Get Off the Track! (Master Thread)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Get Off the Track!

(1)

Get off the track! Get off the track! Get off the track! All are singing While the Liberty Bell is ringing!

Background: Three years after the death of William Henry Harrison plunged the Whig party into chaos, the Union stands on the brink of collapse. The ever-present issue of slavery looms on the horizon, as Southerners and expansionists with the open support of President John Tyler call for the immediate acquisition of Texas. The Democratic party is in disarray, while the haggard survivors of the Whig civil war of 1841 make one last desperate attempt at unity with the nomination of Henry Clay. Meanwhile, the nascent abolitionist movement is gaining in numbers even as Northerners and Southerners alike damn those who would place the freedom of two and a half million slaves ahead of the stability of the nation.

Everywhere, from the sultry streets of Charleston to the taverns and pulpits of Boston, the talk lingers on one thing: the prospect for secession, and the imminent breakup of the Union.

(1) Wikimedia Commons

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

PRESIDENTS of the UNITED STATES
1. George Washington (Unaffiliated, Virginia) April 30, 1789–March 4, 1797
2. John Adams (Federalist, Massachusetts) March 4, 1797–March 4, 1801
3. Thomas Jefferson (Republican, Virginia) March 4, 1801–March 4, 1809
4. James Madison (Republican, Virginia) March 4, 1809–March 4, 1817
5. James Monroe (Republican, Virginia) March 4, 1817–March 4, 1825
6. John Quincy Adams (Republican, Massachusetts) March 4, 1825–March 4, 1829
7. Andrew Jackson (Democratic Republican, Tennessee) March 4, 1829–March 4, 1837
8. Martin Van Buren (Democratic Republican, New York) March 4, 1837–March 4, 1841
9. William Henry Harrison (Whig, Ohio) March 4, 1841–April 4, 1841†
10. John Tyler (Whig→Unaffiliated, Virginia) April 4, 1841–March 4, 1845
11. James Gillespie Birney (Liberty, Michigan) March 4, 1845–March 4, 1849
12. William Henry Seward (Liberty Union→Republican, New York) March 4, 1849–March 4, 1857
13. John Charles Frémont (Republican, California) March 4, 1857–March 4, 1861
14. Samuel Jones Tilden (Republican, New York) March 4, 1861–April 15, 1865
15. Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) April 15, 1865–March 4, 1869
16. Salmon Portland Chase (Republican, Ohio) March 4, 1869–March 4, 1873
17. William Robert Taylor (Republican Labor, Wisconsin) March 4, 1873–March 4, 1877
18. Abraham Lincoln (Liberal National, Illinois) March 4, 1877–March 4, 1885
19. James Edward Hall (Social Democratic, New York) March 4, 1885–May 3, 1889
20. Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) May 3, 1889–November 10, 1890
21. John McAllister Schofield (Military, Illinois) November 10, 1890–present

VICE PRESIDENTS of the UNITED STATES
1. John Adams (Federalist, Massachusetts) April 21, 1789–March 4, 1797
2. Thomas Jefferson (Republican, Virginia) March 4, 1797–March 4, 1801
3. Aaron Burr (Republican, New York) March 4, 1801–March 4, 1805
4. George Clinton (Republican, New York) March 4, 1805–April 20, 1812†
VACANT April 20, 1812–March 4, 1813
5. Elbridge Gerry (Republican, Massachusetts) March 4, 1813–November 23, 1814†
VACANT November 23, 1814–March 4, 1817
6. Daniel D. Tompkins (Republican, New York) March 4, 1817–March 4, 1825
7. John Caldwell Calhoun (Republican→Nullifier, South Carolina) March 4, 1825–December 28, 1832*
VACANT December 28, 1832–March 4, 1833
8. Martin Van Buren (Democratic Republican, New York) March 4, 1833–March 4, 1837
9. Richard Mentor Johnson (Democratic Republican, Kentucky) March 4, 1837–March 4, 1841
10. John Tyler (Whig, Virginia) March 4, 1841–April 4, 1841
VACANT April 4, 1841–March 4, 1849
11. Thomas Hart Benton (Liberty Union, Missouri) March 4, 1849–March 4, 1853
12. Charles H. Durkee (Radical, Wisconsin) March 4, 1853–March 4, 1857
13. Abraham Lincoln (People's, Illinois) March 4, 1857–March 4, 1861
14. Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) March 4, 1861–April 15, 1865
VACANT April 15, 1865–March 4, 1869
15. Ulysses S. Grant (Republican, New York) March 4, 1869–March 4, 1873
16. Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican Labor, Massachusetts) March 4, 1873–March 4, 1877
17. Theodore Roosevelt (Liberal National, New York) March 4, 1877–February 9, 1878
VACANT February 9, 1878–March 4, 1881
18. John Singleton Mosby (Liberal National, Virginia) March 4, 1881–March 4, 1885
19. Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) March 4, 1885–May 3, 1889
VACANT May 3, 1889–March 4, 1893

[Elcaspar]

Color me interested. However i do wanna know what happened to that old project of yours, relating to the War of 1812 if i remember correctly?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Color me interested. However i do wanna know what happened to that old project of yours, relating to the War of 1812 if i remember correctly?

Long story short, I realized I had written myself into a corner, with events in New England progressing much too quickly for the rest of the story. I do want to come back to it someday, though!

[Elcaspar]

Color me interested. However i do wanna know what happened to that old project of yours, relating to the War of 1812 if i remember correctly?

Long story short, I realized I had written myself into a corner, with events in New England progressing much too quickly for the rest of the story. I do want to come back to it someday, though!

Ah i see. Looking forward to when it eventually does return!

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

1844 United States presidential election

Former State Representative James Gillespie Birney (Liberty, Michigan) / former Senator Thomas Morris (Liberty, Ohio) 154 electoral votes, 41.2% popular votes
Senator Henry Clay (Whig, Kentucky) / former Representative Millard Fillmore (Whig, New York) 63 electoral votes, 20.6% popular votes
President John Tyler (National Democratic, Virginia) / Senator Robert John Walker (National Democratic, Mississippi) 32 electoral votes, 14.7% popular votes
Former President Martin Van Buren (Democratic, New York) / Governor James Knox Polk (Democratic, Tennessee) 26 electoral votes, 23.5% popular votes

The Democracy split, and the Whigs rejoiced. "The division among the Loco-Focos is certain to elect Clay," announced the jubilant Indiana Journal in the late spring of 1844. Tyler's candidacy, they predicted, would deliver the South into Clay's waiting arms, while in the North Indiana, Ohio, and possibly even New York and Pennsylvania would be ripe for the taking. The Whigs, however, placed too much confidence in the loyalty of Northern Whigs, and one Whig—William H. Seward of New York—in particular, when confronted with a pro-Southern national platform. Snubbed by the convention, who elevated his chief rival Fillmore to the second spot on the ticket, and disturbed by Clay's willingness to concede to Southern demands for Texas, Seward led a revolt among Northern "Conscience" Whigs that led to James G. Birney replacing Clay as the official Whig candidate in states where the anti-slavery wing of the party dominated. Meanwhile, losing ground to Tyler in several key states across the South, Van Buren felt the need to soften his anti-Texas position in the final weeks of the campaign —with the result that abolitionist Democrats in the upper North flocked to Birney's banner. When the last state had voted, Birney had carried all the free states save for New Jersey, despite winning only 41% of the popular vote. Crucially, the nascent Liberty party did not receive so much as a single vote in any slave state. Abolitionists in the North rejoiced at the overthrow of the Slave Power —meanwhile, in the South, the wheels were already in motion to carry on the fight by other means.

[Former President tack50]

Note for Truman: If you want semi-realistic results, don't put any single issue anti-slavery candidates on the ballot as otherwise most of Atlas will flock to them no matter what

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

1845 Secession Crisis

Map of North America, c. June 1845. (1)

Whether it was the infamous Pakenham Letter, or the battle against the gag rule, or the highly-publicized mutinies aboard the Creole and Amistad, or simply as in 1776 a "long train of abuses" that hardened the hearts of the Northern public against the Southern Slave Power, the effect was the same. The election of James Gillespie Birney proved what Salmon P. Chase and the Liberty party had maintained all along: that the major parties and statesmen from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line had dramatically underestimated the appetite for anti-slavery politics among the Northern public. While a majority of white Northerners were still unready to embrace the doctrine of universal rights, the events of the disastrous Tyler administration had brought them to see black slavery as the natural enemy of white freedom. Failure by the Whigs and Democrats to adequately address their concerns drove them into the arms of the abolitionists.

The South, however, refused to recognize the new government. Initially they sought to prevent its inauguration altogether. When Congress convened to formally count the votes of the electoral college, several Southern senators (led by the venerable John M. Berrien of Georgia) moved that the votes of the Birney electors be discounted. The Liberty party had won their majorities in the free states, they declared, on the basis of "fraudulency, corruption, and malfeasance of the lowest order." But their efforts to overturn the results of the election were ultimately defeated, for three reasons. First, too few Northern Congressmen answered the call of the Southern colleagues, afraid to publicly revoke the votes of their constituents. Second, discounting all of Birney's votes would make Clay president, an outcome many Southerners found equally abhorrent. Third, a large party of the Southern firebrands did not want to prevent Birney's ascendency. The election of an out-and-out abolitionist provided the necessary spark that would ignite the fire of Southern nationalism.

In the end, the firebrands got their wish. A convention of delegates from ten of the thirteen slave states assembled in Richmond on February 18, 1845 at the urging of Secretary of State Calhoun. (North Carolina failed to appoint delegates in time; Delaware and Kentucky refused the invitation.) Calhoun had spent the months since Birney's election mobilizing for war, outfitting Southern state militias with the contents of federal arsenals and drafting a proclamation of an independent Southern Confederacy that the delegates approved with minor alterations on February 21. In short order the convention passed resolutions to nominate a provisional government, admit Texas as the twelfth Confederate state, and adopt the Maryland seceder militia, who had assumed defensive positions north and east of Washington. Calhoun was unanimously elected provisional president in abstentia, though he would not formally assume his duties until March 7, three days after Birney was inaugurated in Philadelphia.

Birney inherited the administration of a government deeply divided and a public confused and demoralized by the events of winter. In 1845, it was not clear that he was really president at all. Unable even to enter Washington for fear of his life, Birney continued to run the government out of the U.S. Customs House on Chestnut Street just blocks from Independence Hall. Foreign papers speculated Calhoun would soon replace Birney as president of the re-united States once Congress convened in December to address the crisis.

To make matters worse, Northern opinion was not uniformly in favor of Union in the spring of 1845. Lingering mistrust for abolitionists and the prospect of a long and bloody civil war combined to sow divisions within the loyal states. Even some Liberty men questioned the wisdom of fighting a costly war to preserve a Union that, after all, had failed to “preserve the blessings of liberty” for nearly three millions of its people. “No union with slaveholders!” was the cry that rung from the pages of the Emancipator, as Garrisonians —confident that an independent South would soon collapse of its own volition —urged the president to turn the other cheek.

Whether Birney ever found these arguments convincing is a subject of continued debate. In any event, the option to consent to disunion was soon revoked by events in Virginia.

On May 13, the small federal garrison at Harper’s Ferry came under fire from pro-secession militia commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, a former lieutenant in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. Whether Lee’s troops or the garrison fired first remains unknown; but through the North, Harper’s Ferry became a rallying cry that united a disparate people behind the cause of Union. The sight of the flag of the United States ripped by rebel musket balls, reproduced in newspapers and engravings from Boston to Cairo, lit a fire under the North that could not be put out. Some 60,000 men of every age and background turned out to answer the government’s call for volunteers as the nation hurtled, now uncontrollably, towards war.

(1) Source: Own work.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Birney Administration (1845–1848)

With the election of Birney and the Liberty party in 1844, the Northern public declared their independence from the government of the slave power. They had not to wait long for their response. The declaration of a Southern Confederacy at Richmond, followed shortly by a violent confrontation between federal troops and secessionist militia at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, plunged the country into a long and bitter war between North and South. Having so far waged a peaceful war against slavery, the abolitionists were now thrown headlong into a crusade for "Liberty and Union." From the provisional federal capital at Philadelphia, Birney took three actions in the first year of the war that saved the Union cause from imminent ruin. First was his appointment of John Quincy Adams, William H. Seward, and Salmon Chase as secretaries of state, war, and treasury respectively. Together, the three formed a triumvirate led by Seward as de facto prime minister whose combined administrative skill and political acumen saved the government from collapse and by 1848 had mobilized a formidable war machine in opposition to the Confederates. Second, his July 4th proclamation freeing the slaves in the rebel Confederacy gave moral purpose to the war effort and effectively ended talk of a British intervention on behalf of the South. Third, the appointment of Zachary Taylor to lead the Union armies—though controversial with abolitionists—proved to be inspired after Taylor defeated the early Confederate offensive and kept Kentucky for the Union. After falling from his horse at a parade inspection in August 1845, Birney was effectively paralyzed from the waist down and ceased to play an active role in directing the war effort, most of the day-to-day duties of the head of government falling to Seward.

At first the war went poorly for the North. Their early attempts at an invasion of the South were repulsed, and sympathetic uprisings of slaves and Southern Unionists were brutally suppressed. Guerrilla fighting in Missouri and western Virginia claimed thousands of lives as Union and Confederate governments battled for control. The apparent hopelessness of the Union cause led not only moderates, but also some abolitionists to question the continuation of the conflict by force of arms. In fact, the Confederate position was weaker than it first appeared. The admission of Texas to the Confederacy in the spring of 1845 had predictably inflamed tensions with Mexico, who declared war the following year. Forced to fight a war on two fronts, within two years the Confederacy's human and material resources were depleted, and their need to end the war quickly was greater than ever.

1848 United States presidential election

Secretary of War William Henry Seward (Liberty Union, New York) / Military Governor Thomas Hart Benton (Liberty Union, Missouri) 177 electoral votes, 53.1% popular votes
General Winfield Scott (Whig, New Jersey) / former Representative Abbott Lawrence (Whig, Massachusetts) 12 electoral votes, 18.8% popular votes
Representative Gerritt Smith (National Liberty, New York) / Representative Charles C. Foote (National Liberty, Michigan) 0 electoral votes, 21.9% popular votes
Senator Franklin Pierce (Democratic, New Hampshire) / Senator Jesse David Bright (Democratic, Indiana) 0 electoral votes, 6.3% popular votes

Anti-war sentiment festered in the summer of 1848, and for several months it appeared a deadlocked electoral college was a real possibility. The capture of Washington and Union victories at Mobile and Pensacola in late September and early October led to a surge of popular support for the wartime government, allowing Seward to carry all of the free states along with Delaware for a grand total of 177 electoral votes. Yet while Seward nominally improved on Birney's 1844 showing, a majority of Liberty men voted against the government, with New York Representative Gerrit Smith's splinter candidacy performing well throughout the upper North, holding Seward to bare majorities in Massachusetts and Michigan and nearly taking Vermont. Meanwhile, a plurality of Seward's support came from voters who had supported Martin Van Buren in the last election, perhaps persuaded by the former president's Albany Letter supporting Seward's election in the final months of the campaign. Thus Seward, a former Whig leading the Liberty ticket, was elected by the votes of anti-slavery Democrats who deserted their party's regular candidate in droves. The war for the Union would continue, as would the nation's crusade for emancipation; but the decision Americans made in 1848 would have a profound effect on the course of both over the next four years.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The First Seward Administration (1849–1853)

The winter of 1848-49 was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. In four months from November to February, Union forces captured Fredericksburg, Baltimore, and Hampton Roads, repulsed a second Confederate invasion of Kentucky, and laid siege to and took the city of New Orleans. Meanwhile, Mexican victories at Vera Cruz and Buena Vista marked the end of Southern offensive operations in the Southwest. In summer the Nashville and Mississippi campaigns plunged a dagger into the heart of the Confederacy, cutting vital lines of communication and bringing the grim realities of war to the Southern heartland. The death of President Calhoun the following year decimated morale and ended any hope of a coordinated effort to retake the territory lost to the Union armies. The untested vice president, Jefferson Davis, was unable to control events or command the respect of his cabinet. As a result, and with an increasingly-effective Union blockade to manage, the Confederate armies were often ill-supplied and outnumbered. Meanwhile, Seward had built an effective modern war machine in the North that mobilized not only hundreds of thousands of volunteers, but the civilian population in support of the war effort. The fall of Atlanta and then Richmond and the surrender of the largest remaining Confederate force at Spotsylvania Court House in the spring of 1852 effectively brought the major part of the war to a close.

Domestically, Seward's government oversaw a period of flourishing social reform and rapid economic growth, as the election of strong majorities in both houses of Congress afforded him the opportunity to pursue his sweeping reform agenda. His foremost accomplishment, the passage and subsequent ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolished slavery throughout the United States and its territories and extended to former slaves full rights of citizenship. This was the cornerstone of his "free soil" policy, best enunciated in a memorial to the Cooper Union. In it, Seward described the history of the late war as a struggle between the forces of capital and labor, the alliance of the "Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash" on one side against the united laboring classes of farmers, working men, artisans, and entrepreneurs. The Homestead Act of 1850, passed with the overwhelming support of the Liberty and Union Democrats in Congress, offered 160 acres of land to any loyal citizen willing and able to improve it. Finally, the Freedmen's Bureau, established in 1852, seeks to address the plight of former slaves by providing schools, provisions, and temporary shelter. Together, these acts laid the foundation for the post-war order and helped to define the emerging party system.

1852 United States presidential election

Former Representative Gerritt Smith (Radical, New York) / Representative Charles H. Durkee (Radical, Wisconsin) 87 electoral votes, 32.4% popular votes
President William Henry Seward (Republican, New York) / Vice President Thomas Hart Benton (Republican, Missouri) 82 electoral votes, 38.2% popular votes
Senator Daniel Webster (Constitutional Union, Massachusetts) / former Representative Garrett Davis (Constitutional Union, Kentucky) 44 electoral votes, 29.4% popular votes

Following Seward's Cooper Union Memorial, a "Republican & Liberty Union" convention met at Philadelphia to formally renominate the incumbent ticket. Paying homage to the political organization of Thomas Jefferson, they hoped to unite farmers, working men, artisans, and freedmen under a single banner under the promise of cheap land, equal rights, and national reunion. As was the custom, Seward did not campaign actively for his reelection, instead relying on his surrogates, most notably Vice President Benton. Benton's fiery speeches denouncing the financial elites as complicit in the rebellion and vowing to "hang the secesh traitors" won many former Democrats to the Republican cause; but Benton's reputation also allowed the Radical Liberty men to portray Seward as the agent of free trade and Jacksonian economics, while his own reunion program was received as too lenient by a public clamoring for revenge. As moderate reunionists split their votes between Seward and Webster, former Representative Gerritt Smith amassed enough support among abolitionists and middle class radicals to win a plurality in the electoral college (though he lost the popular vote to Seward by nearly six percent). With no candidate possessing a majority, the choice of a president fell to Congress, as the House of Representatives prepared to convene in February.

1853 United States contingent election

President William Henry Seward (Republican, New York) 11 states
Senator Daniel Webster (Constitutional Union, Massachusetts) 8 states
Former Representative Gerritt Smith (Radical, New York) 1 state

Seward was fortunate that it was the outgoing House of Representatives who would decide the presidency; had the choice falling to the incoming House, the result might have been very different. As it was, Seward prevailed on the first ballot, though his majority was but narrow —even one defection would have deadlocked the chamber and thrown the election into chaos. But it was the behavior of the Radical members that was most significant: convinced he could not win but determined to stop Seward, Smith freed his supporters to cast their votes for Webster, allowing the senator to carry several New England states as well as Ohio. This coalition succeeded in electing Charles H. Durkee to the vice presidency over Seward's running mate, Benton. The common cause between Whigs and Radicals would profoundly shape the next four years as a minority president with a divided Congress prepared to assume office.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Second Seward Administration (1853–1857)

Having won the war, Seward now took it upon himself to win the peace. Convinced sectional conflict and its fruit, secession, was itself the direct result, first of slavery, and secondly of the deep class divisions which slavery creates in white society, the complete dismantling of the apparatus that institution became the first aim of his policy of reunion. As condition for readmission to representation in Congress, each former Confederate state was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and modify their own constitutions to disavow slavery and enfranchise blacks on an equal footing with whites. To enforce these edicts, Seward turned to the victorious Union army, who remained to keep the peace in a violent and fractured region.

Seward's other domestic goals—Westward expansion, land and currency reform—proved more difficult to maneuver through the divided Congress which resulted from the 1852-53 elections. With the surrender of the last Confederate army in June 1853, U.S. forces occupied the former Republic of Texas, and Seward appointed former Texan President Samuel Houston military governor. A similar sequence of events unfolded in Alta California, where pro-Confederate rebels had wrested control from the Mexican authorities in 1846, only for pro-Union proxies to assume control of the territory shortly before the Confederate surrender. Despite having worked closely with the Mexican government during the war, first as Birney's secretary of state and later as president, Seward believed Mexico too weak to reabsorb these territories and considered them naturally part of the United States. Congress, however, took a different view, and declined to ratify Seward's occupation of the Southwest, leaving the region in a delicate state of limbo. Seward's theory of "squatter sovereignty" and the independent treasury scheme favored by the Bentonites in the Congressional Republican party likewise went nowhere. Seward was, however, able to secure Senate approval for a treaty settling the northern border of Oregon, an issue that had evaded previous presidents.

Meanwhile, reunion proceeded apace, though not without pitfalls: the organization of Southern state governments proved a major issue, as once readmitted, the former Confederate states went about restoring the erstwhile leaders of the rebellion to office and resurrecting slavery under another name. This prompted Congress to pass the Reconstruction Act of 1855, setting new, more stringent requirements for readmission (including ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteeing black civil rights and black male suffrage) and barring former Confederate leaders from voting or holding elected office. This last provision was passed over Seward's veto, the president arguing Congress had no authority to strip citizens of their rights without a fair trial. Ultimately, no charges were brought against the leaders of the rebellion.

1856 United States presidential election

Military Governor John Charles Frémont (Republican, Alta California) / Senator Hannibal Hamlin (Republican, Maine) 90 electoral votes, 38.2% popular votes
Military Governor Samuel Houston (People's, Texas) / former Representative Abraham Lincoln (People's, Illinois) 77 electoral votes, 26.5% popular votes
Chief Justice John McLean (Liberal, Ohio) / Representative William Goodell (Liberal, New York) 70 electoral votes, 20.6% popular votes
Former Senator Robert Field Stockton (American, New Jersey) / C.S.A. Colonel Birkett Davenport Fry (American, Virginia) 18 electoral votes, 14.7% popular votes

Ruthless partisanship and scathing rhetoric around reunion and westward expansion defined the4 1856 campaign, resulting as four years before in a deadlocked election. With Seward having chosen retirement over an ill-omened bid for a third term, the Republicans nominated the son-in-law of his former vice president. A war hero and a charismatic radical, John Charles Frémont was widely popular in the populous Western states who held the balance of power in the electoral college. So, however, was Samuel Houston, the aged nominee of the new People's party, whose candidacy proved especially popular with former Whigs and conservatives alienated by Frémont's hardline stance on reconstruction. With many moderates backing Houston, and just as many radicals supporting the Liberal candidacy of John McClean, Frémont was unable to amass an electoral majority. Neither, however, were any of his rivals, throwing the election to the House for the second time in four years.

1857 United States contingent election, first ballot

Military Governor John Charles Frémont (Republican, Alta California) 8 states
Military Governor Samuel Houston (People's, Texas) 8 states
Chief Justice John McClean (Liberal, Ohio) 7 states
No vote (IA, MS, WV) 3 states

The divided House of Representatives failed to select a president on the first ballot, with Frémont, Houston, and McClean polling roughly even despite a plurality for the Republicans in the lower chamber. Meanwhile, in the Senate, a coalition of Liberals, Populares, and Americans united to elect Lincoln the nation's next vice president over Hamlin, confirming the upper chamber's opposition slant.

1857 United States contingent election, last ballot

Military Governor John Charles Frémont (Republican, Alta California) 16 states
Military Governor Samuel Houston (People's, Texas) 10 states

After several successive ballots failed to reveal a path to victory for the Liberals, Chief Justice McClean instructed his managers to withdraw his candidacy, leaving Frémont and Houston as the final contenders. While McClean himself made no public endorsement, he let it be known privately that Frémont was of the two men the most agreeable —a view shared by the Liberal floor leaders in the House, John Sherman and Thaddeus Stevens. While some former Whig members from Connecticut and Rhode Island voted for Houston, the rest of the Liberal caucus threw their support to Frémont with the understanding that he would support their more aggressive vision for Congressional Reconstruction.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Frémont Administration (1857–1861)

The circumstances under which John Charles Frémont entered the presidency in the late winter of 1857 ensured that Congress would play the major part in the government of the country for the next four years. While controlling a plurality of state delegations, the Republicans were nonetheless a minority in the House, while in the Senate the opposition continued to set the agenda. For his own part, Frémont displayed no great aptitude for executive leadership: his military background and tenure as governor of occupied California left him ill-prepared for the presidency, while the death of his father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton, in 1858 deprived him of his most astute advisor.

Nevertheless, Frémont's time in office saw not a few achievements. First among these was the annexation by the United States of Texas and Alta California, a recognition of the status quo post-1852. Congress followed up this expansion of the nation's territory with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1858, which organized territorial governments in the remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase, paving the way for a proposed Transcontinental Railroad. In a partial repudiation of Seward's policy, the Tariff of 1857 moderately lowered duties on foreign imports. Meanwhile, Congressional leadership of Reconstruction installed new governments in the former rebel states who created public schools, elected black state legislators and Congressmen, and dismantled the Black Codes passed to restrict the rights of freedmen. An uprising by the White Leagues and Knights of the Golden Circle in 1857-58 was suppressed by federal troops commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, whom Frémont appointed general of the Armies of the United States. Within the Reconstructed states, the Republicans emerged as the party of tenant farmers and most former slaves, while the Liberals were supported by the business interests and landowners, including black landholders like Dred Scott, who became the first former slave elected to the United States Senate. A third group, the so-called Redeemers, were the party of Confederate veterans and the former slaveocracy, and resisted with varying degrees of success the federal attempts at reconstruction, sometimes via bribery and fraud, sometimes by force. Arguments surrounding Reconstruction, however, were somewhat overshadowed by the Panic of 1859, which led to the collapse of several eastern banks and plunged the national economy into a brief depression. While historians disagree as to its causes, Liberals blamed the crisis on the alleged corruption of Frémont's administration.

1860 United States presidential election, first round

Governor Samuel Jones Tilden (Republican, New York) / Senator Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) 38.5% popular votes
Senator Charles Sumner (Liberal, Massachusetts) / Governor Henry Winter Davis (Liberal, Maryland) 34.6% popular votes
Mr. Stephen Arnold Douglas (National People's, Illinois) / C.S.A. Colonel John Hunt Morgan (National People's, Kentucky) 26.9% popular votes

The first election under the newly-minted Sixteenth Amendment was also the first in which a majority of white Southern men could vote since the surrender of the last Confederate forces in 1853. In this evolving political landscape, the Republicans sought to have their cake and eat it too, seeking to become both the party of freedmen and the party of the white working classes. They were only partly successful. Their nominee, New York Governor Samuel Tilden, won pluralities in the Mississippi Valley and the upper Midwest thanks to the support of immigrants, black tennant farmers, and some poor whites, while the Liberals—led by radical firebrand Charles Sumner—took New England, the old radical strongholds of Michigan and Ohio, and the Appalachian counties in the upper South. The "Redeemer" ticket led by Stephen A. Douglas, however, proved unexpectedly strong in areas where supporters of Reconstruction were divided and newly-enfranchised Confederate veterans could muster a plurality, if not a majority, at the polls. The result was a split election, with Tilden and Sumner advancing to the second round of balloting in December.

1860 United States presidential election, runoff

Governor Samuel Jones Tilden (Republican, New York) / Senator Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) 51.5% popular votes
Senator Charles Sumner (Liberal, Massachusetts) / Governor Henry Winter Davis (Liberal, Maryland) 48.5% popular votes

The first implementation of the Sixteenth Amendment was not without incident: the runoff election was marred by violence, widespread accounts of fraud and intimidation, particularly in the former Confederacy, where "Red Shirts" either supporting Tilden's election or merely opposing Sumner's employed lynchings and threats of violence to keep black men from the polls. It would take several weeks and a special tripartite Congressional committee to determine that Tilden had won the election. The Republican majority was narrow, Tilden having prevailed by a bare margin of 3% —owing to the support of Redeemers in the lower South, and also ironically to the many black voters who defied the Red Shirts to support the party of Seward and Frémont. Time would tell whether their confidence in the Republicans was well-placed, as a weary nation looked toward a new administration in a new decade.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Tilden Administration (1861–1865)

The four years of Tilden's presidency were an eventful epocha for the United States, as Americans and indeed the wider world came to terms with the reality of life in the second half of the nineteenth century. The revolutionary upheaval of the 1840s had been followed by a period of rapid industrial expansion, so that by the time Tilden arrived in Washington City to be inaugurated the fourteenth president under the stars and stripes, the pastoral republic of Jefferson had been fully replaced by a modern, capitalist economy. With rising demands for recognition from a new and growing urban laboring class, together with the pressures of Reconstruction and the influx of immigrants from Europe and China, Tilden's America was wholly unlike anything that had come before —for better and for worse.

During his tenure as governor of New York, Tilden had made a name for himself as a reformer, a reputation that in no small part contributed to his narrow victory over Charles Sumner in the 1860 election. His leadership of the executive branch was remarked for its transparency and efficiency, as party men were replaced with civil servants hired for their credentials at the helm of the great departments. He became the first president to meet with representatives of the newly independent Irish Republic, an action which enraged the British press but won his administration the support and affection of the population of Irish immigrants in America. Domestically, Tilden vetoed the Garfield–Conkling Act, which sought to limit the circulation of unbacked paper currency that had propagated since the war—a repudiation of his earlier "hard money" policy—as well as supporting federal appropriations for the Transcontinental Railroad. His efforts on behalf of a federal civil service reform bill were less successful, as was his challenge to the powerful Speaker of the House Oliver P. Morton. Finally, Tilden oversaw the gradual reduction of the federal military presence in the former Confederacy, with the result that Redeemers reclaimed control of several state governments in the lower South in 1861 and 1862.

1864 United States presidential election, first round

President Samuel Jones Tilden (Republican, New York) / Vice President Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) 47.8% popular votes
Senator Henry Smith Lane (Liberal, Indiana) / Senator William Woods Holden (Liberal, North Carolina) 26.1% popular votes
Representative Alexander Hugh Holmes Stuart (National, Virginia) / former Governor Milton Slocum Latham (National, California) 26.1% popular votes

Tilden's success at consolidating immigrants, working men, Western farmers and Southern tenants under one roof made him the prohibitive favorite for reelection. As the telegraph tapped out the returns on election night, the Republican ticket swept the upper Midwest and the Pacific Coast and ran up huge pluralities in the large Mid-Atlantic states and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. For a time it appeared Tilden might win outright and avoid a runoff; but the lower South still were loathe to support a Republican president, and soon speculation turned to whether Lane or Stuart would face Tilden in the second round. The margin was close —when all was said and done, a few thousand votes separated the Liberal and National tickets —but in the end Lane's support in New England, coupled with his running mate's popularity among freedmen in the upper South, handed him the advantage and the dubious honor of second place.

1864 United States presidential election, runoff

President Samuel Jones Tilden (Republican, New York) / Vice President Galshua Aaron Grow (Republican, Pennsylvania) 58.3% popular votes
Senator Henry Smith Lane (Liberal, Indiana) / Senator William Woods Holden (Liberal, North Carolina) 41.7% popular votes

So enormous was Tilden's plurality on the first round that many assumed his reelection to be preordained even before it was definitely known which of his challengers would advance to the runoff. Sure enough, the president's second round majority was overwhelming, falling just short of 60% of the vote despite the best efforts of the Liberals. While Lane did reasonably well in the lower Midwest compared to the rest of the country, Tilden nevertheless carried every state outside of New England as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island for good measure, while performing best in the West, the Mississippi Valley, and the upper Midwest. Having travelled to New York on the advice of his campaign managers, Tilden would make his triumphant return to Washington in shortly before Christmas to adoring crowds, confident by this point in large Republican majorities in Congress to usher through his second term agenda.

Among the well-wishers was John O'Mahony, a prominent Irish Republican and the new Irish ambassador to the United States. Observing the warm welcome of O'Mahony at the White House, one onlooker —a minor stage celebrity and Redeemer who had refused to vote for Lane —was heard to remark, "that is the last speech he [Tilden] will ever make."

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Grow Administration (1865–1869)

The tragic death of President Tilden shook the moral foundations of a country so recently ravaged by civil war and elevated the vice president to the presidency for only the second time in American history. Like Tilden, Galshua Aaron Grow was an easterner and former Democrat whose loyalty to the Republican party was absolute; unlike his predecessor, Grow came from the radical wing of the party who took a hard line on Reconstruction. The murder of the president by an actor with well-documented ties to the White Leagues and the National party gave these elements a pretext to put their social agenda into motion.

Eight months after taking office, Grow signed the Civil Rights Act of 1865, a bipartisan achievement approved by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate thanks largely to the stewardship of Liberal Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Republican Senator Schuyler Colfax of Indiana. Designed in response to allegations of fraud and intimidation in the 1864 presidential campaign, the act struck down barriers to black male suffrage erected by Redeemer state governments in the lower South and, most controversially, created a special contingent of federal marshals to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. While it did not address the broader social inequities faced by free blacks in the post-war South, the act was a major blow to the political power of the White Leagues, and the period from 1866-1868 is sometimes known as the "Second Reconstruction."

Grow's other domestic achievements included the Butler Silver Purchase Act, an inflationary measure which allowed the payment of federal bank notes with either gold or silver. The last years of his administration were marked by a series of scandals, as several civil servants and prominent Republican politicians were implicated in fraud surrounding the government's involvement in the Transcontinental Railroad.

1868 United States presidential election, first round

Former Secretary of State Salmon Portland Chase (Republican, Ohio) / former Representative Ulysses S. Grant (Republican, New York) 46.9% popular votes
Representative Benjamin Helm Bristow (Liberal, Kentucky) / Mr. Henry Wilson (Liberal, Massachusetts) 28.1% popular votes
Mayor Fernando Wood (National, New York) / Governor James Edward English (National, Connecticut) 18.8% popular votes
Former Mayor Neal Dow (Prohibition, Maine) / Reverend John Russell (Prohibition, Michigan) 6.3% popular votes

Thrice disappointed in his many attempts to win the presidency, events conspired at last to deliver Salmon P. Chase the nomination of his party in the spring of 1868. The incumbent, Galshua Grow, having failed to mobilize in time to win the votes of a majority of delegates, Chase's two decades in Republican politics won him the endorsement of the convention and a final chance at entering the Executive Mansion. The Civil Rights Act of 1865 had swelled the ranks of the Republicans in the lower South with thousands of free blacks, and in spite of the fearmongering of the Liberals —who warned that the Republican tariff policy would land a fatal blow to American manufacturing —wage laborers and trade unionists voted overwhelmingly for Chase. The result confirmed the Republicans' status as the natural party of government, as Chase outpolled his nearest rival, Benjamin Bristow, by nearly twenty percent, while falling just short of a majority on the first round.

1868 United States presidential election, runoff

Former Secretary of State Salmon P. Chase (Republican, Ohio) / former Representative Ulysses S. Grant (Republican, New York) 70.4% popular votes
Representative Benjamin Helm Bristow (Liberal, Kentucky) / Mr. Henry Wilson (Liberal, Massachusetts) 29.6% popular votes

From the outset, the Liberals had faced an uphill battle; Bristow's only hope was to consolidate essentially all of the anti-Chase voters in the second round, a seemingly impossible task given his outspoken support for Reconstruction. In the end, the largest share of National voters simply stayed home, while those who did turn out voted reluctantly for Chase. The result was a overwhelming victory for the Republicans, the sheer enormity of which even the former state secretary's most enthusiastic backers had not dared to anticipate. The Republican ticket won with more than two thirds of the popular vote, carrying every state save Vermont and Massachusetts. In some Western states, Bristow received only a handful of votes as even wealthy landholders voted Republican. Having received the largest share of the vote for any president since James Monroe, Chase would take office alongside enormous Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, the enemies of Republicanism apparently vanquished at last.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Chase Administration (1869–1873)
Having sought the office repeatedly over the course of two decades, Salmon Portland Chase was inaugurated the sixteenth president of the United States on March 4, 1869 before an adoring crowd of onlookers. Despite the scandal and turmoil of the last twenty years, the Republican party had never been more popular, and Chase as the embodiment of the hopes of millions of farmers, laborers, and new citizens entered the White House upon a wind of good will. Not since the days of Jefferson and Jackson had an incoming president been so universally loved by the people; and none since Tyler had experienced so rapid a fall from grace.

The Republican party had long been torn between its liberal and agrarian wings: the former drawn from the ranks of former Jacksonian Democrats who followed Martin Van Buren into the party during the harrowing days of the Civil War, the latter representative of the working class interests that were increasingly the foundation of the party's strength in the West and Northeast. Under the prevailing Free Labor theory, all of these —from merchants and attorneys to miners and dock workers —formed one great, homogenous "laboring class" opposed to the interests of capital. Increasingly in practice, however, the two were often opposed on issues of the currency, trade, and monopolies. Under Tilden, the liberals had controlled the national party even as agrarians outnumbered them in Congress. With the election of Chase, an advocate of paper currency long associated with the agrarians, labor hoped to have a steadfast friend for four in the White House.

The reality was more complicated. While Chase was broadly sympathetic to the concerns of the growing labor movement, his fundamentalist view of the constitution led him to conclude that in most disputes between labor and capital, the federal government was powerless to intervene. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for greenbacks had waned since his days as treasury secretary, and he now expressed concerns with the widespread circulation of paper money. A brief economic downturn in the winter of 1870 motivated a cadre of liberal Republicans to join Liberals and Nationals in Congress to support repeal of the Butler Silver Purchase Act, and Chase signed the repeal legislation February 2, 1871.

Meanwhile, the president's silent response to the Chicago "Labor Day Riots" served to undermine his credibility with liberals and labor alike. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, eight labor organizers —including four foreign nationals —were indicted for inciting the violent clashes between protestors and the metropolitan police that followed the explosion of a bomb near the speaker's podium; while eyewitness accounts differed, the eight were convicted by a grand jury and sentenced to death by hanging. Chase pointedly refused to pardon the men, despite appeals from labor leaders who noted the xenophobic fearmongering of the prosecution against "alien anarchists" during the trial.

Outside of labor issues, the president did have some successes. Under his supervision, the newly reinstituted Freedmen's Bureau resumed its activities across the South, while federal marshall's at Chase's direction arrested and charged the leaders of the White Leagues and other white supremacist groups. In foreign affairs, the 1870 Naturalization Act raised quotas for immigration from eastern Europe, while a treaty with Britain signed the same year resolved outstanding financial disputes dating back to the Civil War. These events, however, were overshadowed by public revelation of the "Western Express" scandal, in which scores of civil servants, businessmen, and members of Congress were implicated in a bribery scheme. While Chase himself was never proved to have knowledge of the conspiracy or the subsequent coverup, several members of his cabinet were forced to resign, casting a pal over his hopes for reelection as the 1872 nominating convention approached.

1872 United States presidential election

Mrs. Victoria Woodhull (Equal Rights, Ohio) / Mr. Frederick Douglas (Equal Rights, New York) 33.3% popular votes
Governor William Robert Taylor (Republican Labor, Wisconsin) / Representative Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican Labor, Massachusetts) 24.2% popular votes
Former Governor Zebulon Baird Vance (Liberal National, North Carolina) / Mr. Chester Alan Arthur (Liberal National, New York) 24.2% popular votes
President Salmon Portland Chase (Republican, Ohio) / Senator Schuyler Colfax (Republican, Indiana) 12.1% popular votes
Mr. James Black (Prohibition, Ohio) / Reverend John Russell (Prohibition, Michigan) 6.1% popular votes

The 1872 campaign would be recorded as among the most bizarre and colorful in American history. Refusing calls from within his own party to stand aside for a candidate untarnished by the scandal and controversy of the last four years, an embattled President Chase mobilized the patronage power of the presidency and his years of experience in national politics to secure renomination to a second term —and thereby sealed the fate of the Republicans. Furious, labor organizers and civil service reformers bolted the party, and at a rival convention at Indianapolis nominated Wisconsin Governor William R. Taylor on a "Republican Labor" ticket. Ordinarily these  circumstances would have bode well for the Liberals; but after their humiliating defeat in the previous election, desperate party leaders made a Faustian bargain with the Devil and nominated former North Carolina Governor and ex-Confederate Zebulon Vance on a fusion ticket with the Nationals. The fusion ticket predictably alienated the party's radical base in the Northeast, and as the election neared, Liberals too were looking for an alternative to the offerings of the major parties.

Enter Victoria Woodhull, a spiritualist, editor, and suffrage activist whose candidacy as the nominee of the newly-formed Equal Rights party had already garnered interest from socialists and voters in the handful of Western states where women were already enfranchised. During the summer, the division of the conservative vote between Chase and Vance allowed Taylor's Republican Labor candidacy to take the lead, terrifying moderates and advocates of the gold standard. So was hatched the wild scheme to promote Woodhull's campaign in order to divide the left and embarrass Taylor ahead of the runoff election. Expecting Woodhull to garner only a small share of the vote, the authors of this strategy were shocked when instead, the first woman ever nominated for the presidency finished with a healthy plurality on the first round, having swept the West and narrowly bested her divided opposition across the Northeast. The conservatives, meanwhile had lost out entirely, Taylor outpolling Vance by a few thousand votes thanks largely to the support of German immigrants in the upper Midwest.

1872 United States presidential election, runoff

Governor William Robert Taylor (Republican Labor, Wisconsin) / Representative Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican Labor, Massachusetts) 55.6% popular votes
Mrs. Victoria Claffin Woodhull (Equal Rights, Ohio) / Mr. Frederick Douglass (Equal Rights, New York) 44.4% popular votes

Woodhull had so far surpassed all expectations —but ultimately, the task of persuading an overwhelmingly male electorate to support a woman (and so radically unconventional a woman at that) for president proved a leap to far. William R. Taylor was elected on the final round with 56% of the vote amidst anemic turnout, many conservatives having boycotted the election out of disgust. In some states, armed mobs descended on polling stations and terrorized known supporters of Woodhull and Taylor alike, determined to prevent the election of any president. Riots in New York and Chicago were suppressed by the metropolitan police, but in the South it was necessary to increase the ranks of federal marshals to ensure a peaceful and orderly election. In this, the defeated president showed his true character —for though frustrated in his ambitions, Chase refused to entertain calls for him to remain in office past the expiration of his term, and dutifully handed over the White House to Taylor on March 4, 1873.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Taylor Administration (1873–1877)

The explosive events of 1872 hung over the nation like gun smoke as William R. Taylor took over the presidency from Salmon P. Chase the fourth day of March 1873. The symbolic transference of power from the liberal Chase to the radical Laborist Taylor was not lost on the country or on the world. The previous spring, Parisian communards ran up the red flag and declared the city government deposed, beginning the events that would bring down the French Second Republic. In London, Rome, and Berlin, the anthem of socialist revolution was on the wind. In the United States, a growing divide between the moderate Laborists —represented by Taylor and the Knights of Labor —and the radical elements of the left complicated the triumph of Republican Labor as Taylor sought to consolidate his support in the spring and summer of 1873.

In fact the Republican Laborists were more mass movement than a political party, and what national infrastructure did exist was based heavily on the KoL and other allied organizations. In many places, Taylor's name had appeared at the head of the regular Republican ticket, while elsewhere divisions in the left-wing vote allowed the election of conservatives in districts where Taylor and Woodhull together polled a majority. The result was a Congress, if not hostile, then skeptical toward the new administration. While Taylor succeeded in passing a civil service reform bill to dismantle the old spoils system in favor of competitive examinations, his other proposals to repeal the gold standard and cause the upward adjustment of tariff rates were defeated by varying margins in the House and Senate. He encountered sharp criticism for his handling of the Great Railway Strike of 1874: after Taylor refused to send in federal troops to disperse the demonstrators, the strike was ultimately put down by private militias, and the ringleaders of the strike were tried and convicted by the state courts. On the other hand, the Naturalization Act of 1873 establishing strict quotas for immigration from East Asia passed with overwhelming cross party support from conservatives, liberals, and laborists alike.

1876 United States presidential election

Senator Abraham Lincoln (Liberal National, Illinois) / Mr. Theodore Roosevelt (Liberal National, New York) 31.4% popular votes
President William Robert Taylor (Republican Labor, Wisconsin) / Vice President Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican Labor, Massachusetts) 20.0% popular votes
Mr. Henry George (Independent, California) / Father Edward McGlynn (Independent, New York) 17.1% popular votes
Mrs. Victoria Clafin Woodhull (Equal Rights, New York) / Mrs. Marietta Stow (Equal Rights, California) 17.1% popular votes
Governor John Quincy Adams II (Republican, Massachusetts) / Governor James Douglas Williams (Republican, Indiana) 11.4% popular votes
Former Representative Green Clay Smith (Prohibition, Kentucky) / Mr. Gideon Tabor Stewart (Prohibition, Ohio) 2.9% popular votes

The collapse of the Republican party continued to wreak havoc on the American party system, as the pieces of its once-might coalition were scattered to the wind. In 1876, the leaders of the four-year-old Republican Labor movement still hoped to reunite the old party under its banner, minus the conservative “Bourbon” element, and to this end held a confident national convention in Indianapolis attended by several hundred representatives of organized labor and local affiliates where Taylor was renominated by acclamation. The entry of independent candidate Henry George and the refusal of the Social-Democratic party to support Taylor officially ended these hopes for a united left on the first round. Meanwhile, Victoria Woodhull’s Equal Rights organization remained alive and well, and while Woodhull would not match her performance in 1872, she managed to maintain her base of support among Western voters and select elements of the socialist left. All this was to the benefit of the Liberal National ticket led by Illinois Senator and former Vice President Abraham Lincoln, who won 31% of the popular vote and—thanks to the split in the left-wing vote between Taylor, George, and Woodhull—carried practically every state east of the Mississippi.

1876 United States presidential election, runoff

Senator Abraham Lincoln (Liberal National, Illinois) / Mr. Theodore Roosevelt (Liberal National, New York) 50.001% popular votes
President William Robert Taylor (Republican Labor, Wisconsin) / Vice President Benjamin Franklin Butler (Republican Labor, Massachusetts) 49.999% popular votes

Not since the bitter Tilden–Sumner campaigns of 1860 had an American election been so closely contested. In the results of the first round, the president seemed to hold a small advantage; but Taylor would probe unable to consolidate his support among the left wing, with scores of Woodhull's voters in the Atlantic states rushing back to Lincoln. Meanwhile, George had weakened support for the Republican Labor party among Irish Catholics, who regarded the incumbent with a degree of indifference and his challenger as a relatively unobjectionable replacement. Taylor's anemic efforts to enforce the Civil Rights Act, meanwhile, meant he could not count on support from black voters in the South to put him over the line. Lincoln was the ideal candidate to exploit these weaknesses. So obscure was his career in politics (two years as a representative from Illinois during the Civil War, an uneventful term as vice president, and four more years in the Senate —each period separated by long absences from public life) meant he had no controversial record to defend. He was friendly enough toward Catholics not to ruin his chances in the east, but not so friendly as to alienate the National vote. He had opposed the 1874 railway workers' strike but made favorable statements toward labor in the past, which allowed him to carry Pennsylvania and run close campaigns in Indiana and Illinois. Even so, the election was unusually tight. It would take weeks of controversy and a special Congressional committee to certify the election for Lincoln, making Taylor the latest in a long line of presidents to serve only a single term.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The First Lincoln Administration (1877–1881)

Nearly forty years had passed since a Northern conservative had lived in the White House. Like William Henry Harrison before him, Abraham Lincoln had been elected by a troublesome coalition of  Northern business interests and Southern landowners who hated each other almost as much as they did the opposition. In those days, factional infighting had brought down Harrison's cabinet a mere five months after the old man himself died of pneumonia and plunged the country into a bloody civil war a mere four years later. Lincoln, entering office at a time when the Union seemed similarly primed for conflict, was determined not to repeat his predecessor's example.

So always easier said than done. While Lincoln owed his narrow victory to the political right, the leadership of the new Congress was drawn from the radical wing of his party: men like John Sherman of Ohio and George Franklin Edmunds of Vermont who were old enough to remember a time when Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner chaired the Liberal Congressional conference. By 1877, these "half-breeds" were deeply and increasingly concerned by what they saw as the gluttonous excess of the capitalist class and the desperate plight of laboring people and the urban poor. Left unchecked, these forces, they feared, would ultimately drive the masses into the waiting arms of the socialist movement unless conservative voices offered a moderate and reasoned alternative to revolution.

So was born the doomed but valiant effort to repeal the Coinage Act of 1871 and thus allow the limited coinage of silver once again. While Sherman and his Liberal colleagues had supported the 1871 law to cut down on reckless speculation, the sharp economic contraction in the years following its passage helped to convinced them the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. Lincoln was slower to cotton on to the idea, but convinced of the political necessity of economic relief for Midwestern farmers, announced support for the idea in his first annual message to Congress in 1878. The conservatives, however, were having nothing of it. The Sherman Bill, as it came to be known, provoked the ire of the Northern business interests and Southern reactionaries who combined with liberal Republicans to defeat the measure in the Senate after it narrowly passed the House. Among the members voting against passage were a small cadre of Republican Laborists who felt the proposal did not go far enough towards dismantling the gold standard and who continued to agitate for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of 30:1 with gold.

Lincoln likewise faced down the conservatives within his own party over his efforts to enforce the 1865 Civil Rights Act in the Southern states. While hardly a radical on racial issues, Lincoln's concept of the Union would not allow for states to flagrantly disregard federal law, and between 1877 and 1878 prosecutions under the Civil Rights Act increased by 50%. The initiative alienated Lincoln from the Southern Nationals, including those in his own cabinet, who following the lead of Interior Secretary James Longstreet resigned en masse following Lincoln's announced support for anti-lynching legislation in the fall of 1879.

1880 United States presidential election, first round

President Abraham Lincoln (Liberal National, Illinois) / U. S. Minister to France John Singleton Mosby (Liberal National, Virginia) 34.5% popular votes
Representative James Baird Weaver (Republican Labor, Iowa) / former U. S. Minister to Great Britain Barzillai Jefferson Chambers (Republican Labor, Texas) 31.0% popular votes
Mayor Henry George (United Labor, New York) / Mr. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (United Labor, Massachusetts) 24.1% popular votes
Former Senator James Edward English (Republican, Connecticut) / former State Senator Isaac Pusey Gray (Republican, Indiana) 10.3% popular votes
Former Mayor Neal Dow (Prohibition, Maine) / Mr. Henry Adams Thompson (Prohibition, Ohio) 0.1% popular votes

As had happened four years previous, the first round of the 1880 election saw Lincoln finish narrowly ahead of a crowded field of leftist parties —principally James Baird Weaver's Republican Laborists and Henry George's United Labor movement. The collapse of the Prohibition vote and the decision by the Equal Rights party not to field a candidate left these three as the major competitors to advance to the all-but-certain runoff in December. Lincoln's support, while diminished in parts of the South and Atlantic states where anti-black and anti-immigrant groups disparaged his perceived friendliness to freedmen and Catholics, grew in the traditionally Republican West, while the vocal support of John S. Mosby and other "Scalawags" helped to bolster his margins in the upper South. While Weaver finished well ahead of George, the race for second exposed deepening fault lines within the American labor movement, as urban and industrial labor increasingly aligned with the United Labor party and the SDPNA against farmers and "skilled" workers affiliated with Republican Labor.

1880 United States presidential election, runoff

President Abraham Lincoln (Liberal National, Illinois) / U.S. Minister to France John Singleton Mosby (Liberal National, Virginia) 51.9% popular votes
Representative James Baird Weaver (Republican Labor, Iowa) / former U.S. Minister to Great Britain Barzillai Jefferson Chambers (Republican Labor, Texas) 48.1% popular votes

The Georgeist constituencies continued to create problems for Weaver even after their candidate was removed from the ballot for the second round. While the majority of those voters who had supported the United Labor party cast their ballots for the Republican Laborists on the second round, a significant minority backed Lincoln. The typical example was a native-born working class voter in New York or Pennsylvania who saw little benefit for himself in Weaver's signature issue, bimetalism; but Lincoln also attracted significant support from the black middle classes, as well as civil rights activists like Frederick Douglass, who appreciated Lincoln's support for anti-lynching legislation and his appointment of black men to ambassadorships and positions in the civil service. The result was a majority for the president somewhat larger than his result in 1876, making him the first incumbent since the ill-fated Samuel Tilden to win a second term in office.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Second Lincoln Administration (1881–1885)

When the results of the 1880 election were read out in Congress in advance of the twenty-fourth presidential inauguration, Abraham Lincoln had prevailed over James Baird Weaver by a majority of some four hundred thousand votes, becoming the first president from a right-of-center party to be reelected since Washington himself. His second administration was nearly cut short on July 2, 1881, when a disappointed office seeker-turned-assassin fired a pistol shot into the president's abdomen at a Washington train station. Lincoln, stubbornly refusing treatment, made a miraculous recovery and would carry the bullet for the rest of his life. (The former president would die eighteen months after leaving office at the age of 77 when the bullet was dislodged in a carriage accident, killing its intended victim a half-decade after being fired from the assassin's gun.)

Experiencing a surge of popularity from surviving the attempt on his life just as Congress was preparing to reconvene in the fall of 1881, Lincoln's hold over his party was further strengthened by the outcome of the last Congressional elections, which had seen nearly two dozen Southern Nationals go down to defeat at the hands of Republican Labor challengers, while divisions between moderate Laborists, Georgists, and socialists allowed Northern Liberals to gain seats across the Atlantic and the upper Midwest. With this more favorable Congress, Lincoln was able to secure Congressional support for a federal anti-lynching bill in 1882. Lincoln likewise succeeded in persuading Congress to enact federal anti-trust legislation and a revised silver purchase act, reestablishing a bimetallist monetary policy.

In spite of these legislative achievements, Lincolns' second term witnessed rising tensions between immigrant and native-born workers, between the state and organized labor, and between opposing factions of the labor movement. Labor riots in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco in the summer of 1883 left dozens dead and ultimately had to be suppressed by a combination of police and state militia; meanwhile, Lincoln was forced to mobilize federal troops to prevent the armed overthrow of the biracial city government of Danville, Virginia by leaders of the National Conservative party and the "White Supremacy Convention."

1884 United States presidential election, first round

Mr. James Edward Hall (Social Democratic, New York) / Mr. Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) 27.6% popular votes
Secretary of State John Alexander Logan (Liberal National, Illinois) / former Governor James Lusk Alcorn (Liberal National, Mississippi) 24.1% popular votes
Former Mayor Henry George (United Labor, New York) / State Senator John Sherwin Crosby (United Labor, New York) 17.2% popular votes
Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood (Equal Rights, District of Columbia) / Mrs. Marietta Stow (Equal Rights, California) 13.8% popular votes
Governor Alson Jenness Streeter (Republican Labor, Illinois) / Representative Absolom Madden West (Republican Labor, Mississippi) 13.8% popular votes
Former Governor John McAuley Palmer (Republican, Illinois) / former Representative Abram Stevens Hewitt (Republican, New York) 3.4% popular votes
Former State Senator John Pierce St. John (Prohibition, Kansas) / former State Senator William Daniel (Prohibition, Maryland) 0.0% popular votes

By the end of Lincoln's second term, the nationalist project which had its origins in the wild dream of Alexander Hamilton had at last come into its own as a mature, coherent vision for the nation's future. Industry, science, and imperialism had transformed the face of the North American continent, as the flag of the United States advanced all the way to the Pacific coast. Though Republicans from Jefferson to Jackson to Seward had sometimes succeeded in influencing the course of progress, they had been unable to defeat it altogether, and this manifested in a collapse in the Republican vote. Between 1872 and 1884 Jeffersonians went from a clear majority of the electorate and the dominant force in Congress to a dwindling and deeply divided minority whose solutions seemed to the great majority of workers out-of-touch with the economic and political reality in the country. As the industrial working class increased in share of the overall population, demand for a fresh solution to the capitalist problem grew among the constituencies traditionally catered by the left that was answered by a new party: the Social Democrats. Drawing support primarily from industrial workers in the upper Midwest, recent immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe, and middle class intellectuals in New England, the party succeeded in topping the first round of the 1884 presidential election. Their plurality, however, was slim, and the lack of adequate organization in the South and West allowed the Liberal Nationals to keep control of much of the map. Fewer than one third of the voters backed the SDA's presidential candidate on the first round, as Georgeists and laborists remained skeptical heading into the runoff.

1884 United States presidential election, results

Mr. James Edward Hall (Social Democratic, New York) / Mr. Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) 59.3% popular votes
Secretary of State John Alexander Logan (Liberal National, Illinois) / former Governor James Lusk Alcorn (Liberal National, Mississippi) 40.7% popular votes

In forty years of chaos and upheaval, most Americans had not seen anything like it. The very few who could remember James Gillespie Birney's extraordinary campaign never thought they would live to see it again. In six remarkable weeks, the organizers of the Social Democratic party transformed their young and inexperienced party from a confederation of labor unions and radical groups into a mass political movement embracing industrial wage workers, farmers, black sharecroppers, immigrants, and middle class intellectuals. In the South and West, the Liberal Nationals took advantage of the outgoing president's resilient popularity and skepticism of the SDA among more moderate and established labor groups to win votes in places that had never before supported a nationalist candidate. It didn't matter. When the votes were tallied, Hall—who had never before held elected office—had been elected president with nearly sixty percent of the vote, outperforming even Tilden's 1864 reelection. For the nationalists, it was alike to what Jefferson had once described "the fire bell in the night that awoke me and filled me with terror."

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

The Hall Administration (1885–1889)

The political winds which swept J. Edward Hall and the Social Democratic party into power in the fall of 1884 were as contrary as they were irresistible. The SDA, who owed their incredible electoral success to the combined support of farmers, industrial workers, and immigrants, had begun a decade before as the creative endeavor of middle class intellectuals, organized and orchestrated by the bourgeoisie. Their candidate had never before held political office, and indeed at the time of his nomination was not nationally known. Having run unsuccessfully for the New York State Assembly in 1881 and 1882, his candidacy was first proposed by a gathering of machinists and trade unionists in New York City. In the explosive national environment, Hall's nomination began to attract attention from other socialist parties, and was picked up by the delegates to the second-ever national convention of the SDA in Chicago. The delegates initially offered the vice presidential nomination to Edward Bellamy, one of the founders of the party, but he declined, preferring to seek the governorship of Massachusetts, and the second spot on the ticket instead went to Albert Parsons, a Chicago-based anarchist and editor.

Even after the SDA topped the poll in the first round, few expected Hall could actually be elected, and his victory elicited a storm of opposition that seemed to foretell a second civil war. Across the South and pockets of the West and Northeast, nativist and white supremacist groups, white with rage to see "the professed candidate of Negroes, Jews, Catholics ... a catalogue of foreign elements ... proclaimed the President of the United States by every press," vowed to obstruct the inauguration of the new administration. A rumor circulated that Hall was part black himself, an allegation made more plausible by the fact that few Americans had ever seen his photograph. But the general of the army was William Tecumseh Sherman, a veteran of the Civil War whose campaigns against the White Leagues and the Plains Indians had earned him a reputation for terrifying ruthlessness. Though Liberal in his politics, Sherman was full of contempt for the White Caps and resolved to crush the insurrection in its infancy. In the winter of 1885, he met with Hall and Bellamy (who was soon to become Secretary of State) and the three forged an agreement: Sherman would provide the support of the army for the new government, and in exchange the administration would seek Sherman's advice on issues of national importance.

Hall was inaugurated without incident on March 4 —but a deeply divided Congress ensured little of his legislative program would become law. Lacking experience in government, early on he relied heavily on his cabinet (led by Bellamy and made up mostly of middle class intellectuals and reformers) and Sherman for advice. His major contributions as president were bringing forty-seven successful anti-trust prosecutions under the 1882 Lincoln Anti-Trust Act and preventing U.S. expansion into the Pacific. His intervention in the 1886 Southwest Railroad Strike was controversial, securing a small increase in wages for the railway workers, but not formal recognition of the union.

1888 United States presidential election, first round

President James Edward Hall (Social Democratic, New York) / Vice President Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) 35.5% popular votes
Governor Matthew Calbraith Butler (Liberal National, South Carolina) / former U.S. Minister to Sweden John Leavitt Stevens (Liberal National, Maine) 16.1% popular votes
Mrs. Belva Ann Lockwood (Equal Rights, District of Columbia) / Mr. Charles Stuart Weld (Equal Rights, New York) 16.1% popular votes
Senator George Franklin Edmunds (Liberal Reform, Vermont) / Mr. Henry Adams (Liberal Reform, Massachusetts) 12.9% popular votes
Former Mayor Terence Vincent Powderly (Labor Reform, Pennsylvania) / former Representative Charles E. Cunningham (Labor Reform, Arkansas) 12.9% popular votes
Corporal Clinton Bowen Fisk (Prohibition, New Jersey) / Reverend John Anderson Brooks (Prohibition, Missouri) 6.5% popular votes

The result of the 1888 federal election demonstrated the remarkable success of the SDA in consolidating support among the industrial working class after less than a decade in the field —and the limits of that success in persuading farmers, Southerners, and increasingly suffragists to join cause with the socialists. In elections for the House of Representatives that year, the Social Democrats won a large plurality in the lower chamber, beneficiaries of a divided opposition and their increasingly hegemonic appeal in urban centers like New York and Chicago, as well as strong support from German immigrants in the upper Midwest. Hall and Parsons received nearly 36% of all votes nationwide, easily advancing to the second round of the presidential election. Their success, however, was limited geographically to the states of the North and the Midwest; in the South, the party finished a distant third behind the Liberal Nationalists and Terrence Powderly's Labor Reform outfit, while the Equal Rights party took advantage of the general enfranchisement of women in the states west of the Mississippi to carry six states and 16% of the vote. Lockwood's managers were jubilant, and some papers initially declared she had secured enough votes to advance to the runoff against Hall. Ultimately, the Liberal National ticket finished ahead of Lockwood by fewer than 4,000 votes (whether as Lockwood later alleged by fraud has never been satisfactorily determined). Lockwood's exclusion from the runoff would set the tone for the campaign, as a powerful progressive bloc of suffragists, laborists, Liberals, and Prohibitionists would determine the success or failure of the president's bid for reelection.

1888 United States presidential election, runoff

President James Edward Hall (Social Democratic, New York) / Vice President Albert Richard Parsons (Social Democratic, Illinois) 53.6% popular votes
Governor Matthew Calbraith Butler (Liberal National, South Carolina) / former U.S. Minister to Sweden John Leavitt Stevens (Liberal National, Maine) 46.4% popular votes

In the end, Hall was reelected, though with a majority reduced from his first election four years prior. The president took 53% of the national vote and eighteen states, a comfortable victory which somewhat masked some fraying at the edges of the left-labor coalition. Having invested their resources in organizing the industrial working class, Hall could depend on large majorities from the factory belt and large urban centers like New York and Chicago where labor unions dominated the political landscape. In the South and West, where the small landholder and the poor tenant farmer made up the historical left-wing constituency, a comparative lack of organization allowed South Carolina's Matthew Butler to carry all of the former slave states save for Missouri and run much closer than previous Liberal National nominees in Nebraska and Kansas. Butler's hardline opposition to labor, however, allowed Hall to offset his losses somewhat with gains among reform-minded Yankees, while the votes of the enfranchised Western women would be decisive in delivering the Plains states to the SDA.