Yes and yes. Really, I very much struggle to see how Mexico could've had a worse 19th century than it did.
A House Divided: A TL
- Thread starter Utgard96
- Start date
Yes and yes. Really, I very much struggle to see how Mexico could've had a worse 19th century than it did.
Alex Richards
Donor
Hmm. I sense that we're going to see a much more balanced distribution of power in the Americas- a somewhat weaker US, and stronger, more unified Latin American states.
Aside from the obvious stuff like Gran Colombia not falling apart, nearly all of this update was OTL. Just think of me as EduardoT.
RyanF
Banned
I didn't know half the stuff about Mexico and Gran Colombia mentioned in the update; I hope you realise I am now furiously trying to find out more about Bolivar's proposed Tricameralism.
Unless you speak Spanish, good luck. It's a miracle I got the update together off English-language sources.
A "peaceful" transition of power in Mexico is a great step to stability. Great update
#4: The Art of Governing
Oh FFS, I knew there was something I forgot to do today!
A House Divided #4: The Art of Governing
“Do they think that I am such a damned fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.”
***
From “A History of U.S. Presidential Scandals”
(c) 1990 by Jennifer McNeal
Richmond: Tidewater Press
The Petticoat Affair (1829-30)
Peggy O'Neill was unlike most other Washington women of her time. Beautiful, charming and gregarious, she turned more than a few heads in her life, including those of many prominent men in the capital. Her father owned an inn a short distance from the White House, which was a favored haunt of many a Washington gentleman, and more than a few of them probably came to see the innkeeper's daughter, who was known for her conversational skills and adeptness at the piano. In 1816, the 17-year-old Peggy married a 39-year-old naval purser named John B. Timberlake, who was in deep debt at the time. At about the same time the two became acquainted with a newly-elected Senator from Tennessee by the name of John Eaton. Eaton eagerly helped Timberlake pay off his debts and got him a posting with the Mediterranean Squadron, which was prestigious, well-paid, and just coincidentally happened to force Mr and Mrs Timberlake to spend long periods of time apart from one another. Eaton proceeded to establish a rapport with Peggy – to such an extent that she apparently had a miscarriage in 1828, when her husband had been away at sea for over three years.
In 1828, while away with his ship, Timberlake died of what was reported as pneumonia – however, there was a rumor that he'd found out about his wife's miscarriage and proceeded to commit suicide. Whatever the facts, Eaton and Peggy proceeded to marry within weeks of receiving news of Timberlake's death. This shook Washington society to the core, and matters were not helped when Andrew Jackson, newly-elected President and one of Eaton's closest friends and political allies, named Eaton to head the War Department. Peggy now had to take part in social functions as a Cabinet wife – a role entirely unsuited to her temperament. Wives at the time were expected to be gracious, reserved and moral. Peggy was outspoken, too clever by half, and had apparently had an extramarital affair for years before being widowed and remarried to her lover. Particularly opposed to Peggy's entry into the highest society was Floride Calhoun, the Second Lady, who organized a “coalition” of wives to shun the Eatons at all social functions and refuse to receive or visit them.
There were really only two men in Washington who continued to stridently support the Eatons. One of them was the President of the United States, and when it all came down to it, he was the only one whose support was needed. Jackson sympathized with the Eatons because his own wife had been the subject of speculation regarding whether her first marriage had actually ended before she married Jackson. These rumors had grown particularly rampant during Jackson's election campaign, and Mrs Jackson's death weeks after the election was blamed by Jackson on related stress.
The other man was Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who was also a widower and uninfluenced by the views of the Cabinet wives. Van Buren also saw in the conflict a chance to annoy John Calhoun, who was a rival of his, and prevent Calhoun from using the scandal for political leverage. It was ultimately he who provided a resolution to the scandal in May of 1831, by tendering his resignation from the State Department and thus allowing Jackson to fire the rest of his cabinet and appoint differently inclined individuals. Jackson was able to resolve the conflict to his satisfaction, Eaton avoided losing face, and Van Buren was rewarded with the post of Minister to London, a role he would serve in until 1837. [1]
***
From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press
…Far more than the Indian wars or the Petticoat Affair, Jackson's defining challenge in his first term came to be the Bank War. The Bank of the United States which existed in Jackson's time was the second institution of that name, and had originally been chartered in 1817 for a twenty-year period. The Bank had fluctuated in reputation over its existence, but by the time Jackson took office it was generally well-regarded by most Americans. The Bank's purpose was to restrict the issuing of paper money by private banks and lenders, providing stability to the dollar as a currency and limiting the sort of overspeculation that might potentially lead to a financial panic. In this task it was supported by the proto-Republicans – indeed, the Bank was one of the three pillars of Henry Clay's “American System” along with protectionist tariffs and internal improvements – but Jackson's coalition of supporters nearly all opposed the Bank for different reasons. Jackson himself was a staunch hard-money advocate, who believed that the only “pure” form of currency was gold and silver bullion, and that the issuing of paper money created artificial wealth and gave excessive power to the banks [2]. Several of his prominent allies agreed with this, but many others were soft-money men, who believed that unrestricted issuing of paper money would spur growth and that the Bank was restraining the economy for the benefit of the wealthy East. In order to bridge this difference of opinion among his followers, Jackson did not make a major campaign point of the Bank in 1828, but once in office, opposition to it would be one of the major themes of his administration…
…After the Eaton affair, Jackson appointed Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland as Treasury Secretary; Taney was a former Federalist, and had been essential in bringing his home state into Jackson's fold. Taney was also a staunch opponent of the Bank, and formulated a plan to withdraw federal assets from it, which he correctly predicted would reduce it to irrelevance whether Congress voted to recharter it or not. Jackson agreed with this plan in principle, but in the interests of appearing moderate and preventing a crisis, instructed Taney to scale down his initial proposal from immediate withdrawal of funds to gradual withdrawal over the next five years; this was expected to coincide with Jackson's time in office, which meant he could still oversee the dismantling of the Bank without the shock that its immediate collapse would no doubt create.
Taney's plan might have succeeded, but in December of 1831, the newly-elected 22nd Congress convened, and the new Senate had only a razor-thin pro-Jackson majority. Immediately it set about trying Jackson's new cabinet appointments [3]; most of them passed as mere formalities, but the anti-Jackson forces in the Senate made Taney's removal a priority, and his confirmation failed by a vote of 26 to 22, with two Jacksonians dissenting against the hardline secretary [4]. The defeated President saw a need to moderate his position somewhat, and appointed Louis McLane of Delaware, the former Minister to London, as Taney's replacement. McLane was also a former Federalist turned Jackson supporter, but unlike Taney, retained something of a belief in the old Federalist platform, including supporting the Bank's continued existence. To this end, he and Jackson agreed to leave the customary attack on the Bank's integrity out of the annual presidential message to Congress, fearing that any mention of it would trigger a drive for recharter…
…In January of 1832, with the presidential elections on the horizon, Henry Clay and his allies in Congress decided the time was right to push for the Bank's recharter. The newly-christened Republican Party had already started its pro-Bank campaign around the nation, with major figures like Clay, Daniel Webster and indeed the Bank's own President Nicholas Biddle warning that Jackson's reelection would mean the death of the Bank and “an end to the good financial order of this country for the foreseeable future”. They named their party to underline the view of Jackson's policies as an abandonment of “good republican principle” - similarly, the alliance of Jackson supporters coalescing around the removal of the Bank named themselves the Democrats to signify that they were on “the side of the people”. Their message was equally dramatic: the alliance of Clay and Biddle was a collusion of the aristocracy's interests against those of the common man, and Biddle's involvement in partisan politics was condemned in particular as evidence of the Bank's moral bankruptcy [5]…
…It is probable that Clay worded the Congressional recharter bills in such a way as to provoke a veto from Jackson; he deliberately refuted requests to moderate the tone of the proposals, and undoubtedly his own presidential ambitions stood to gain from such a blatant exercise of executive authority on Jackson's part [6]. As expected, Jacksonians reacted to the launching of the recharter bill by launching inquiries into the Bank's practices, which were sure to delay the vote considerably and which, furthermore, Congress could very easily be pressured into voting for, as a substantial number of congressmen on both sides of the aisle had received donations from the Bank [7]…
…It would take until June before the recharter measure finally came up to a vote in the Senate, and by this point, Biddle had personally arrived in Washington to conduct a defense of the Bank on all levels of society. Pro-Bank congressmen were pressured by Biddle into writing tracts in support of recharter, which were distributed nationally using the Bank's resources. This, however, only served to energize the Bank's opponents, who saw it as a particularly blatant case of the Bank using its assets to unfairly influence the public. Francis Preston Blair of the Washington Globe, the capital's main pro-Jackson newspaper, made a nationwide name for himself by writing editorials in support of Jackson's measures against Bank renewal, and would soon take a prominent place for himself in the nation's politics, without ever holding elective office…
…In the end, despite the Jacksonian efforts, the recharter bill passed both houses of Congress with narrow majorities. However, a week after its passage in the House, Jackson issued a statement to the nation, proclaiming that as the sole government official with a direct link to the entire American people, the President was empowered to take action when the other branches of government seemed to act against the best interests of the people. To this end, he argued that the presidential veto, which had previously been very sparsely used and seen largely as a reserve power to prevent abuse of the Constitution, should be exercised to prevent such legislation as counteracted the “national interest” (i.e. the President's opinion of what the national interest was). This message was published in the Globe and other Jacksonian newspapers across the nation, and sent to Congress attached to a statement in which the President declared his refusal to sign the recharter bill into law. The bill had thus been vetoed, and while Clay immediately rallied his forces to overturn the veto, he failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majorities in either house, and the bill thus died. [8]
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1832: The Dawn of a System
The 1832 presidential election was the second under the new Jacksonian party system, and the first to feature organized national parties in the modern sense. Jackson's opponents, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, were beginning at the time to coalesce into a unified “Republican Party”, which was united by opposition to Jackson's continued rule as well as support for internal improvements and the National Bank. Jackson's supporters similarly united behind the “Democratic” banner, and although the parties would not be fully organized in all federal elections until 1836, battle lines had been drawn that would last until the Western Compromises and the…
…A curious newcomer to the political scene was the Anti-Masonic Party, a single-issue party devoted to fighting the influence of the Freemasons, who party supporters believed had formed a cabal that ruled the US covertly in violation of democratic principles. The disappearance and presumed death of William Morgan, a New York writer and (ironically) bricklayer who was reputed to be about to publish an exposition of Freemason secrets, led anti-Masons to fear the Freemasons were now murdering their opponents, and to organize politically in opposition to the practice. The party became surprisingly strong at state level, particularly in the Northeast, and for the 1832 presidential election it decided to mount a federal campaign, for which it called the first ever national party convention at the Athenaeum in Baltimore in September of 1831. The convention's initial choice for the nomination was Richard Rush, but he refused the nomination, and while some considered nominating John Quincy Adams (a passive supporter of the party), his lingering unpopularity made him a poor choice. So, in one of the great ironies of American history, the convention settled on William Wirt, a former Attorney General who was himself a former Freemason and openly told the convention that he found Freemasonry unobjectionable in principle – nevertheless, he took the nomination by an almost unanimous vote… [9]
…After the success of the Anti-Masonic convention, the Republicans decided that a similar gathering would be in their interest, and called a convention of their own at the same venue in December of 1831. Unlike that of the Anti-Masons, however, the nomination of the Republican Party was never in doubt – Adams having taken his turn, and remaining unpopular in large sections of the country, the time had come for Henry Clay to take his shot at the presidency. The convention nomination was largely a formality, and only one delegate ended up not voting for Clay – even then, he didn't propose an alternate candidate, but simply abstained as he felt that Clay would be unable to win and should wait until 1836. The convention selected John Sergeant of Pennsylvania for Vice President, and adopted a platform calling for higher federal spending, continued high tariffs and the renewal of the National Bank.
The Democrats, for their part, also held a convention and also held it at the Baltimore Athenaeum – and also nominated their candidate unanimously, in their case President Jackson. It was however clear that Vice President Calhoun would not be renominated, and the delegates ultimately settled on Philip Barbour of Virginia – it was suggested that Jackson's running mate should be a northerner for regional balance, but this was ultimately disregarded by the convention… [10]
…The campaign was every bit as spirited as 1828 had been, and hinged on the be or not to be of the National Bank, whose charter was set to expire in 1836, and which Jackson made his dislike for very well known. Jackson, who fundamentally mistrusted paper currency (and indeed any currency not pure gold bullion), wanted to restore monetary policy to the states, and ultimately the precious metals market itself, which his opponents argued would lead to financial ruin. In particular, Jackson's repeated vetos of Congressional bills to renew the Bank earned him the scorn of his opponents, who derided him as a tyrant. One well-known cartoon of the era, captioned “KING ANDREW THE FIRST – LONG MAY HE REIGN” depicted Jackson in royal regalia, treading on the Constitution and other pieces of paper labeled “National Bank” and “Internal Improvements”. Jackson's supporters argued that he was trying to reduce the power of bankers and politicians over the common man, and this stance earned him a large amount of popular support, despite the anti-Jackson campaign being better funded and organized.
The 1832 election saw the continuing of the trends established in 1828 – only South Carolina now retained legislative appointment of electors, and all other states except Maryland chose electors on a statewide general ticket. No new states had been admitted since 1828, but the Fifth Census reapportionment had resulted in 25 seats being added to the House of Representatives, and the electoral college grew accordingly. Most of the new electoral votes were in the West and the non-New England North, areas where population growth was strong as a result of settlement and immigration respectively. These changes came to benefit Jackson for the most part, as he carried the large states of the North by narrow margins and were able to take all their electoral votes. His electoral victory proved even more crushing than his popular-vote one, and thus he became the first candidate ever to gain over 200 electoral votes in a contested election… [11]
…The South Carolina legislature, dominated by Nullifiers, chose a slate of electors who cast their votes for John Calhoun for President and John Floyd of Virginia for Vice President – Calhoun and Floyd refused to let themselves be nominated, but were still voted for by the electors. This makes them the last presidential ticket ever to receive more electoral votes than they did votes from the people… [12]
***
[1] The Petticoat Affair happened largely in the same way IOTL, but Van Buren's confirmation as Minister to Britain was torpedoed by Calhoun, who believed failing to pass the confirmation vote would kill Van Buren's career. It ended up victimizing him in Jackson's eyes, and coincidentally, bringing him back to Washington just in time to be nominated as Jackson's Vice President.
[2] If Andrew Jackson had lived today, you just know he would've been running one of those redpill blogs with titles like “THE FAKE MONEY CONSPIRACY EXPOSED!” on every post.
[3] Under the Constitution, appointments to the Cabinet require the approval of the Senate; if the Senate is in recess when a cabinet office becomes vacant, the President may fill the vacancy unilaterally, but the Senate must approve the appointment as soon as it comes back into session for it to be valid.
[4] IOTL, Jackson appointed Taney to the same post in 1833, after the Bank's recharter had already been vetoed, and the Senate (which had an anti-Jackson majority as of that time) rejected his appointment by a much wider margin.
[5] A bit rich coming from the people who literally invented the spoils system – hell, even more so considering that Jackson initially tried to turn the Bank into a spoils institution much like the Postal Service before Biddle made his opposition to this clear – but there you are.
[6] Before Jackson, the veto was largely seen as an emergency measure, akin to the monarch's reserve powers in the Westminster system – one of Jackson's most enduring legacies was expanding its use to any situation where the President felt Congress was acting against the popular interest.
[7] In American politics, the more things change, the more they stay the same…
[8] The “Bank War” thus went largely as OTL, with one major exception – Taney's stay at the Treasury Department did not happen IOTL, and Jackson didn't try to defund the Bank until after its recharter had already been defeated.
[9] This is, of course, all OTL (could I make this stuff up?).
[10] IOTL, of course, Van Buren was nominated, but a splinter group of Virginia Democrats nominated a Jackson/Barbour ticket, which Barbour publicly distanced himself from and which largely failed to carry traction.
[11] Jackson's Electoral College victory ITTL is actually slightly less than OTL, partly because of New England being more solidly Republican ITTL and partly because of Jackson choosing a southern running mate. It's still an enormous landslide though.
[12] Also true IOTL, although there Floyd was the choice for President with Henry Lee of Massachusetts (yes, really, a Nullifier from Massachusetts) for VP.
A House Divided #4: The Art of Governing
“Do they think that I am such a damned fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir; I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be President.”
***
From “A History of U.S. Presidential Scandals”
(c) 1990 by Jennifer McNeal
Richmond: Tidewater Press
The Petticoat Affair (1829-30)
Peggy O'Neill was unlike most other Washington women of her time. Beautiful, charming and gregarious, she turned more than a few heads in her life, including those of many prominent men in the capital. Her father owned an inn a short distance from the White House, which was a favored haunt of many a Washington gentleman, and more than a few of them probably came to see the innkeeper's daughter, who was known for her conversational skills and adeptness at the piano. In 1816, the 17-year-old Peggy married a 39-year-old naval purser named John B. Timberlake, who was in deep debt at the time. At about the same time the two became acquainted with a newly-elected Senator from Tennessee by the name of John Eaton. Eaton eagerly helped Timberlake pay off his debts and got him a posting with the Mediterranean Squadron, which was prestigious, well-paid, and just coincidentally happened to force Mr and Mrs Timberlake to spend long periods of time apart from one another. Eaton proceeded to establish a rapport with Peggy – to such an extent that she apparently had a miscarriage in 1828, when her husband had been away at sea for over three years.
In 1828, while away with his ship, Timberlake died of what was reported as pneumonia – however, there was a rumor that he'd found out about his wife's miscarriage and proceeded to commit suicide. Whatever the facts, Eaton and Peggy proceeded to marry within weeks of receiving news of Timberlake's death. This shook Washington society to the core, and matters were not helped when Andrew Jackson, newly-elected President and one of Eaton's closest friends and political allies, named Eaton to head the War Department. Peggy now had to take part in social functions as a Cabinet wife – a role entirely unsuited to her temperament. Wives at the time were expected to be gracious, reserved and moral. Peggy was outspoken, too clever by half, and had apparently had an extramarital affair for years before being widowed and remarried to her lover. Particularly opposed to Peggy's entry into the highest society was Floride Calhoun, the Second Lady, who organized a “coalition” of wives to shun the Eatons at all social functions and refuse to receive or visit them.
There were really only two men in Washington who continued to stridently support the Eatons. One of them was the President of the United States, and when it all came down to it, he was the only one whose support was needed. Jackson sympathized with the Eatons because his own wife had been the subject of speculation regarding whether her first marriage had actually ended before she married Jackson. These rumors had grown particularly rampant during Jackson's election campaign, and Mrs Jackson's death weeks after the election was blamed by Jackson on related stress.
The other man was Martin Van Buren, the Secretary of State, who was also a widower and uninfluenced by the views of the Cabinet wives. Van Buren also saw in the conflict a chance to annoy John Calhoun, who was a rival of his, and prevent Calhoun from using the scandal for political leverage. It was ultimately he who provided a resolution to the scandal in May of 1831, by tendering his resignation from the State Department and thus allowing Jackson to fire the rest of his cabinet and appoint differently inclined individuals. Jackson was able to resolve the conflict to his satisfaction, Eaton avoided losing face, and Van Buren was rewarded with the post of Minister to London, a role he would serve in until 1837. [1]
***
From “Waxhaws to White House: The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson”
(c) 1962 by Dr Josiah Harris
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press
…Far more than the Indian wars or the Petticoat Affair, Jackson's defining challenge in his first term came to be the Bank War. The Bank of the United States which existed in Jackson's time was the second institution of that name, and had originally been chartered in 1817 for a twenty-year period. The Bank had fluctuated in reputation over its existence, but by the time Jackson took office it was generally well-regarded by most Americans. The Bank's purpose was to restrict the issuing of paper money by private banks and lenders, providing stability to the dollar as a currency and limiting the sort of overspeculation that might potentially lead to a financial panic. In this task it was supported by the proto-Republicans – indeed, the Bank was one of the three pillars of Henry Clay's “American System” along with protectionist tariffs and internal improvements – but Jackson's coalition of supporters nearly all opposed the Bank for different reasons. Jackson himself was a staunch hard-money advocate, who believed that the only “pure” form of currency was gold and silver bullion, and that the issuing of paper money created artificial wealth and gave excessive power to the banks [2]. Several of his prominent allies agreed with this, but many others were soft-money men, who believed that unrestricted issuing of paper money would spur growth and that the Bank was restraining the economy for the benefit of the wealthy East. In order to bridge this difference of opinion among his followers, Jackson did not make a major campaign point of the Bank in 1828, but once in office, opposition to it would be one of the major themes of his administration…
…After the Eaton affair, Jackson appointed Roger Brooke Taney of Maryland as Treasury Secretary; Taney was a former Federalist, and had been essential in bringing his home state into Jackson's fold. Taney was also a staunch opponent of the Bank, and formulated a plan to withdraw federal assets from it, which he correctly predicted would reduce it to irrelevance whether Congress voted to recharter it or not. Jackson agreed with this plan in principle, but in the interests of appearing moderate and preventing a crisis, instructed Taney to scale down his initial proposal from immediate withdrawal of funds to gradual withdrawal over the next five years; this was expected to coincide with Jackson's time in office, which meant he could still oversee the dismantling of the Bank without the shock that its immediate collapse would no doubt create.
Taney's plan might have succeeded, but in December of 1831, the newly-elected 22nd Congress convened, and the new Senate had only a razor-thin pro-Jackson majority. Immediately it set about trying Jackson's new cabinet appointments [3]; most of them passed as mere formalities, but the anti-Jackson forces in the Senate made Taney's removal a priority, and his confirmation failed by a vote of 26 to 22, with two Jacksonians dissenting against the hardline secretary [4]. The defeated President saw a need to moderate his position somewhat, and appointed Louis McLane of Delaware, the former Minister to London, as Taney's replacement. McLane was also a former Federalist turned Jackson supporter, but unlike Taney, retained something of a belief in the old Federalist platform, including supporting the Bank's continued existence. To this end, he and Jackson agreed to leave the customary attack on the Bank's integrity out of the annual presidential message to Congress, fearing that any mention of it would trigger a drive for recharter…
…In January of 1832, with the presidential elections on the horizon, Henry Clay and his allies in Congress decided the time was right to push for the Bank's recharter. The newly-christened Republican Party had already started its pro-Bank campaign around the nation, with major figures like Clay, Daniel Webster and indeed the Bank's own President Nicholas Biddle warning that Jackson's reelection would mean the death of the Bank and “an end to the good financial order of this country for the foreseeable future”. They named their party to underline the view of Jackson's policies as an abandonment of “good republican principle” - similarly, the alliance of Jackson supporters coalescing around the removal of the Bank named themselves the Democrats to signify that they were on “the side of the people”. Their message was equally dramatic: the alliance of Clay and Biddle was a collusion of the aristocracy's interests against those of the common man, and Biddle's involvement in partisan politics was condemned in particular as evidence of the Bank's moral bankruptcy [5]…
…It is probable that Clay worded the Congressional recharter bills in such a way as to provoke a veto from Jackson; he deliberately refuted requests to moderate the tone of the proposals, and undoubtedly his own presidential ambitions stood to gain from such a blatant exercise of executive authority on Jackson's part [6]. As expected, Jacksonians reacted to the launching of the recharter bill by launching inquiries into the Bank's practices, which were sure to delay the vote considerably and which, furthermore, Congress could very easily be pressured into voting for, as a substantial number of congressmen on both sides of the aisle had received donations from the Bank [7]…
…It would take until June before the recharter measure finally came up to a vote in the Senate, and by this point, Biddle had personally arrived in Washington to conduct a defense of the Bank on all levels of society. Pro-Bank congressmen were pressured by Biddle into writing tracts in support of recharter, which were distributed nationally using the Bank's resources. This, however, only served to energize the Bank's opponents, who saw it as a particularly blatant case of the Bank using its assets to unfairly influence the public. Francis Preston Blair of the Washington Globe, the capital's main pro-Jackson newspaper, made a nationwide name for himself by writing editorials in support of Jackson's measures against Bank renewal, and would soon take a prominent place for himself in the nation's politics, without ever holding elective office…
…In the end, despite the Jacksonian efforts, the recharter bill passed both houses of Congress with narrow majorities. However, a week after its passage in the House, Jackson issued a statement to the nation, proclaiming that as the sole government official with a direct link to the entire American people, the President was empowered to take action when the other branches of government seemed to act against the best interests of the people. To this end, he argued that the presidential veto, which had previously been very sparsely used and seen largely as a reserve power to prevent abuse of the Constitution, should be exercised to prevent such legislation as counteracted the “national interest” (i.e. the President's opinion of what the national interest was). This message was published in the Globe and other Jacksonian newspapers across the nation, and sent to Congress attached to a statement in which the President declared his refusal to sign the recharter bill into law. The bill had thus been vetoed, and while Clay immediately rallied his forces to overturn the veto, he failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds majorities in either house, and the bill thus died. [8]
***
From “The Statistical Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections”
(c) 1992 by Horace Finkelstein (ed.)
New Orleans: Pelican Books
1832: The Dawn of a System
The 1832 presidential election was the second under the new Jacksonian party system, and the first to feature organized national parties in the modern sense. Jackson's opponents, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, were beginning at the time to coalesce into a unified “Republican Party”, which was united by opposition to Jackson's continued rule as well as support for internal improvements and the National Bank. Jackson's supporters similarly united behind the “Democratic” banner, and although the parties would not be fully organized in all federal elections until 1836, battle lines had been drawn that would last until the Western Compromises and the…
…A curious newcomer to the political scene was the Anti-Masonic Party, a single-issue party devoted to fighting the influence of the Freemasons, who party supporters believed had formed a cabal that ruled the US covertly in violation of democratic principles. The disappearance and presumed death of William Morgan, a New York writer and (ironically) bricklayer who was reputed to be about to publish an exposition of Freemason secrets, led anti-Masons to fear the Freemasons were now murdering their opponents, and to organize politically in opposition to the practice. The party became surprisingly strong at state level, particularly in the Northeast, and for the 1832 presidential election it decided to mount a federal campaign, for which it called the first ever national party convention at the Athenaeum in Baltimore in September of 1831. The convention's initial choice for the nomination was Richard Rush, but he refused the nomination, and while some considered nominating John Quincy Adams (a passive supporter of the party), his lingering unpopularity made him a poor choice. So, in one of the great ironies of American history, the convention settled on William Wirt, a former Attorney General who was himself a former Freemason and openly told the convention that he found Freemasonry unobjectionable in principle – nevertheless, he took the nomination by an almost unanimous vote… [9]
…After the success of the Anti-Masonic convention, the Republicans decided that a similar gathering would be in their interest, and called a convention of their own at the same venue in December of 1831. Unlike that of the Anti-Masons, however, the nomination of the Republican Party was never in doubt – Adams having taken his turn, and remaining unpopular in large sections of the country, the time had come for Henry Clay to take his shot at the presidency. The convention nomination was largely a formality, and only one delegate ended up not voting for Clay – even then, he didn't propose an alternate candidate, but simply abstained as he felt that Clay would be unable to win and should wait until 1836. The convention selected John Sergeant of Pennsylvania for Vice President, and adopted a platform calling for higher federal spending, continued high tariffs and the renewal of the National Bank.
The Democrats, for their part, also held a convention and also held it at the Baltimore Athenaeum – and also nominated their candidate unanimously, in their case President Jackson. It was however clear that Vice President Calhoun would not be renominated, and the delegates ultimately settled on Philip Barbour of Virginia – it was suggested that Jackson's running mate should be a northerner for regional balance, but this was ultimately disregarded by the convention… [10]
…The campaign was every bit as spirited as 1828 had been, and hinged on the be or not to be of the National Bank, whose charter was set to expire in 1836, and which Jackson made his dislike for very well known. Jackson, who fundamentally mistrusted paper currency (and indeed any currency not pure gold bullion), wanted to restore monetary policy to the states, and ultimately the precious metals market itself, which his opponents argued would lead to financial ruin. In particular, Jackson's repeated vetos of Congressional bills to renew the Bank earned him the scorn of his opponents, who derided him as a tyrant. One well-known cartoon of the era, captioned “KING ANDREW THE FIRST – LONG MAY HE REIGN” depicted Jackson in royal regalia, treading on the Constitution and other pieces of paper labeled “National Bank” and “Internal Improvements”. Jackson's supporters argued that he was trying to reduce the power of bankers and politicians over the common man, and this stance earned him a large amount of popular support, despite the anti-Jackson campaign being better funded and organized.
The 1832 election saw the continuing of the trends established in 1828 – only South Carolina now retained legislative appointment of electors, and all other states except Maryland chose electors on a statewide general ticket. No new states had been admitted since 1828, but the Fifth Census reapportionment had resulted in 25 seats being added to the House of Representatives, and the electoral college grew accordingly. Most of the new electoral votes were in the West and the non-New England North, areas where population growth was strong as a result of settlement and immigration respectively. These changes came to benefit Jackson for the most part, as he carried the large states of the North by narrow margins and were able to take all their electoral votes. His electoral victory proved even more crushing than his popular-vote one, and thus he became the first candidate ever to gain over 200 electoral votes in a contested election… [11]
…The South Carolina legislature, dominated by Nullifiers, chose a slate of electors who cast their votes for John Calhoun for President and John Floyd of Virginia for Vice President – Calhoun and Floyd refused to let themselves be nominated, but were still voted for by the electors. This makes them the last presidential ticket ever to receive more electoral votes than they did votes from the people… [12]
***
[1] The Petticoat Affair happened largely in the same way IOTL, but Van Buren's confirmation as Minister to Britain was torpedoed by Calhoun, who believed failing to pass the confirmation vote would kill Van Buren's career. It ended up victimizing him in Jackson's eyes, and coincidentally, bringing him back to Washington just in time to be nominated as Jackson's Vice President.
[2] If Andrew Jackson had lived today, you just know he would've been running one of those redpill blogs with titles like “THE FAKE MONEY CONSPIRACY EXPOSED!” on every post.
[3] Under the Constitution, appointments to the Cabinet require the approval of the Senate; if the Senate is in recess when a cabinet office becomes vacant, the President may fill the vacancy unilaterally, but the Senate must approve the appointment as soon as it comes back into session for it to be valid.
[4] IOTL, Jackson appointed Taney to the same post in 1833, after the Bank's recharter had already been vetoed, and the Senate (which had an anti-Jackson majority as of that time) rejected his appointment by a much wider margin.
[5] A bit rich coming from the people who literally invented the spoils system – hell, even more so considering that Jackson initially tried to turn the Bank into a spoils institution much like the Postal Service before Biddle made his opposition to this clear – but there you are.
[6] Before Jackson, the veto was largely seen as an emergency measure, akin to the monarch's reserve powers in the Westminster system – one of Jackson's most enduring legacies was expanding its use to any situation where the President felt Congress was acting against the popular interest.
[7] In American politics, the more things change, the more they stay the same…
[8] The “Bank War” thus went largely as OTL, with one major exception – Taney's stay at the Treasury Department did not happen IOTL, and Jackson didn't try to defund the Bank until after its recharter had already been defeated.
[9] This is, of course, all OTL (could I make this stuff up?).
[10] IOTL, of course, Van Buren was nominated, but a splinter group of Virginia Democrats nominated a Jackson/Barbour ticket, which Barbour publicly distanced himself from and which largely failed to carry traction.
[11] Jackson's Electoral College victory ITTL is actually slightly less than OTL, partly because of New England being more solidly Republican ITTL and partly because of Jackson choosing a southern running mate. It's still an enormous landslide though.
[12] Also true IOTL, although there Floyd was the choice for President with Henry Lee of Massachusetts (yes, really, a Nullifier from Massachusetts) for VP.
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Alex Richards
Donor
Were there some states which just didn't put anyone other than Jackson on the ballot then?
Seems like it. It's worth noting that it basically took until 1840 for there to be an organised Whig Party, so opposition to Jackson during his time in office basically came down to Anti-Jacksonians in Congress (who could agree on virtually nothing except that they didn't care for Jackson much) and whatever forces could be marshalled in each individual state, which in the southwest (as it then was) doesn't seem to have amounted to much, at least not before the Nullification Crisis turned people like Calhoun and Hugh White against Jackson.
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#5: Swinging Britain
A House Divided #5: Swinging Britain
“Sir, This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly we shall commence our labours.”
***
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
In 1830, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was among the last of Europe's anciens régimes to survive. The rumblings of the French Revolution were unfelt in Britain, and the old system retained supremacy – indeed, as revolutionary France had been an enemy, its ideas of secular government and popular sovereignty were viewed as unneeded at best and stepping stones to mob rule at worst. The governance of the UK was in the hands of the King and his Parliament, with one chamber representing the hereditary nobility and the other the non-noble landed and merchant elite.
Even in the nominally-elected lower house, the House of Commons, the franchise was restricted and deeply unequal. With a few exceptions, each parliamentary borough in England elected two members and each one in Wales and Ireland elected one; Scotland grouped its burghs into districts which elected one member each. Franchises varied widely from one borough to the next; a few allowed all freeholders to vote, while others restricted it to taxpayers or potwallopers (people who owned a door and a pot). In another group of boroughs the members were selected by the corporation (the borough's governing body) itself, while another group restricted the vote to owners of specific properties known as burgages. Combined with the small size of some boroughs (several held less than a dozen voters, and in one memorable case, Old Sarum had no resident voters at all, allowing the holder of the burgage property to nominate voters freely), this allowed a single person to wield complete control over who filled a seat in Parliament – this was known as a “pocket borough”, one of the diverse practices grouped together under the term “rotten borough”. The reason for this was the inflexibility of the system; the most recent enfranchisement of a borough was that of Newark-on-Trent in 1661, and the only change that had taken place since was the disfranchisement of Grampound in Cornwall, a particularly notorious rotten borough, in 1821.
Areas outside the parliamentary boroughs were represented by county members, two of whom were elected from each English and Irish county and one from each Welsh and Scottish county. This gave Rutland and Lancashire the same representation, and until 1826 even Yorkshire had only two members – in that year it was expanded with the two seats taken away upon Grampound's disfranchisement. Scotland also held a number of exceptions to the rule, as the 1707 Act of Union allowed it to send fewer county members than it had counties – ergo, in a very 18th century solution to the problem, six of its counties were grouped into pairs, which sent members to alternate Parliaments. The county franchise was set centrally, but varied between each of the Home Nations, so that in England, everyone who owned land worth forty shillings at the current standing of the currency could vote, whereas in Scotland the franchise was restricted to landowners whose land had been worth two pounds Scots when the Scots Parliament was originally created in the 14th century. Ergo, the English electorate numbered around 190,000 by 1830, while that of Scotland was less than 3,000. The English rules applied in Wales and Ireland as well, and because of the different land situation there, Ireland had roughly the same number of electors as England; the Welsh electorate, however, was barely a tenth of either's number. [1]
In any analysis of the early reform period, it's worth understanding precisely what the motivations of the different groups were. Only the Chartists and their predecessors, as well as some radical Whigs, actually believed reform should be a stepping stone to full democracy, and that this was in itself a good thing. The majority of the proponents of reform were instead concerned with securing good government, and by extension, eliminating the corrupt practices used to elect Members of Parliament around the country. It was in this spirit that the Canningite Ministry was first formed in 1827, and carried out its setpiece reforms, beginning with Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and culminating with the 1833 Reform Act… [2]
***
From “The Men of Downing Street: The Lives of Britain's Prime Ministers”
(c) 1967 by Adrian Menzies
London: Macmillan Publishing
The Canning ministry's first major reform was Catholic emancipation, which was prompted by the events of the Clare by-election in 1828, after William Vesey-Fitzgerald was chosen to become President of the Board of Trade. The resulting ministerial by-election, in contrast to most such exercises, was contested by Daniel O'Connell, a leader of the Irish Catholic emancipation movement, and in an upset result, O'Connell won election despite the restricted franchise and open ballot [3]. O'Connell's election sent shockwaves through the political establishment, since he was unable to take his seat in Parliament without swearing an oath declaring the King's religious supremacy and foreswearing his allegiance to the Catholic Church. It was feared that Ireland would rise in revolt against British rule for the third time in as many generations [4], and as a result of this, many political figures who'd previously opposed Catholic emancipation turned in favour of it as the alternative to heightened civil strife. A compromise settlement was pushed through Parliament, and in April of 1829, King George IV signed the Roman Catholic Relief Bill into law. The bill removed restrictions on the franchise for Catholics throughout the UK, and in order to stave off fears of electoral dominance by Catholic smallholders, the property requirement for Irish voters was raised from the forty shillings used in England and Wales to ten pounds.
This was among the final acts of King George's reign, as the King's indulgent lifestyle was beginning to catch up with him; he suffered from gout so severe that it rendered his right arm immobile, and dropsy that caused him to suffer regular breathless spasms; by the summer of 1829 this had advanced to the point where he was forced to sleep upright in a chair to keep him from suffocating in his sleep [5]. In August, the King burst a blood vessel inside his stomach, causing him to excrete large amounts of blood; medicine at the time was unable to cure this without significant risks to the patient, and so the King came to realise that the end was near for him. He dictated his will from his bed at Windsor Castle, and started to pray for forgiveness for his earlier ways; his last words were spoken to a priest on the 16th – “Goodness, what is this? I fear it's death” [6]. And so it was; notice was given across the United Kingdom the next day, and a nation mourned its monarch. At this time, the demise of the Crown necessitated the dissolution of Parliament, and the resulting general election was held over the course of the autumn [7]. The result was a victory for the Canningite-Whig coalition, although in a sign of things to come, a number of the Tory members campaigned against the government and continued to sit on the Opposition benches in the new Parliament…
***
From “The Cambridge Dictionary of British Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
SWING RIOTS, THE: Series of agricultural worker riots in the summer of 1830, beginning in the Elham Valley (Kent) and spreading across south-eastern England. The immediate cause of the riots was the poor harvests of 1828 and 1829, as well as the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines, which replaced the labour of several men and threatened to undo the entire social structure of the English countryside; more indirect causes include the enclosure of common lands (although this has become disputed, see ENCLOSURE ACTS) as well as the increasing financial burdens placed on the rural poor by the Crown and Church of England. The methods of the rioters varied from place to place, but a common modus operandi can be distinguished: letters would be sent to local notables (landowners, parsons, magistrates, poor law guardians), signed by the semi-mythical figure Captain Swing (the origin of the common name for the riots) and requesting higher wages, lower tithes and the destruction of the threshing machines, and threatening that the workers would take matters into their own hands if the demands were not heeded. At this point agricultural workers would meet in groups of 2-300, threaten the notables with violent action if the calls continued to be ignored, and eventually physically smashed threshing machines and other agricultural implements to pieces.
Despite using the slogan “Bread or Blood”, the Swing Riots were notable for their lack of physical violence; while many thousands of pounds worth of property was destroyed by the riots, only one man actually died at any point, and that was a rioter killed by either a guard or policeman during a raid on a farm. The overwhelming majority of the riots were concerned solely with inflicting property damage, specifically to the hated threshing machines; a number of barns were also burned, however. The riots prompted a brief panic in the ruling class, with some blaming them on agents-provocateurs sent from France, just gone through its second revolution [8]. There is no evidence that this was the case, but nonetheless, the riots did lead to significant results, with the wages of rural workers seeing small but needed increases over the course of the 1830s… [9]
***
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
Canning's ministry carried on through the comparatively quiet 1831, but in the year after, rumblings for reform again began to make themselves felt. Renewed agitation on the part of the rural poor coupled with increasing urban unrest to make the situation in the country increasingly hard; prominent Whigs took the opportunity to call for reform in parliamentary debate, with Lord Lansdowne strongly implying that were the current state of affairs to go on, he and his colleagues would resign from government and force a general election. Canning, anxious to keep his fragile coalition together and prevent early elections, heeded Lansdowne's call and appointed William Huskisson, a fellow moderate Tory, to draft a Reform Bill for entry into the House of Commons.
The document that was eventually proposed was a more moderate one than the Whigs would've liked; cynics quickly claimed Huskisson had made the bare minimum of changes needed to appease the Whig side of the government. It disfranchised 38 particularly egregious rotten boroughs, while another 56 had their representation cut to a single member; a substantial number of boroughs were also expanded to cover bigger areas, as had been the usual practice for corrupt boroughs during previous years [10]. The seats removed from rotten boroughs were transferred to the growing industrial cities, and to ensure that the resulting new boroughs were not dominated by the working-class vote, the franchise was restricted to those residents owning properties worth more than ten pounds. The same limit was set for suffrage in county constituencies, which was in line with Tory thought of the period [11]. In addition, all previous borough electors retained the franchise for life, but this was not extended to county electors whose property was worth between two and ten pounds…
…Overall, the Reform Act that was passed through Parliament in 1833 was a disappointment to the reform campaigns of previous years, who had hoped that a substantial expansion of the franchise would accompany reform and now found the opposite to be the case. A demonstration against the “phantom Reform” was held in Westminster, a radical stronghold and former seat of power of Charles James Fox, the longtime Whig leader, in September of that year, and the Reform Associations founded in the 1820s to promote parliamentary reform vowed to carry on their work. The age of upheavals was beginning…
***
[1] The description of the unreformed Parliament is entirely OTL.
[2] IOTL, Canning was a very moderate Tory, but not quite moderate enough to want parliamentary reform – when he formed his coalition cabinet with the Whigs, they agreed not to broach the topic as both sides could feel the divide between them, but it's going to catch up with them just as it did IOTL.
[3] Traditionally, British elections were conducted by open ballot: in each polling station there would be a poll book with a section for each candidate, and voters would sign their names under the relevant candidate. This meant that voters were open to intimidation since the way they voted would be known, and so even the Catholic voters in Ireland could be counted on to vote however their landlord wanted them to.
[4] The 1798 United Irishmen revolt, which was inspired by the French Revolution and sought separate nationhood for Ireland, and the brief 1803 Rising being the two previous ones.
[5] I've accelerated King George's health problems somewhat, but they were all present in OTL; the Blackadder depiction of him as Prince Regent got a lot wrong, but they were completely right about him being a massive wastrel and spendthrift.
[6] IOTL his last words were very similar, but spoken to a bedside page (“Good God, what is this? My boy, this is death”).
[7] British elections, as was commonplace across the world at the time, were held on different dates in different constituencies – although the spread lessened throughout the 19th century, it took until 1918 IOTL before it was all standardised to a single day.
[8] This entire section is all OTL up to this point.
[9] IOTL, King George IV died during the latter half of the Swing Riots, and an election immediately called. This was utterly chaotic, with both parties heavily split and agitation for reform as a permanent solution to the agricultural crisis commonplace; ITTL, with George IV having died the previous year, the riots certainly don't go unnoticed, but don't directly lead into reform in quite the same way.
[10] This was done four times, in New Shoreham (West Sussex), Cricklade (Wiltshire), Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) and East Retford (Nottinghamshire), all of which were extended to cover large tracts of nearby countryside and had their franchise expanded to include the forty-shilling freeholders of the area, making them county constituencies in all but name.
[11] IOTL, the Reform Act also extended the franchise to some tenant farmers, but this does not happen ITTL.
“Sir, This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly we shall commence our labours.”
***
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
In 1830, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was among the last of Europe's anciens régimes to survive. The rumblings of the French Revolution were unfelt in Britain, and the old system retained supremacy – indeed, as revolutionary France had been an enemy, its ideas of secular government and popular sovereignty were viewed as unneeded at best and stepping stones to mob rule at worst. The governance of the UK was in the hands of the King and his Parliament, with one chamber representing the hereditary nobility and the other the non-noble landed and merchant elite.
Even in the nominally-elected lower house, the House of Commons, the franchise was restricted and deeply unequal. With a few exceptions, each parliamentary borough in England elected two members and each one in Wales and Ireland elected one; Scotland grouped its burghs into districts which elected one member each. Franchises varied widely from one borough to the next; a few allowed all freeholders to vote, while others restricted it to taxpayers or potwallopers (people who owned a door and a pot). In another group of boroughs the members were selected by the corporation (the borough's governing body) itself, while another group restricted the vote to owners of specific properties known as burgages. Combined with the small size of some boroughs (several held less than a dozen voters, and in one memorable case, Old Sarum had no resident voters at all, allowing the holder of the burgage property to nominate voters freely), this allowed a single person to wield complete control over who filled a seat in Parliament – this was known as a “pocket borough”, one of the diverse practices grouped together under the term “rotten borough”. The reason for this was the inflexibility of the system; the most recent enfranchisement of a borough was that of Newark-on-Trent in 1661, and the only change that had taken place since was the disfranchisement of Grampound in Cornwall, a particularly notorious rotten borough, in 1821.
Areas outside the parliamentary boroughs were represented by county members, two of whom were elected from each English and Irish county and one from each Welsh and Scottish county. This gave Rutland and Lancashire the same representation, and until 1826 even Yorkshire had only two members – in that year it was expanded with the two seats taken away upon Grampound's disfranchisement. Scotland also held a number of exceptions to the rule, as the 1707 Act of Union allowed it to send fewer county members than it had counties – ergo, in a very 18th century solution to the problem, six of its counties were grouped into pairs, which sent members to alternate Parliaments. The county franchise was set centrally, but varied between each of the Home Nations, so that in England, everyone who owned land worth forty shillings at the current standing of the currency could vote, whereas in Scotland the franchise was restricted to landowners whose land had been worth two pounds Scots when the Scots Parliament was originally created in the 14th century. Ergo, the English electorate numbered around 190,000 by 1830, while that of Scotland was less than 3,000. The English rules applied in Wales and Ireland as well, and because of the different land situation there, Ireland had roughly the same number of electors as England; the Welsh electorate, however, was barely a tenth of either's number. [1]
In any analysis of the early reform period, it's worth understanding precisely what the motivations of the different groups were. Only the Chartists and their predecessors, as well as some radical Whigs, actually believed reform should be a stepping stone to full democracy, and that this was in itself a good thing. The majority of the proponents of reform were instead concerned with securing good government, and by extension, eliminating the corrupt practices used to elect Members of Parliament around the country. It was in this spirit that the Canningite Ministry was first formed in 1827, and carried out its setpiece reforms, beginning with Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and culminating with the 1833 Reform Act… [2]
***
From “The Men of Downing Street: The Lives of Britain's Prime Ministers”
(c) 1967 by Adrian Menzies
London: Macmillan Publishing
The Canning ministry's first major reform was Catholic emancipation, which was prompted by the events of the Clare by-election in 1828, after William Vesey-Fitzgerald was chosen to become President of the Board of Trade. The resulting ministerial by-election, in contrast to most such exercises, was contested by Daniel O'Connell, a leader of the Irish Catholic emancipation movement, and in an upset result, O'Connell won election despite the restricted franchise and open ballot [3]. O'Connell's election sent shockwaves through the political establishment, since he was unable to take his seat in Parliament without swearing an oath declaring the King's religious supremacy and foreswearing his allegiance to the Catholic Church. It was feared that Ireland would rise in revolt against British rule for the third time in as many generations [4], and as a result of this, many political figures who'd previously opposed Catholic emancipation turned in favour of it as the alternative to heightened civil strife. A compromise settlement was pushed through Parliament, and in April of 1829, King George IV signed the Roman Catholic Relief Bill into law. The bill removed restrictions on the franchise for Catholics throughout the UK, and in order to stave off fears of electoral dominance by Catholic smallholders, the property requirement for Irish voters was raised from the forty shillings used in England and Wales to ten pounds.
This was among the final acts of King George's reign, as the King's indulgent lifestyle was beginning to catch up with him; he suffered from gout so severe that it rendered his right arm immobile, and dropsy that caused him to suffer regular breathless spasms; by the summer of 1829 this had advanced to the point where he was forced to sleep upright in a chair to keep him from suffocating in his sleep [5]. In August, the King burst a blood vessel inside his stomach, causing him to excrete large amounts of blood; medicine at the time was unable to cure this without significant risks to the patient, and so the King came to realise that the end was near for him. He dictated his will from his bed at Windsor Castle, and started to pray for forgiveness for his earlier ways; his last words were spoken to a priest on the 16th – “Goodness, what is this? I fear it's death” [6]. And so it was; notice was given across the United Kingdom the next day, and a nation mourned its monarch. At this time, the demise of the Crown necessitated the dissolution of Parliament, and the resulting general election was held over the course of the autumn [7]. The result was a victory for the Canningite-Whig coalition, although in a sign of things to come, a number of the Tory members campaigned against the government and continued to sit on the Opposition benches in the new Parliament…
***
From “The Cambridge Dictionary of British Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
SWING RIOTS, THE: Series of agricultural worker riots in the summer of 1830, beginning in the Elham Valley (Kent) and spreading across south-eastern England. The immediate cause of the riots was the poor harvests of 1828 and 1829, as well as the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines, which replaced the labour of several men and threatened to undo the entire social structure of the English countryside; more indirect causes include the enclosure of common lands (although this has become disputed, see ENCLOSURE ACTS) as well as the increasing financial burdens placed on the rural poor by the Crown and Church of England. The methods of the rioters varied from place to place, but a common modus operandi can be distinguished: letters would be sent to local notables (landowners, parsons, magistrates, poor law guardians), signed by the semi-mythical figure Captain Swing (the origin of the common name for the riots) and requesting higher wages, lower tithes and the destruction of the threshing machines, and threatening that the workers would take matters into their own hands if the demands were not heeded. At this point agricultural workers would meet in groups of 2-300, threaten the notables with violent action if the calls continued to be ignored, and eventually physically smashed threshing machines and other agricultural implements to pieces.
Despite using the slogan “Bread or Blood”, the Swing Riots were notable for their lack of physical violence; while many thousands of pounds worth of property was destroyed by the riots, only one man actually died at any point, and that was a rioter killed by either a guard or policeman during a raid on a farm. The overwhelming majority of the riots were concerned solely with inflicting property damage, specifically to the hated threshing machines; a number of barns were also burned, however. The riots prompted a brief panic in the ruling class, with some blaming them on agents-provocateurs sent from France, just gone through its second revolution [8]. There is no evidence that this was the case, but nonetheless, the riots did lead to significant results, with the wages of rural workers seeing small but needed increases over the course of the 1830s… [9]
***
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
Canning's ministry carried on through the comparatively quiet 1831, but in the year after, rumblings for reform again began to make themselves felt. Renewed agitation on the part of the rural poor coupled with increasing urban unrest to make the situation in the country increasingly hard; prominent Whigs took the opportunity to call for reform in parliamentary debate, with Lord Lansdowne strongly implying that were the current state of affairs to go on, he and his colleagues would resign from government and force a general election. Canning, anxious to keep his fragile coalition together and prevent early elections, heeded Lansdowne's call and appointed William Huskisson, a fellow moderate Tory, to draft a Reform Bill for entry into the House of Commons.
The document that was eventually proposed was a more moderate one than the Whigs would've liked; cynics quickly claimed Huskisson had made the bare minimum of changes needed to appease the Whig side of the government. It disfranchised 38 particularly egregious rotten boroughs, while another 56 had their representation cut to a single member; a substantial number of boroughs were also expanded to cover bigger areas, as had been the usual practice for corrupt boroughs during previous years [10]. The seats removed from rotten boroughs were transferred to the growing industrial cities, and to ensure that the resulting new boroughs were not dominated by the working-class vote, the franchise was restricted to those residents owning properties worth more than ten pounds. The same limit was set for suffrage in county constituencies, which was in line with Tory thought of the period [11]. In addition, all previous borough electors retained the franchise for life, but this was not extended to county electors whose property was worth between two and ten pounds…
…Overall, the Reform Act that was passed through Parliament in 1833 was a disappointment to the reform campaigns of previous years, who had hoped that a substantial expansion of the franchise would accompany reform and now found the opposite to be the case. A demonstration against the “phantom Reform” was held in Westminster, a radical stronghold and former seat of power of Charles James Fox, the longtime Whig leader, in September of that year, and the Reform Associations founded in the 1820s to promote parliamentary reform vowed to carry on their work. The age of upheavals was beginning…
***
[1] The description of the unreformed Parliament is entirely OTL.
[2] IOTL, Canning was a very moderate Tory, but not quite moderate enough to want parliamentary reform – when he formed his coalition cabinet with the Whigs, they agreed not to broach the topic as both sides could feel the divide between them, but it's going to catch up with them just as it did IOTL.
[3] Traditionally, British elections were conducted by open ballot: in each polling station there would be a poll book with a section for each candidate, and voters would sign their names under the relevant candidate. This meant that voters were open to intimidation since the way they voted would be known, and so even the Catholic voters in Ireland could be counted on to vote however their landlord wanted them to.
[4] The 1798 United Irishmen revolt, which was inspired by the French Revolution and sought separate nationhood for Ireland, and the brief 1803 Rising being the two previous ones.
[5] I've accelerated King George's health problems somewhat, but they were all present in OTL; the Blackadder depiction of him as Prince Regent got a lot wrong, but they were completely right about him being a massive wastrel and spendthrift.
[6] IOTL his last words were very similar, but spoken to a bedside page (“Good God, what is this? My boy, this is death”).
[7] British elections, as was commonplace across the world at the time, were held on different dates in different constituencies – although the spread lessened throughout the 19th century, it took until 1918 IOTL before it was all standardised to a single day.
[8] This entire section is all OTL up to this point.
[9] IOTL, King George IV died during the latter half of the Swing Riots, and an election immediately called. This was utterly chaotic, with both parties heavily split and agitation for reform as a permanent solution to the agricultural crisis commonplace; ITTL, with George IV having died the previous year, the riots certainly don't go unnoticed, but don't directly lead into reform in quite the same way.
[10] This was done four times, in New Shoreham (West Sussex), Cricklade (Wiltshire), Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) and East Retford (Nottinghamshire), all of which were extended to cover large tracts of nearby countryside and had their franchise expanded to include the forty-shilling freeholders of the area, making them county constituencies in all but name.
[11] IOTL, the Reform Act also extended the franchise to some tenant farmers, but this does not happen ITTL.
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IIRC in those days it tended to be a more continental European ballot system, and on top of that there were no formal nomination rules or secret ballots - you just had to print/handcopy (IIRC some, perhaps all, states forbade printing) your slates and hand them out to people to vote. If there wasn't an organised presence for a candidate in a town, people simply couldn't/wouldn't vote for them.
Indeed - a sizeable part of my intent with this is to sort of deconstruct the whole "the moderate hero will save the day" mentality. Here we've got the Moderate Hero of Moderate Heroes as far as the period goes, making a Reform Act that pleases all sides to some extent (there might be a few Ultras who would disagree with it and a few Whigs who'd argue it doesn't go far enough, but nothing like the controversy of OTL) and makes it seem like a great political triumph - though we're entering a period when politics extends far outside the walls of Westminster Palace, and the common people are certainly going to react to this whole affair…
Indeed - before the Era of Good Feelings, nominations for President were conducted somewhat centrally by the Democratic-Republicans by means of a caucus vote in Congress - this is how Jefferson, Madison and Monroe all won the nomination. In 1824 the caucus nominated William Crawford, who'd been promised the nomination in a future election after being narrowly defeated by Monroe in the 1816 selection - this was after significant groups within the party had boycotted the vote calling it a fraud and a stitch-up, and went off to nominate Adams, Jackson or Clay as the case might be. There then followed a chaotic period where nominations weren't conducted above state level at all, which ended with the rise of national conventions that was complete by the 1840 election.