiana - which was culturally southern - he swept the north, and in addition to one vote from Maryland, he won 146 votes - just enough for a majority. Excluding East Florida and Cimarron, that is, and whether they would be considered states upon their election was an open question that depended on what exact date Congress considered their statehood - before or after the election. In their absence, it would instead be a hung college due to the small amount of support Clay Jr. got from border Unionists. This dispute immediately achieved vast proportions in and out of Congress, even as it became clear that the House would fall under firm Justicialist control in the coming elections.

But Gwin, panicked and horrified at the victory of restriction, needed to make a move, and so to that end he talked with southern governors over the wire. Soon afterwards, the governors of Maryland and Missouri and the returning boards under their control declared that there had been electoral fraud in elections in their state and, to that end, removed all non-Gwin electors and replaced them with electors who would vote for Gwin. In addition to the votes from East Florida and Cimarron, this would give Gwim a majority in the Electoral College.

The Constitution was wholly unclear on who would answer in the case of such a dispute. If it would be the Senate, under Populist control, and its president, Vice President Andrew Johnson, they would no doubt recognize Gwin. If it would be the a join session of Congress, with the House under the control of a coalition of Justicialists and other oppositionists and in the coming elections were due to have a more sweeping majority, it would no doubt recognize Davis. And if the decision was to be decided by contingent election, that would mean a joint session again, which would mean Davis similarly. With the divide between Justicialist and Populist growing larger and larger, compromise was impossible.

On both sides paramilitaries had formed, the northern Comuneros and the southern Minutemen, but Washington was located between Maryland and Virginia, and thus in the south. Thus, Minutemen had the position to strike. They met senators and other government officials to plan how best to ensure an inauguration of Gwin; they hit a snag when Vice President Johnson refused to play ball with such tactics. Their plans reached their fruition when, on the day Congress was to meet, Minutemen invaded the minimally-defended Capitol and invited pro-slavery congressmen to meet. This was one more senator than half of the Senate (including Cimarron and East Florida), but Vice President Johnson was absent; instead he spat at them and organized an attempt to counter them. The president pro tempore then counted the electoral votes, including the votes from Cimarron and East Florida and the replaced Gwim slates from Maryland and Missouri, and he declared that with this Gwim had won a majority and became president. Outgoing president Woodward quickly recognized this as authoritative, as did the majority of Supreme Court members, and they called for the end of the controversy. The unhappiness in the north was deafening.

In its wake, Vice President Johnson and President-Elect Davis organized an extraordinary meeting of a joint session of Congress in Philadelphia consisting of the remainder (including the vast majority of the House as well as Clay Jr.'s Unionists), which declared Davis duly elected and, to clean up all further controversy, held a mock contingent election which ensured he would be considered duly-elected by every standard except the Senate's.

And with that, the United States was divided into two governments, one in control of most of the North and the other of the South. Though Johnson and Davis frustrated attempts to get Maryland to recognize Gwin and ensured their position was strong enough that Illinois would fall into divided governments itself rather than go for Gwin, it was quite clear that defeating the rebels in charge of Washington without causing a partition of the nation would be tough. But Davis was willing to fight for Union and Liberty, and for the constitution. This fight would be long and tough, but it would ultimately end with Union and Liberty confirmed, slavery at last destroyed, and the constitution vindicated. And that - that Davis could be proud of.

Indicus · Dec 15, 2022

In 1827, the British government fell to a revolution, and in its place came a state which, while not matching the revolutionary dreams of many, brought the British Isles onto a radical and modernizing path. Out came the unreformed parliament, and out came civic disabilities, and over the next two decades out came the chaotic law and out came the rotting judicial system. In its place came a neatly-demarcated parliament with a much expanded franchise, in came religious equality under the law, in came rationalized legal codes, and in came a modernized judicial system. This came hand-in-hand with centralization, however, and nowhere was this more controversial than in Scotland. It had previously prided itself on being a distinct nation within the union, and these reforms adversely affected its status as such. While the reforms greatly expanded the Scottish electorate, Parliament now contained a larger proportion of Scottish seats, and the legal codes resembled a modernized form of Scottish law more than they did English law, Scotland could no longer boast of having a distinct law or judicial system anymore, and the Frame of Government effectively rendered large parts of the Acts of Union obsolete, the various Scottish national banks were supplanted with a singular United Bank of the British Isles, and the establishment of religious equality under the law resulted in Scottish Catholics, greatly expanded in number following the Irish Famine of the 1820s, now having a much stronger voice, causing a Protestant counterreaction. This caused mixed feelings, as protests that Scotland was reduced to an "English province" mixed in with joy at increased representation.

In the tumultuous decades of the 1830s, this counterreaction made itself known in the form of a strong Scottish Tory presence, who sought the full restoration of the pre-1827 order - albeit with some adjustments like more Scottish MPs. When the Tories split between over the Corn Laws and more decisively over joining the Russell government, Scottish Tories allied themselves with the ones who held steadfast in their Toryism, and as the Protestant firebrand William Gladstone - a man of Scottish heritage, incidentally - became its leader, they joined in fully, not in the least because they wanted nothing to do with the Irish Catholics in Scotland who backed the Irish hero Daniel O'Connell. This principled royalism and traditionalism served them well, and as the 1840s proceeded, the assertion of Irish nationalism in this period only led them to assert a royalist Scottish nationalism in opposition. O'Connellite nationalism reached its apotheosis in 1847 when the government, having been forced into it to retain O'Connellite support, presented a bill establishing an Irish Legislature; to the shock of many, William Gladstone endorsed it, declaring the Acts of Union between Ireland and Britain a dismal failure. His party subsequently abandoned him and the Traditionalists were left bereft of leadership or, for that matter, much non-local organization. In Scotland, in its absence Traditionalists rallied behind a medievalist and romanticist Scottish identity which abhorred how Parliament had been "fixated" and "blackmailed" into establishing an Irish legislature. And there was no man better for this role than the Earl of Eglinton, a proud Scotsman and influential politician previously best known for organizing a medieval-style jousting tournament[1]. In 1853, Scottish Traditionalists organized under his leadership in the form of the Scottish Rights League.

The Scottish Rights League delicately avoided any whiff of Irish-style nationalism, associated with the Irish Catholic rabble. Its demands were keyed in the language of romanticism and medievalism rather than any Enlightenment notions, and they only rarely expressed desires for the restoration of any sort of Scottish legislature. It instead fixated on the restoration of a separate Scottish law, of national banks, of a separate judicial system, and other emblems of Scottish nationhood. These tempered demands did not stop Moderates in Parliament from deriding them as no different from those of the Irish nationalists they despised. But nevertheless, as an interest group they forced Parliament to focus more on Scottish issues - lest this turn into a true nationalist movement. Parliament proved more willing to pass Scotland-specific laws, the United Bank branch in Edinburgh was enlargened to the size of the main branch in London, and the administration made sure to appoint Scottish judges to Scottish courts. In 1857, this culminated in the establishment of the Lord Lieutenant of Scotland, a figure appointed by the administration who would administer Scotland from Edinburgh in place of the Interior Minister who did so previously, and who would make sure he would consult Scottish interests before making decision. This great success showed the ability of Scottish united action to affect real change to the state of the Union.

In 1863, after this great success, the Earl of Eglinton died and the Scottish Rights League weakened in magnitude. The reconstituted Traditionalist Party made inroads into Scotland, eating its base, while the more national Radicals and Moderates - who both had large presences in Scotland throughout - were now able to play the Scottish identity game well. Thus, the 1860s and 70s were decades of decline for Scottish nationalism. By the time the agrarian crises of the late 1870s and early 1880s changed this, the Scottish Rights League was a shell of its former self, and anger at London neglecting Scottish interests made itself known in non-Traditionalist ways. The Association of the White Thistle, advocating an establishment of a Scottish legislature on the Irish model and often involved in radical politics, quickly outpaced the Scottish Rights League and the latter quickly collapsed and was absorbed into it. But its legacy continues to live on in a thread of Scottish nationalist that remains traditionalist.

[1] I can't make this up.

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