| April 18 |  |
Editor says, what if President William King died after forty-five days in office? muses Andrew Beane. Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).
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In 1853, President William King died today after losing a battle with tuberculosis. This comes as a shock to the nation, which is still coming to terms with the death of President-elect Franklin Pierce (pictured), who was killed on January 6th of this year in a train derailment in Andover, Massachusetts.
Death of President William KingKing had been suffering with an incurable case of tuberculosis when he was sworn in on March 4th as the fourteenth President of the United States, a distinction that would have been given to Pierce. Too ill even to travel to Washington, D.C, he was sworn in during a limited ceremony at his plantation in Cahaba, Alabama, and remained there for the remainder of his life. He was the first president since John Adams to officially reside somewhere other than the White House.
Though the shortest presidency in American history, it was extremely controversial just the same. Favoring the Kansas-Nebraska act, King succeeded in pushing the Transcontinental Compromise through Congress. The compromise stated that Kansas and Nebraska would eventually be admitted into the Union as slave states, which favored the southern states; and the Transcontinental railroad would run from New York to Chicago before heading south to St. Louis and continue due west to the California coast, which superseded most of the southern states and favored northern interests.
With only forty-five days as President, King did not have time to select a vice president, though it was believed that King's longtime friend James Buchanan had been considered. In accordance with the Constitution, President Pro Tempore David Atchison will become acting President. Having such a prominent pro-slavery activist in the White House carries the danger of splitting the nation over the issue of states' rights.
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Andrew Beane
© Andrew Beane, 2009-.Story Tags
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~ Sorry, the amendment that allowed presidents to appoint a new vice president was adopted during the 1960s. The Northern states would never have accepted two new pro-slavery states.
~ Sucession after President is by act of Congress. In the 1850's that would have been the Secretary of State.
~ No--if I recall correctly, in the 1850s, succession would have passed to the president pro tem of the Senate and, after him, to the Speaker ofthe House, before reaching the Secretary of State.
Late in the nineteenth century the rules were changed to allow the House Speaker to assume the presidency, bypassing the Senate's president pro tem. In the 1960s, facing the prospect that a nuclear attack on Washington, D.C. could wipe out much of the government instantly, legislation was passed specifying that, after the House Speaker, Cabinet secretaries are in the line of presidential succession in the order in which their departments were established.
~ I stand firm on the succession aspect but admit that the slave state bit was far fetched
~ If the transcontinental rail is built early, that'll give us nice butterfly effects on western settlement.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
