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Editor says, what if Stephen Douglas had emerged as the victor of the 1860 Presidential election? muses Eric Lipps. Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the March 2012 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1861, Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas was inaugurated as the 16th President of the United States of America.
President DouglasDouglas had won in a turbulent four-way election, defeating Republican Abraham Lincoln, Kentucky Sen. John C. Breckinridge of he breakaway Southern Democratic Party, and John Bell of the newly-organized Constitutional Union Party.
His victory was due in large part to his success in calming Southern fears regarding the abolition of slavery, which had led several states to draft resolutions of secession from the Union and others to consider doing so if the Republicans, the party most strongly associated with the anti-slavery cause, won.
Douglas had supported the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of fugitive slave laws and stated that the Framers had never intended that blacks should become U.S. citizens. However, he had argued that it could not be effective in a state or territory whose citizens refused to pass laws enforcing it. This attempt at a compromise had angered some Southerners, prompting the schism of the Democratic Party, while failing to satisfy opponents of the decision. As president, Douglas would try to bridge the ideological divide, appointing to key positions members of all four of the parties which had contended in 1860; the result, however, would be not harmony but gridlock. The slavery issue would continue to fester throughout the 1860s, with Southerners continuing to threaten secession if the federal government acts to interfere with their "right of property upon Negro slaves".
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Eric Lipps
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Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Generals Source: Wikipedia Labels: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, America, Election, Presidency.
~ This could lead to Lincoln in 1868, the North having further economic advantages over the South -- with the addition of breech-loaders, a war would favor the north to the point that it wouldn't last more than two years.
~ I take it John Brown didn't run his raid? I've read that was one of the big factors keeping Douglas out of the White House.
~ It is really unlikely that the Union would hold together if a government that did not bend over backwards to placate the South (up to and including violating any rights of the northern states) got elected... and simple population growth meant that it was only a matter of time.
~ The problem is that I don't see any plausible way for Douglas to win in 1860. He certainly could not get a majority in the Electoral College. His only real strength in the slave states--where the contest was mainly between Breckinridge and Bell--was in the border state of Missouri, which he narrowly won. In the free states, the only ones where he came really close were California and Illinois. (What is sometimes listed as a"Douglas" ticket in New York--at http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/u/usa/pres/1860.txt for example--was actually a fusion ticket of Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell supporters. Anyway, it finished 7.4 points behind Lincoln in the state.) In New Jersey, he got as many electoral votes as he could--the anti-Lincoln "fusion" electors who narrowly lost in New Jersey were committed to Breckinridge or Bell, and lost because a few hard-core Douglasites would not vote for them.
Nor would Douglas have any chance in the House in case there was no electoral majority (which is itself unlikely). First of all, he would be unlikely to finish with more electoral votes than Bell, so he would probabl;y not be among the top three. Second, even if he had made the top three, he was emphatic that he would not accept election by the House. (To a good Democrat like Douglas, election by the House was reminiscent of the "corupt bargain" that had defeated Andrew Jackson in 1824-5.) Third, even if he was in the top three and would accept election by the House, llinois was the only state with a Douglasite majority there.
The only way to have Douglas even have a plausible scenario to win in 1860 IMO is to avoid the Democratic split (though IMO this would require Douglas to make such concessions to the South that he would lose every northern state and thus lose even in a two-way race.) But for this to happen, either the South would have to accept that territorial legislatures could exclude slavery or else Douglas would have to concede that there was no such power. (Not only was he unlikely to do that for pricipled reasons, but doing so would surely mean that Lincoln would defeat him for the Senate in 1858.)
A no-Harpers-Ferry scenario would not IMO be enough to avoid a Democratic split. The South hated Douglas dating back to his opposition to the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, and his Harper's magazine article arguing that territorial legislatures could exclude slavery. This was long before Harpers Ferry. Anyway, even if the South did not walk out of the Democratic convention over the platform, they had enough strength--thanks to the 2/3 rule--to block Douglas's nomination there.
Besides, the premise of this story is that there *is* a Democratic split and a four-way race--and yet Douglas, who only got 12 electoral votes in our timeline, somehow wins anyway. I see no chance of this at all.
~ Interesting thought on politics. Too many cooks in the kitchen, nothing gets done.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
