http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1848
Without hindsight I’d have voted for Taylor but with hindsight for Van Buren.
Gotta go with Ol’ Kinderhook. I just read Russell Shorto’s masterful book The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America, and maybe a bit of that New Amsterdam seed of tolerance for diversity (we’re all free to make a buck) and free expression would still manifest in a great-grandson of those folks.
I’ve read one historical speculation that Taylor might have caused an early civil war if he had lived. Taylor apparently opposed some of the terms of the Compromise of 1850 and planned on vetoing it. But then he died and Fillmore signed it. If Taylor has lived and the compromise had not been enacted, some southern states might have seceded and we would have had a war ten years early.
I’ll go with the Whigs for their American System, but Free Soil is a tempting alternative.
Van Buren’s treatment of the Cherokees during the Trail of Tears, and his support for returning the Amistad captives to Spain in defiance of the American ban on the slave trade, do not suggest any regard for the welfare of nonwhites.
He did run indeed run as the Free Soil candidate in 1848, in one of the strangest political conversions of all time.
I think it’s quite likely. Taylor wanted to admit California as a free state, right away, and saw no need for any compromise. The gold rushers in California had drafted a free-state Constitution, and if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for him. This made the South apoplectic.
Zachary Taylor was an interesting guy. He married into money (and big-time slave ownership) but acted and thought more like a frontiersman. He might have been a good Civil War leader. The drawback is that the North would have had ten fewer years to build up its factories and railroad network.
I’ll vote for Taylor, hope he lives, and take my chances.
This assumes Fillmore would have been the ideological imperialist madman that Lincoln turned out to be.
I’ll concede that Lincoln’s decision to conquer Canada was the low point of his Presidency.
Cute comment, but I think you’re a bit confused on the definition of imperialism.
No, that would be you who are confused on the definition of imperialism, if you attribute such a thing to Lincoln.
You have your definition and the rest of us have ours.
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