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[Indicus]

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]

Spoiler: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

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.

 

[Indicus]

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.

 

[Indicus]

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]

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.

 

[Indicus]

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.

 

[Indicus]

My mind did boggle a bit when I realized that, despite the vasty different political situation, in the context of a second Quasi War creating a military atmosphere and the Union Party needing to promote a candidate surmounting the sectional divide, William Henry Harrison would still make the most sense as an 1840 presidential candidate.

 

[Indicus]

 

[Indicus]

The rise of international labor politics across the Anglophone world would come due to a conflux of plural forces. First, industrialization. In the British Isles industrialization had occurred for longer and it produced a vast number of goods, while in contrast in the United States it was a much more recent process, the result of the Tariff of 1819 and subsequent tariffs resulting in import substitution (particularly in the Northeast). But in both countries, this created an industrial working class that sought labor rights. Second, there was substantial political realignment in both countries. In the British Isles this was many orders larger owing to the Popular Revolution tearing the old Tory-Whig system apart and destroying the old centres of political legitimacy, while in the United States this was more simply because interests that once stood within the Republican Party finally split apart. But the result was nevertheless, in both countries, a political vacuum which allowed people to think of wholly new political forces to bring to the stage. And a third was an opposition to the new figure of the plutocrat, exemplified by the banker. In both countries, banking interests were stoked, in the British Isles by the anti-revolutionary Bank of England tottering towards collapse (it finally did so in 1835), and in the United States by the recent establishment of the Second Bank of the United States in 1828. The result was that workers' parties in both countries had great symmetry of policies and, recognizing this, various British workers' associations invited members of the Working Man's Parties of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts to come to a general convention and agree on a common platform.

This session, beginning on the anniversary of the promulgation of the Magna Carta, agreed on a variety of policies. They agreed on labor rights, universal suffrage, and opposition to banking immediately. Somewhat more testy was the issue of immigrants, but the great numbers of Irish people fleeing the Famine to both Britain proper and the United States in the 1820s resulted in competition on both sides of the pond and stoked diehard Protestantism, and as a result both agreed on an anti-immigrant stance. Furthermore, the American Working Men's proposal of distributing land to every adult man (with the west in mind) was one which got great support among their British counterparts (with the overseas colonies in mind), and so it achieved inclusion in the platform as well. More testy was the issue of the tariff. The British Isles being the world leader in industry, British Working Men saw no need to have any tariff whatsoever, while their American counterparts were more divided - free trade was a Jeffersonian ideal, but American industry was still new and British goods had the potential to bankrupt it. But the First Nullification Crisis and the Compromise Tariff of 1833 temporarily took the issue out of American politics, and so the convention was able to agree on a platform supporting free trade generally, except where economic expediency might support a "temporary" tariff. Conspicuously absent was any plank on slavery: both American and British Workies could agree that "white slavery" was a bigger deal than "black slavery", and they associated antislavery agitation with middle-class reformers who they abhorred; in the British Isles, it was also associated with the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, whose "Whiggish" radicalism British Workies loathed. With these policies established, the World Working Man's Convention was established as an institution, intended to unify workers around the Anglophone world.

Over the next few years, the ideology of the Convention morphed. In the British Isles, the adoption of the New Poor Law with near-unanimity in Parliament resulted in a period of new agitation, and it brought certain British worker groups in a tenuous alliance with Tory traditionalists, while in the United States many workers joined in Zebulon Pike's 1836 presidential campaign and became People's Men. This made the idea of a World Working Man's Convention tenuous at best - but it nevertheless retained cohesion. On the other hand, the alliance between some British Workies and Tories broke apart and the appeal of radical worker politics diminished following the weakening of the strict terms of the New Poor Law in 1838 and the post-revolutionary government successfully gaining legitimacy for itself. As American politics stabilized, the environment in which Workies could make themselves a notable force weakened, and many simply became radical followers of Zebulon Pike fixated on the banking system above all. But despite workers' forces weakening, conventions continued with an ideology broadly focused on the same common platform.

But in the end, these old workers' forces could not last. The British Isles would, over the 1840s, see the rise of more mainstream Radicalism with a structured party and under the leadership of Wilfrid Lawson, and this weakened the appeal of workers' politics further than it did, and his 1846 electoral victory began a period of unprecedented ten year party dominance and reform which, once and for all, confirmed the stability of the post-revolutionary regime and gave it the lustre of liberating New Granada through military victory. Those who found Lawson too moderate found themselves marginalized. While in the United States, Pike's hard-money and anti-banking ideology was discredited following the Panic of 1842, and the defeat of his handpicked successor Martin Van Buren in 1844 at the hands of Daniel Webster, the very image of the coastal pro-banking elitist, saw ultra-radicals in the United States weakened. They would reemerge as the important northern allies of John C. Calhoun, whose proslavery criticism of northern commerce won him their support, and he successfully won the nomination of the People's Party in 1848. In the subsequent election, he came close to winning - far closer than Webster and the Unionists would have wanted - but he lost nonetheless. With that, the South Carolina anti-tariff extremists who Calhoun had, until that point, kept behind his campaign, nullified the Tariff of 1845 - but President Webster stood firm against them, and the South was not so united behind free trade as it once was - and the Second Nullification Crisis was defeated. This left ultra-radical Populists deeply weakened. With that, labor politics in both countries fell into a temporarily decline and an international workers' convention was left unthinkable - but it was not the end. Labor politics in the Anglophone world would re-emerge in a much different, light - and the World Working Man's Convention would go down as a valiant predecessor.

 

[Indicus]

The origins of Tammany Hall came in the wake of the American Revolution. Named after Tamanend, a Lenape chief who is said to have welcomed William Penn upon his arrival and who gained a mythic status, Tammany Societies spread from Philadelphia across the northern United States, and in 1789 into New York. Viewing itself as the inheritors of the Sons of Liberty, the Tammany Society of New York regarded itself as an organization fighting to preserve the purity of the republic against the class of merchants and officials who sought to corrupt it. From the outset, this also gained a nativist tint, as the organization fought to oppose the influence of "agents of foreign despots", and it restricted its membership to "native-born patriots"[1]. Initially, it was known as the Society of Saint Tammany, but this was thought too Catholic.

Politically, it quickly aligned itself with the Republican Party against the Federalists which so embodied the elites they loathed, and it received the backing of the Clintons and Aaron Burr against them. In the 1800 election campaign, it played a decisive role with Burr in swinging New York for the Republicans, and through it the election. In 1802, DeWitt Clinton's hatred of Burr led him to begin a feud with Tammany, and when he became Mayor of New York the following year, he shut Tammany out of patronage. Tammany's association with Burr harmed it heavily following his assassination of Hamilton, and when in 1806 his dismally-failed invasion of Spanish Luisiana resulted in him being accused of treason, they decisively distanced themselves from him. Instead, they redoubled their efforts fighting against DeWitt Clinton and his supporters. But this was to no avail, as he rose upwards and became Lieutenant-Governor in 1811, with the backing of Irish Catholics who viewed him as their patron. When Clinton became Vice President in 1813, he continued to have control over much New York patronage, and through both his position in Washington and his friends in New York, he secured federal funding for the creation of the Erie Canal and a vote in its favor by the government of New York. Tammany harshly opposed this, deriding it as "Clinton's Ditch", and for a time such attacks were successful. When Clinton ran for president in 1816 as a dissident Republican, Tammany took great pleasure in organizing against him. But Clinton made his return and won election as Governor in 1818, to the dismay of Tammany.

In 1822, Clinton oversaw the opening of the Erie Canal to business, to the applause of the people of New York and beyond. It connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and transformed the fate of the United States forever. While Tammany had, upon seeing its popularity not just among Clintonite Irish Catholics but also among Protestants who saw its potential, already endorsed it, it was unmistakably a victory for Clinton. When he ran for president in 1824, he almost won - but Tammany backing the run of fellow New Yorker Daniel D. Tompkins for the presidency would sap him of much of his support and, when the presidential election came to the House, Clinton's lack of connections in Congress meant his defeat. The following year came the Luisiana War, as the US went to war with Spain. The war, pitting the predominately Protestant republican US against a staunchly Catholic monarchy, immediately stoked nativism, and Tammany immediately took advantage. When Spanish ships sent shells at New York, it was Tammany which organized to fight the "Papist menace" if they ever deigned to land troops. As Clinton's star began to fall as events overtook him, Tammany rose, and in 1827 it backed his defeat. And though Clinton did successfully return next gubernatorial election on the backs of his Irish Catholic base, his star was fading. When his miserable 1832 run for the presidency ended with him crushed, he died broken the following year.

In part, Tammany's victory in the late 1820s was the result of it attracting the support of the poor - including some the Irish Catholic poor - through broad-based policy. In the wake of the Famine of the 1820s, there was a great wave of Irish immigration, and Tammany could not afford to lose any despite all its intense hatred of "Papist superstition". In 1831, it endorsed the savvy politician Martin Van Buren, who sought to attract Catholic voters, in his successful run for the governorship. But the late 1820s and early 1830s were also a time of bubbling nativism due to the immigration wave and the absorption of Catholics in Luisiana including the creation of the Catholic-majority state of Orleans. This wave resulted in the shock 1831 election of diehard nativist Samuel Morse as Mayor of New York as part of the Anti-Catholic Party - a stunning refutation of this strategy. This led Tammany to readopt its nativist attitudes in no small part to crush him - and in 1834 it finally did. When the People's Party was formed in 1835-6, Tammany backed it heavily, as did the remnants of the Anti-Catholic Party. Their shared nativist and anti-Catholic attitude was something they also shared with Southern planters, who associated Irish immigrants with the diehard abolitionist Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, and despite all the efforts of the founders of the People's Party to create a broad-bottomed, it quickly became a vehicle for nativism.

And through it all, Tammany boomed. The People's Party in New York City may as well have been synonymous with it. The candidates endorsed at its wigwams were the official Populist slate, and it helped ensure Populist dominance in the city for many years to come. Exerting a host of shady tactics from patronage to threats of violence, defeating Tammany was always a tough battle. Furthermore, its loyalty to the Populist cause was unquestionable and, when to the disappointment of many New York Populists the great Southerner John C. Calhoun won its nomination for the presidency in 1848, Tammany put out all the stops in his favor. This was part of why Calhoun almost won this election, and it helped to further strengthen Tammany's position.

The 1850s, in contrast, were a severe period of attack against corruption. The Webster political scandals of 1851-2 revealed a ludicrously massive amount of political corruption around his presidency including the sale of patronage positions, and the subsequent backlash and urge for political service reform hit Tammany as well. Unionists, only too happy to distract from Webster, directed a heavy attack against them. The civil service reform bill of 1855 spearheaded by Unionists removed nearly all federal patronage from the control of the (Populist) president, and when the Unionists took control of New York State, they were only too happy to pursue similar reforms against Tammany. But it withstood them, raising the banner of municipal autonomy, and its power over the city was only shaken. New York City was, in contrast to its neighbor of Brooklyn, under the heavy influence of Tammany, and linked heavily with the Populist system to its south. The great political schisms of the 1860s shook this little and, when the 1868 election came, it backed the Populist to the hilt.

The 1868 election ultimately came down to the wire; despite the Justice Party nominating a moderate antislavery Marylander, the very nature of presidential elections being held by district meant they only barely won. Election disputes quickly came to the fore with duelling slates of electors, and this as well as the dispute over whether Cimarron and East Florida were states upon their election resulted in a constitutional crisis spiraling out of control. This ultimately resulted in the outgoing Woodward administration to allow paramilitary "Minutemen" to occupy Congress and convene Populists to certify the election of the Populist, while in contrast the Justicialists and old-line Unionists fled to Philadelphia to certify the election of the Justicialist in their own Congress. This resulted in civil war. For the most part, this pinned North against South, but not in New York. The state government, dominated by the Justicialists, had been gradually weakening control over New York City patronage through civil service reform and amending the charter, and Populist Tammany reviled this. This culminated in the Tammany Mayor of New York declaring that, for all intents and purposes, he recognized the Populist as the rightful president of the United States, and he achieved its recognition by act of the Council of Aldermen. This, in turn, resulted in the state government moving to stop him, he with his municipal police resisted. In truth, Tammany was divided on this; some thought this was considerably too extreme of a move. But enough supported it to kick off massive riots which devastated the city and resulted in distilleries and the gas works blowing up. By the time the New York state government imposed order with the help of the military, the city was, while not anywhere near burned down, badly damaged. Tammany itself was scattered, its control over the city destroyed.

New York City was subsequently put under martial law by the state government, its charter suspended. When it felt content to resume municipal government in 1872, it was in a union with solidly-Justicialist Brooklyn. Though attempts were made to resurrect Tammany, no attempt achieved anywhere near its power in Manhattan, and they withered away in the decades after the civil war. And though in the subsequent decades the Justicialists achieved much power in the city, they would never match the glories of Tammany, destroyed in the fires of rebellion.





[1] As bizarre as it is to think of it, Tammany was initially a nativist organization. This began to change following the War of 1812 in which Irish-Americans were eager to lash a blow against the British Empire, and Tammany saluted an Irish battalion. It finally fell away in 1817, when Irish-Americans seeking it to endorse the Irish candidate Thomas Addis Emmet for State Assembly stormed Tammany headquarters. Out of self-preservation Tammany endorsed him, and this began Tammany's long history of immigrant patronage.

 

[Indicus]

 

[Indicus]

The source of the Civil War was ultimately the divide between slave and free states. The slave states were the South while the free states were the North, and this great divide was one which all national politics had to account for. The parties of the Second Party System, the Unionists and the Populists, by design surmounted this divide and made sure to marginalize all debates over slavery. When the issue did emerge by proxy or otherwise, the parties successfully suppressed it. The First Nullification Crisis ended with the Compromise Tariff, the controversy over expanding west ended with the Missouri Compromise, and the Second Nullification Crisis ended with cowed nullificationists backing down. But the issue kept coming to the national stage. Seeking to take advantage of the US's treaty right to construct a railway to the Pacific through British Columbia, in 1857 President Robert F. Stockton pushed an Organic Act organizing a Nebraska Territory extending to the Rockies. That this required removing Native American tribes - including many already expelled from the East - to semi-arid lands further west was no issue to him, and suspicious of the government many of them instead chose to move to Spanish Texas. In a subsequent act, Stockton achieved the construction of a transcontinental railroad from St. Louis to Independence to the Platte River, and from thence over the route of the Oregon Trail to Port Townsend.

But this, Missourians and Illinoians, living in only tenuously slave states, were angry about. They feared Nebraska Territory, by the Missouri Compromise secured as free soil, would be settled by northerners and thusly become one or many free states where slaves would be able to flee to - and their freedom recognized by free soiler juries. This would leave Missouri and Illinois surrounded on three sides by free states, and slavery gradually whittled away with fugitive slaves and white immigration until they would both become free states. To avoid this, proslavery Missourians and Illinoians migrated into Nebraska Territory and took up the best homesteads, to make sure that when it came time for statehood, they would make at least part of Nebraska a slave state. When railway workers - almost entirely Irish immigrants who supported free soil - came, they sought to intimidate them into fleeing upon the end of their contracts. Fearing the transcontinental railroad would bring northern migrants en masse, they even did sabotage. These efforts were weakened first by the size of Nebraska Territory, second by the sheer number of Irish workers coming in and taking up homesteads, and third because many Southerners were scared about lowering slave concentrations through expansion allowing antislavery a door in. But nevertheless, the conflict continued and the railroad fell behind schedule.

In an attempt to resolve this conflict and complete the railroad, Stockton's successor Richard Menefee made the decision in 1863 to divide Nebraska Territory into the territories of Platte and Kansas, with Kansas implicitly to be settled by Southerners who would avail to make the area a slave state at the earliest opportunity. Upon pushing this through over a party revolt by Northern Unionists, though this did secure the swift completion of the transcontinental railroad, it made Kansas Territory a battlefield as Northerners entered to secure it as a free state against Southerners intent on making it a slave state. Deciding Kansas Territory had enough people for a territorial election, Menefee decided the time was ripe for a territorial election; it subsequently saw wide-scale fraud from Missouri, the territorial legislature ended up being dominated by slave staters. To force the issue of the constitutionality of slavery in the territories, they then passed a slave code - and the case went to the Supreme Court. Simultaneously to this, revolts brewed in bordering parts of New Spain, from California to Texas and through the Sierra Madre, in the name of independence as the new federation of Buenaventura; in Texas, it poised Irish free soilers against coastal planter interests, making it antislavery, on America's very borders. It threatened to make Orleans, the centre of the slave system, border free soil. When Menefee endorsed this revolution, as he would any Spanish American revolution, Southern Unionists called him a traitor. These twin issues, the Kansas Slave Code and the Buenaventuro Revolution, tore the Union Party apart on sectional lines in 1864.

The 1864 election proved a chaotic affair. The northern faction of the Union Party united with the abolitionist Free Democracy in the name of free soil and duly nominated respected the charismatic "Daniel Webster Unionist" Thomas Wilson Dorr, while the southern faction nominated the well-respected politician James C. Jones. The fight between them and the Populists' nominee Chief Justice George W. Woodward was a most chaotic affair - Dorr sounded most revolutionary on the campaign trail as he boomingly spoke of the need for a political revolution, for the democratic masses to rise up and destroy the Slave Power, and his supporters organized Committees of Vigilance to rise up in mass action. Against this, Woodward's proxies spoke of Law and Order against this "Jacobin" threat, and Jones was left to re-establish moderate Unionism against them. When the election was held, the result was most inconclusive, and it took days for states to sum up their ballots. The three-pronged fight in much of the Middle West simply made this harder, and returning boards quickly became the sight of extreme scorn as political biases affected their counting. If Dorr were to win, said many Populists, they would refuse to recognize it. For the most part, however, with the Union Party critically divided, the Populists won their way and Woodward was almost elected without a contingent election. Almost.

The 1865 contingent election saw almost all Southern Union congressmen vote for Woodward, with only some Kentuckians choosing to abstain; this gave Woodward a decisive victory in Congress. But in the eyes of Northern ex-Unionists, this made Southern Unionists effectively Populists, and it made sure the 1864 election would not be but a blip. The subsequent Woodward administration simply made this worse. The Supreme Court declared slavery a form of property protected under due process, and therefore Congress could not regulate its spread into the territories. Suddenly, slavery was legal as far north as Pembina Territory. Far from settling the issue of slavery, this simply escalated it, and Northerners continued to pour in to Kansas Territory to secure it against the Southerners upon statehood. What made this far worse was the Buenaventuro Revolution, and the Northerners who volunteered to join the revolutionary Comuneros caused panic in the South. It marked an instance of Northerners directly attacking the South's 'peculiar institution', and Southerners could only react in panic. To assuage it, Woodward enforced the Neutrality Act to its fullest, using the law to prosecute to the harshest extent these volunteers. These prosecutions, including of influential northerners, caused a wave of revulsion, and northern juries nullifying the law was something many Southerners viewed as a revolutionary act. But volunteers kept coming. Against this, southerners chose to give the Spanish funding to protect slavery, turning the Buenaventuro Revolution into a great proxy war between North and South. But in the end, the Spanish were defeated, and Texan slaveholders retreated to Cuba. Northern Comuneros came home to widespread applause, and they paraded with purple banners in tow. When Woodward would attempt to enforce the Neutrality Act by packing juries, this caused Northerners to unite in opposition to this act of 'despotism', and nary a Southerner met them; they considered an end of the jury system a small price to pay for the protection of slavery.

Returning volunteers would form Comunero Clubs that acted as paramilitaries for antislavery politicians; rejecting more radical names, the antislavery movement, now including Populist splinters, united under the Justice Party label. Many of these volunteers would enter Kansas Territory, and the conflict between free and slave staters escalated to extremes. With the Kansas legislature controlled by slave staters with the help of electoral fraud from Missouri and Illinois, they made the decision to establish their own shadow legislature, submitting a free state constitution to Congress. This explicitly revolutionary act was met with revulsion across the South, who feared it would serve as a precedents for slaves rebelling and establishing shadow governments - but Woodward was altogether reluctant to alienate the North, and so he did not go so far as to suppress it. But the controversy continued to escalate. When Maryland passed a manumission law, the South panicked yet harder, and this inspired Woodward to push for statehood to Cimarron and Florida. By making statehood for Ontonagon dependent on them, he got enough Northern Populists on board to push their statehood for them through Congress, just before the 1868 election. But when Cimarron and East Florida included in their constitution provisions banning free blacks from their borders, Justicialists declared this a violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the Constitution, and that therefore they remained territories. This hung like a shadow over the whole of the 1868 election.

The 1868 election saw the Populists nominate charismatic pro-South Cincinnatian George H. Pendleton in the name of Law and Order. In contrast, seeking to shed a radical image many feared had caused the 1864 defeat, the Justicialists nominated moderate antislavery Marylander Henry Winter Davis; he would abstain from launching a Websteresque campaign tour. While Menefee, distraught and horrified by these events and seeking to re-establish national unity, organized a Union Party convention. The subsequent election proved nevertheless chaotic, as Davis' proxies continued to speak in vehemently revolutionary tones against the Slave Power, and Pendleton's spoke of the Justicialists as 'Jacobin' 'terrorists' who sought to overthrow the constitution. But in the end, Davis' more moderate candidacy paid dividends and swept most of the North, and Menefee's candidacy won only a handful of presidential districts. If Cimarron and East Florida were not considered states upon election, Davis would be victorious; if they were, it would be a hung electoral college and, again, the vote would go to Congress. Yet, controversy over return boards spiked once more. Though the slave states of the Middle West, Illinois and Missouri, certified three Menefee electors and one Menefee and Davis elector respectively, they overturned those certifications after a recount widely regarded as deeply partisan and replaced them with Pendleton electors, in an attempt to forestall challenges to Pendleton electors in the North. Sneering at this, the four Menefee and one Davis elector assembled separately from the "official" electors, and sent their results to Congress. In Indiana, free but deeply tied to the slavery-dominated Mississippi River, the nine rejected members of the Pendleton electoral slate declared the victory of Davis in their presidential districts fradulent and, on this basis, they declared themselves "certified by the Constitution", and in this they were joined with the six duly-certified Pendleton electors, who sent, together, fifteen electoral votes for Pendleton to Congress to certify. Together with electoral votes from East Florida and Cimarron recognized as valid, if all these disputed votes were ruled in favor of Pendleton, it would give him the victory.

This unprecedented period of warring elector states, in a time of extreme sectional tension, was made worse by the lack of clarity of the Constitution on who would rule in the case of such disputes. Would it be the House of Representatives, with its thin Justicialist majority? Or would it be the President of the Senate, in this case the fiercely pro-South Vice President Andrew Johnson? Or would it go to a contingent election, where who would win was an open question with Menefee Unionists holding the thinning middle while being badly divided? Both sides schemed and schemed. The Justicialist stance won the support of Menefee though not much of his Unionists, while the Populists faltered when they found that Johnson thought Davis won the title fair and square. Both Justicialists and Populists were intent on giving their man the title and inaugurating him in Washington; many questioned what would occur in the case of a dual inauguration. On February 10, 1869, the day Congress was to certify the election, proslavery "Minutemen" militias marched from Virginia and southern Maryland and, with outgoing President Woodward defending it little, they stormed the Capitol and invited Congressmen to duly certify Pendleton's election. Populist Congressmen came in, Vice President Johnson found himself barred from entry as did those few Justicialists who tried to enter, and this Congress ruled the disputes in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana Pendleton's way, thus recognizing him as President. In reaction, Justicialists attempted to hold their own session of Congress outside the Capitol, either in a different building or in the open field, but it found that the municipal government hated them, and Minutemen militias were intent on stopping them from meeting. And so, leading Justicialists called for Congress to meet in Philadelphia, firmly Justicialist with its Vigilance Committee and Comunero Clubs, to certify Davis as the rightful president-elect. Meeting in Independence Hall in the name of the Constitution, Justicialists and Unionists did just that - and they made the bold decision to impeach and remove Woodward from office, thereby making Andrew Johnson president for the two weeks until Davis' ordained inauguration.

The initial division of the United States - between the government in Washington, and the self-styled Constitutionalist government in Philadelphia - was driven by the decisions of state governments. Every slave state recognized Pendleton as the rightful president, while every free state - including Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, still in manumission - recognized Davis. But this was only part of the story. Much of the South's outsized political power prewar was based on its control of the Mississippi watershed, which extended well into the free parts of the Middle West. Much of Indiana was dependent on it, and even in firmly antislavery Ohio Cincinnati's domination by southern interests, including its famous railway to Charleston, led Justicialists to nickname it the "South Carolina of the West". New York City's economy was heavily centred around imports and exports to the South, and its politics were dominated by Populist Tammany Hall - resentment at the upstate nature of the New York Justice Party already led to the formation of a movement for separate statehood. In eastern Maryland and (to a lesser extent) southern Delaware, tied deeply to land further south and where slavery was prominent even with manumission underway, Minuteman militias struck in the name of slavery, infamously taking Baltimore. New Jersey, deeply tied to the slave economy, saw rebellion in the north of the state. But things were not one-sided in this regard. The Appalachians had many fierce enemies of the Slave Power, and in northwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and southeastern Kentucky, such feelings threatened to break out. And St. Louis, despite being the heart of the Mississippi, had little slavery itself and its vote for Davis was one of the centres of the electoral dispute.

However, most of these rebellions got crushed. Antislavery in St. Louis was weak and hardly enough to resist the Missourian state government, and indeed many St. Louisans cheered when it got crushed. Similarly, Appalachian resistance to state governments too got crushed, with the Constitutionalists unable to give enough assistance. New Jersey's rebellions got crushed hard, and famously former president Stockton led militias against them, despite extremely old. While New York City was invaded through loyal Brooklyn and, despite mob violence destroying large parts of the city and blowing up the gas works and numerous distilleries, it would be swiftly taken.

The territories were managed by Populist governors; however, for the most part, they saw their positions were untenable and either acceded to the Constitutionalists or fled. There were two major exceptions Kansas Territory, with its slave-stater legislature, decided to fight. However, it also had a shadow free-stater government, and many of its members were armed Comuneros with experience in Buenaventura. They swiftly marched, took on the slaver legislature and won, with the support of most Kansans. However, the slaver legislature simply fled into Missouri, and the grave western logistics issues the Constitutionalists faced, with only Chicago connecting its eastern and western elements, meant they had to fight a border war with minimal eastern support. And in faraway Olympia Territory, separated by British Columbia, the Populist governor attempted to hold true. With the United States - both governments - strictly disallowed by treaty from sending troops across British Columbia, the governor only needed to face a populace that, though mostly (not entirely) free soiler, was not ready to face a fight. It took the fleet stationed at Port Townsend and its crews, largely from free states, to overthrow the government in the Battle of Fort Townsend.

But nevertheless, the Constitutionalists organized. Andrew Johnson and then Henry Winter Davis called for troops to fight, and they got them. They sent them to secure Chicago, the keystone connecting the free east with its west, and it sent prongs to Maryland and Cincinnati to secure them. Cincinnati, despite being the home city of Pendleton himself, was not wholly pro-South, and the Constitutionalists took Cincinnati with only some difficulty. But most decisive was the strike at eastern Maryland. Constitutionalist troops took Baltimore, with the full support of the state government, and they aimed at Washington. The subsequent Battle of Washington would be tough, but ultimately the Constitutionalists took a bombarded, bruised city. Henry Winter Davis, in a celebratory mood, held an unofficial second inauguration at the steps of the Capitol, battered but not broken, to cheering crowds. While the Pendleton government retreated across the Potomac along with the sacred originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They regrouped at Richmond, from which they gained their modern moniker of the Richmond Government, and they planned. And though the partitionism of the Richmond Government is chiefly associated with the late Civil War, it began with the fall of Washington and its transformation into a strictly southern government.

 

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Britain's two largest parties both consider themselves as products of the same great tradition of liberty. Both the Radicals and the Moderates consider themselves as the successors of the Roundheads, the revolutionaries of 1689, the supporters of American independence, the Foxite opponents of the Pittite regime, and the revolutionaries of 1827. Within this, they differ - Radicals strongly admire the Levellers, the Commonwealthmen, the likes of John Wilkes, and the Democratic Radical movement inspired directly from the French Revolution; while conversely, Moderates prefer to emphasize Henry Vane, eighteenth century Whiggism, and the likes of Edmund Burke and William Windham - but they both lay claim to the same tradition of liberty stretching to the seventeenth century struggles between king and parliament.

But in truth, both parties were born in the tumultuous 1830s. The Popular Revolution put an end to the "ancient British constitution" and replaced it with the Charter of Liberties and Securities and the Frame of Government. The House of Commons no longer represented a collection of elite interests, but instead it represented an electorate of all male householders. Farcically, the Convention Parliament's inability to elect a monarch meant it instead established a temporary chief magistracy to fill the office. The new Parliament elected an overwhelming majority of Whigs and Radicals, the latter less a party and more a loose movement, while the old ruling ideology of Toryism was left in the dust. When the new Whig government attempted to constitute an administration of traditional Whigs, in accord to its traditional ideal of aristocrats leading the people, the old Whig party fractured. Samuel Whitbread, the son of a mere brewer and representative of the values of the burgeoning middle-class, and distraught over his Mountain Whig faction's lack of patronage, broke away from the Whigs and formed an alliance with certain Radicals and, more tellingly, with Daniel O'Connell and his very much radical-oriented Irish nationalists. It was from this alliance that today's Radical Party was formed, and that Whitbread's 1834 Pall Mall Address is today regarded as its true birth owes as much as it does to latter-day historiography. Whitbread's tenure as prime minister was, to say the least, highly chaotic; he did, nevertheless, establish many far-reaching reforms, and he did bestow upon his party a tradition of democratization and, despite being wedded to policies of retrenchment, a willingness to interfere in the economy in emergencies.

If Radicals took the Whiggish legacy of fearless advocacy of the sovereign majesty of the people to new directions, Moderates instead took its legacy of interposing between the people and the organs of power, to calm the former and constructively reform the latter. Its founder, Lord John Russell, had served as a fearless foe of the pre-revolutionary administrations and expressed an enmity against the Crown in line with the great Charles James Fox. However, he did not want a full democracy; he simply desired the strengthening of traditional British liberties and an electorate that better represented the changing composition of the polity. Though he endorsed the much wider electorate of the 1829 Frame of Government, he did not want to go further, and he declared the Frame a final, unamendable settlement. He saw in the Radicals an organ of destructive reform which would send Britain into the abyss, and this he sought to avoid through moderate reform that would defend Britain's traditional institutions in the act. In its name, he was able to align his faction of the Whigs with a moderate section of the Tories. In power, he enacted his agenda with middling degrees of success. His attempts to restore the monarchy - a stiffly limited, constitutional monarchy - did not just fail, but also made the "temporary" chief magistracy permanent. It came to his successors to accomplish his ideological aims more successfully.

Both parties existed within an order of extreme parliamentary instability; during Wilfrid Lawson's great Radical administration (1846-56), however, this slowly calmed down. Though he faced a number of party splits, first over the establishment of the Irish Legislative Assembly, then over his intervention in the New Granadine War of Independence, then finally the split over his centralizing tendencies that doomed him, all of these were ultimately temporary. The enactment of near-universal male suffrage, and the permanent breaking of power of the Lords by mass ennoblement, changed British politics forever. The Moderates were forced to reform with the times, forming the Daffodil League to serve as their grassroots network. It was with the George Grey administration (1864-9) that Moderate policies saw their greatest success; seeking to restore its authority, he replaced its membership with half of it being representative peers, and the other half being a collection of various interests. It is the form of the latter half that the Senate exists today.

But it was in the late nineteenth century that this order fell apart. The John Morley administration (1876-1885) was, in many ways, the greatest victory of old radicalism. Coming in on the back of the end of the American Civil War and the victory of the anti-slavery Constitutitonalist side that was so cheered by the Radicals, it reduced taxes across the board and tariffs to near-zero, enacted land reforms that ensured the great radical Cobden's ideal of "free trade in land" was met in truth, and pushed for internationalism abroad that not only ended the German War of Independence, but also established the International Forum to ensure conflicts could be resolved through discussion and arbitration. But already, the old radicalism was in threat. Retrenchment did nothing to resolve the many issues suffered by the Radicals' old electorate, and rising competition with American and French industry made Radicals' old attachment to free trade considerably less appealing. New Radicals advocated far-reaching municipal and land reform; no longer was the state something to be afraid of, but instead it was to be a tool to ameliorate the condition of the people and regulate the power of monopoly, and in many cities, particularly Birmingham, this saw its enactment in policy. With this came a newfound love of taxation, and they spoke openly of restoring the income tax, long since associated with the hated pre-revolutionary government. Furthermore, having abandoned politics of retrenchment, they were also more open to the Empire. Morley, a true believer in traditional old radicalism, could do nothing but shudder, and as the New Radicals, in the form of their organization the National Radical Union, took control of the party in opposition in 1887, Morley instead formed his own separate Old Radical bloc, and even as his foes hissed at him as a traitor, a latter-day Burke, he genuinely believed himself the upholder of true Radicalism.

The emblem of the National Radical Union, the torch of liberty, was already common among many Radical constituency organizations as a symbol of liberty unattached to foreign ideas, but it now became consistent. The Radicals had long used green, the traditional color of British radicalism, but they also added a bit of purple, the color of the Constitutionalist side of the American Civil War, and increasingly in Europe the color of labor and associationism. This fundamental design remains the Radical Party symbol today.

The Moderates, seeing this division as beneficial, chose to stress free trade themselves, and it is from there that their modern appellation of the "Moderate and Free Trade Party" emerged. The Radicals were, in truth, deeply divided on the topic of free trade; though their newfound appreciation to state intervention made them more open to it, protectionism was hardly some unifying policy. But it was a useful thing for the Moderates to stress, as the doctrine of free trade appealed particularly in Ireland, which was fearful of its food security and understood that protectionism would not protect it against competition from Great Britain. Morley's Old Radicals found themselves swallowed by the Moderates, and they bestowed upon them a legacy of retrenchment and laissez-faire economics, married to international utopianism. This granted the Moderates virtually untrammeled domination of the political scene - until the 1897 election and the great reformist CJ Fox Martineau's administration.

The Moderates would, following their stressing of free trade doctrines, use bushels of wheat and cornucopias to signify the prosperity of free trade, but its grassroots Daffodil League continued to use the daffodil. Later party modernization in 1942 made the daffodil the main party symbol.

It is fundamentally this divide that persists in politics today, despite the Radical divisions over the Hindustani War of Independence, the racial and religious panics of the mid-twentieth century, and other great changes since. Although the Association of Workers and Peasants is certainly a prominent party even capable of winning in some regions, the Irish Nationalists are prominent in Ireland, and there are various other active parties, this divide is the main one of British politics today.

Spoiler

1) Britain gets a revolution in 1827
2) Whigs and Radicals dominate the post-revolutionary state's politics
3) The leftmost Whig faction allies with various Radicals and with O'Connell's Irish Nationalists, forming the Radical Party
4) The remaining Whigs ally with some moderate Tories, forming the Moderate Party
5) Eventually the Radicals move from Cobdenite free trade laissez-faire radicalism and towards Chamberlain-style radicalism, causing a party split
6) To attract voters, Moderates accuse the Radicals unfairly of being entirely anti-free trade, stressing free trade themselves

 

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This emerged out of me trying to figure out what exactly the Internet would look like in my "Revolutionary Britain" thing. This led me to the computer, which in turn led me to the transistor, which in turn led me to the discovery of germanium, which in turn led me to the elements in general (and also to semiconductivity and quantum mechanics, but that's a whole other story). Along the way, I've filled out the periodic table up to plutonium.

Spoiler: Notes for the elements I remembered to make notes on

*Halogine named after proposed name halogen, with ending conforming with fluorine
*Glucinium named after its sweet taste (OTL name used in France till 1947)
*Coronium named after the corona rather than the sun (a name for an OTL theorized element also detected from the Corona)
*Humboldtium discovered in Bolivia from humboldite [argyrodite] also from there, named after Humboldt
*Residuine named after being residue gas (from air)
*Janium named after ninth planet, Janus
*Vestium named after the asteroid Vesta
*Junonium named after Juno
*Astraeum named after Astraea
*Norium named after Nordere, another name for Norway
*Meridium extracted from lapidolite (find new name), found in Minas Gerais, Meridia
*Concordium and Teutonium created from didymium, named in honor of the unification of Germany
*Celtium discovered by an Irishman
*Borussium and berolinium discovered by a Prussian
*Aurantine named after orange color
*Democratium named by French guy after democracy
*Mediolium named after Milan
*Caeruline named for blue color
*Albine named after white color
*Exine named because it flows out
*Cartium named for the British Charter of Liberties and Securities
*Ouralium named after the Ural mountains
*Grannius named after Aachen
*Gallium named in honor of France
*Lutetium named after Paris
*Decipium named for being deceptive
*Popularium named by a Brit after "the people"
*Londium named after London

 

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An experiment with QGIS. My font choice isn't the best and I'm not happy with a few of the labels (and editing this as an SVG would probably crash my computer), but that aside I think it looks good.

 

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An experiment with QGIS. My font choice isn't the best and I'm not happy with a few of the labels (and editing this as an SVG would probably crash my computer), but that aside I think it looks good.

View attachment 78644

Took some trial-and-error but I've been able to get the grasp of QGIS since making this, so here's a more "proper" version of this map.

 

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I realize my alternate wikibox aesthetic has ended up looking like an Ipod.

Spoiler: Text format and full-color flag

Name - République de Nouvelle-Hollande (French) / Republic of New Holland (English)
Continent - Oceania
Capital - Lorient [Perth]

​

Administration​

Head of state - Grand Elector John Maloney
Head of government - General Councillor for the Interior Amélie Tam
Legislature - National Assembly
President of the National Assembly - Guillaume Bremer
Judiciary - Tribunal of Cassation
President of the Tribunal of Cassation - Lawrence Haig
Form of government - Unitary republic under a democratic ministerial directorial constitution
Form of law - Cambacérès Code (civil, criminal, procedural), Brougham Code (commercial)

​

Geography​

Area - 2,534,596 km^2
Largest cities
-Lorient - 1,204,000 (city), 2,541,000 (metro)
-Espérance - 302,000 (city), 748,000 (metro)
-Callaghanville [Kalgoorlie] - 112,000 (city), 251,000 (metro)
Time zone - TMP+08:00
Currency - New Hollandaise piastre

​

Demography​

Language - French, English
-Note: English is dominant in Aururie department (incl. Callaghanville) and co-dominant in Espérance department; French is dominant in other departments
Population - 3,813,000
Density - 1.50 /km^2

​

History​

-Proclamation of the Colony of New Holland - April 7, 1808
-Charter for Self-Government - July 6, 1888
-Declaration of a Republic - January 22, 1954

​

Symbols​

National festival - Naturaliste Day (January 22) - commemorating victory against Germans at the Battle of Cape Naturaliste (1883)
Anthem - L'Armée des Nations / Army of the Nations
Motto - Unité, Liberté, Ordre

Flag​

 

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Thanks to @Time Enough for reminding me of this guy's existence.



Feargus O'Connor came from a fairly illustrious parentage. His father Roger, and uncle Arthur, were Anglo-Irish gentry; despite this, they were radical reformers and members of the Society of United Irishmen, which sought the end of distinctions between Anglican, Dissenter, or Catholic and their unity under a common Irish identity in a spirit of civil and religious liberty. Exasperation at the un-reformable institutions of the old Kingdom of Ireland, dominated by an Anglican aristocratic oligarchy, had turned their Whiggism into republicanism and a devotion to the principles of the French Revolution. Shortly after Feargus' birth, the French general Lazare Hoche led an army to invade Ireland in the name of an independent Irish republic, and promptly the United Irishmen established a republican government. Arthur O'Connor joined the Executive Commission (under its president Wolfe Tone) which sat at the top of the declared Irish republic, and it was in this context, of a new republic in arms against the powerful British monarchy, that Feargus lived his first few years. But alas, in the end, this revolution was defeated. In 1799, Hoche died on the field, and soon afterwards the Irish Republic fell into freefall. Though it took years for the British, the Tories, and the Orange forces to defeat the last of the Croppies, the Irish Republic effectively ceased to exist, and in 1800 Feargus fled with his family to France.

Though the United Irish diaspora is more commonly associated with the United States, where it helped set the religious ecumenism and antislavery tenor of the Irish diaspora there, France also held part of it, following the generations who fled there for the opposite politics of republican religious unity. Feargus' uncle Arthur was perhaps the foremost leader of this Irish community, and he even maintained some semblance of a government in exile. And thus it was that Feargus O'Connor grew up and naturalized in France, speaking French, but in an Irish neighborhood and on horror stories of Tory and Orange outrages against the Irish people; thus, he maintained a proud Irish identity even though he could remember his homeland little. With an undoubted elite position, and with anti-Irish sentiments at a low point in the era thanks to the French Celtomania kicked off by Hoche's invasion, he became an advocate in the court, and despite his intensely abrasive personality he performed well in this role. Known to be an opponent of the oligarchical Sieyesian regime, his name swiftly got elected onto the list of national notables, and from there the College of Conservators selected him for the Tribunate - that is, the designated opposition.

Here, he was well to the left of the First Tribune Benjamin Constant and advocated a restoration of fully democratic government, and this made his name well-known across the country. With France mired in a new war since 1821 against the British, O'Connor also made himself known as a strong supporter of the effort, and he openly advocated an invasion of Ireland. With the outbreak of the Parthenopean Revolution, the expansion of the war into something which encompassed all Europe, and the ensuing Paris Riots of 1824, Grand Elector Roederer and the remainder of the Sieyesian regime saw its downfall, and O'Connor was selected as part of Chauvelin's new Council of State. In this role, he was essentially a backbencher, as he advocated still more democratic reforms than those implemented, and his intensely abrasive personality did not help him make new allies or push his views very much. But nevertheless, his commitment to the war effort, which only grew more intense when he witnessed the Irish Famine of the 1820s and the British regime and Anglo-Irish regime do nothing about it. His hopes that it might at least inspire a revolution came to naught, for the people were too weak, too hungry, to put up a fight, and they maintained their support of the pacifist ideals of Daniel O'Connell even as he was taken to jail and peaceful protestors rotted in the ground at Clontarf.

With the Popular Revolution and the overthrow of the British order in 1827, O'Connor at first hoped that France would invade Ireland when the British regime could not defend it; when it instead sought for peace, he resigned his position. O'Connor's disgust would only cool when, in the halls of the Convention Parliament, Daniel O'Connell and the remainder of the Irish contingent held the revolution hostage by forcing the Convention to grant the Irish people aid, without work requirements, through free soup kitchens across the island. With his French career in a dead end, and the new British government consisting of people the Irish could work with, O'Connor moved to London and took an excited look at the Convention Parliament and its framing of a new order. Indeed, as a natural-born British subject whose father had not been included on an act of attainder, he was eligible to become a Member of Parliament. And so, despite him being raised a Frenchman, and despite him speaking with a French accent only lightly leavened with an Irish brogue, he ran for the Grand Division which most closely resembled his uncle's old constituency and got enough United Irishmen votes to win.

With many deeply unnerved at the violence of the Popular Revolution and unnerved at the possibility of a British Reign of Terror, this Frenchman speaking in a French accent devoted to absolute republican principles and the nephew of a high ranking Irish revolutionary sitting in the new House of Commons did not help things. A popular Guelphite cartoon in 1831 portrayed him standing aft as the new Robespierre of the new British Republic at the top of a Franco-Irish conspiracy, with the title Fearguise Eau-Conneaux[1]; or London Turned to Pandemonium. That many of his proposed reforms were very, very French in nature - for instance, he advocated forced testation - did not really help things. These accusations reached their very peak when, during the Orange Riots of 1834, the Orange mob that burned and looted Parliament cried out "Death to Feargus" - O'Connor himself was undeterred, however, and he regarded them as simply the modern iteration of the Orangists and Tories his father and uncle fought against.

And though O'Connor initially very much admired Daniel O'Connell for his role in forcing the British government to grant aid, which no doubt limited the death toll of the Famine to 250,000, he increasingly regarded his unshakeable pacifism and closeness to the Radical government of Samuel Whitbread - far too moderate to O'Connor's liking - as the act of a sellout. Furthermore, O'Connor was raised in the United Irishmen tradition. He believed that all religious identities - Anglican, Dissenter, and Catholic - should be abandoned in the name of the common identity of Irishmen, and he regarded O'Connell's wearing of Catholicism on his sleeve as mere sectarianism, and it reminded him of the French clerical establishment - that O'Connell was a firm believer in separation of church and state and advocated Dissenter rights as eagerly as those of Catholics did not really change that for him. In one instant, he jeered O'Connell as a "Jesuit". This caused widespread accusations of religious bigotry, but O'Connor denied this. He stated he was a proud advocate of religious unity as per the ideals of the United Irishmen, and that he despised not Catholicism but the presence of religion in politics. It did not help among a vote base which regarded O'Connell as a near-god, and O'Connor did not win re-election.

Out of office, O'Connor instead wedded himself to the land reform movement. His advocacy of French-style forced testation, going beyond the abolition of primogeniture, had already made himself known among it. With Crown and many Church lands being sold off, a land boom had been formed, and O'Connor swiftly sought to make use of it by creating a National Land Company with himself as one of its directors. Its plan was to buy up Crown and Church lands and establish homesteads for the people, to be given to shareholders through lottery - that such homesteads would make people so enlisted eligible for the ballot certainly fueled it. For a while, this plan was successful. Though the influential Associationist thinker James Bronterre O'Brien opposed this plan of small homesteads out of a belief in land nationalization, it was wildly successful.

O'Connor's political career saw a revival during the repeal wave of 1843. With the Radicals out of power, Daniel O'Connell lost his influence in government, and he was instead forced to return to his tactics of mass protest, in part because the Young Ireland movement - dominated by people who found him too moderate - saw growing steam. Amid this, O'Connor won election from Cork City, defeating an O'Connellite. In power, O'Connor called for immediate repeal - through peaceful means, or otherwise - and he promoted his National Land Company. Eventually, in the 1846 election, the Radicals came to power, and O'Connell was able to achieve the concession of the re-establishment of an Irish Legislature with limited power - which he regarded as the first "instalment" to full repeal. In reaction, O'Connor furiously denounced this as a betrayal, as the act of a sellout taking the scraps of the English. In the 1847 election, kicked off by the Lords' veto, Young Ireland won seats at the expense of O'Connellites - but in the end, O'Connell achieved broad-reaching autonomy for Ireland, and as the Irish legislature met at the old seat of Grattan's Parliament he won the praises across the board. O'Connor swiftly got elected to the new Irish Legislative Assembly, to bully the British and O'Connell into making this the first step to full repeal - however, he found himself in a minority in the ensuing elections. Instead, O'Connell saw his very apotheosis, sworn in as an MLA - and then died. The resulting outpour of grief, overpowering in Ireland and strong even in Britain (strong enough he lay in state in the reconstituted Westminster Hall) was enough that, with great reluctance, O'Connor praised Daniel O'Connell.

O'Connor remained an Irish MLA amid a collapsing O'Connellite movement that became entirely subsumed into the British Radical movement, and he kept with his efforts in the National Land Company. However, eventually, the land boom came crashing down. By the 1850s, the best Crown lands had been sold off, or endowed to land-grant universities, and the Church of England was selling much less land similarly. And so, by 1854, the Company collapsed and died. With his wealth destroyed and reputation in tatters, O'Connor instead retired to France. Here, he got elected purely as an honor as a National Notable - in the context of the considerably more democratic France he had returned to, this gave him direct admission into the halls of government - or rather, as a diehard opponent of Consul Menabrea, he became an opposition Tribune and became a figure of much amusement before retiring shortly before his death. His funeral saw a grand crowd from both France and the British Isles, and his resting place in Paris with a Celtic cross atop his tombstone gave him, at last, a glorious moment in his bizarre life, no doubt greatly hemmed by his tendency towards sheer abrasiveness



[1] Thanks to @Walpurgisnacht for this bit.