Best President of the Jacksonian Era, and Why?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Taylor, if I'm not mistaken, actually opposed compromise and supported the South. These were all rather mediocre or poor presidents, but I guess I'll hold my nose and vote for Jackson.

That is highly innaccurate. The man was a simple soldier first and foremost and not a politician. He saw statehood in simple terms and thus didn't understand the fuss that the South was making over CA coming into the union and freely deciding to be a free state. He thus opposed the compromise of 1850, and believed that California should be admitted as a free state since that is what CA wanted and that was that.

The south was the imposing party in most of these affairs. The continued growth of the non-South and their admission as free states would mean that the Senate would join the House in being hostile to slavery and that would get worse with each passing decade. California was the tipping point and never again would the Senate be tied between slave and free state Senators. So their political strategy was to rile up as much chaos to force concession to be made lest the country split apart. From an unbiased position the South's arguments in these affairs could be summarized as follows, "Our freedoms and rights can't be protected unless everyone else's is infringed upon".

While indeed a Southerner, Taylor didn't much care for political strategery and thus ended up allied with Northerners and abolitionists against the the Southerners. When he died, Fillmore embraced the compromise because although a Northerner, he was first and foremost a politician.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Taylor, if I'm not mistaken, actually opposed compromise and supported the South. These were all rather mediocre or poor presidents, but I guess I'll hold my nose and vote for Jackson.

That is highly innaccurate. The man was a simple soldier first and foremost and not a politician. He saw statehood in simple terms and thus didn't understand the fuss that the South was making over CA coming into the union and freely deciding to be a free state. He thus opposed the compromise of 1850, and believed that California should be admitted as a free state since that is what CA wanted and that was that.

That really distorts Taylor's position, tho it is possible that his military background caused him think of himself as a second Alexander as he thought he had a solution to the Gordian knot of whether the territory acquired from Mexico should be free or slave.  He favored admitting the California, Utah, and New Mexico Territories as States, thereby eliminating the issue,  Frankly, none of them were ready, with California Statehood only happening because the people flooding in there because of the gold rush made it a necessity.  However, it would have been wiser had only North California been admitted.  California is too big a State, as is Texas.

No, I highly doubt he saw himself in such grandiose terms and it wouldn't mesh with what happened either. My analysis of his actions was one of being naive, not being some sort of genius. He had no political background and wasn't one to entertain the nuances and such. Every source I have read on the subject has painted him as seeing the addition of new states as positive, that if they wanted to be free states it was their own choice, and lastly that he didn't appreciate/care about the objections being raised against doing so. Thus he also didn't see the need for a compromise. This position ignored the political reality created by the South and its demands.

Would Utah or New Mexico have been pre-disposed to becoming slave states? And even if they were, admitting three states would still cause problems with one side or the other because someone would have to lose out in the Senate balance, which is the root of the controversy. If anything such a position only adds weight to my interpretation. It by no means was a reasonable solution.

What is beyond doubt is that he clearly didn't support the South here. If it had been Texas say instead of California but with the same circumstances, then that might be different. That was my point in responding to the innaccuracy of Snowstalker's post. I wanted to establish that he was in fact opposing the demands of the South here but not out of any ideological pre-dispositions for one side or the other. Failure to mention the last bit, would have ignored crucial elements of his opposition to the compromise and created a different, far more aggregious distortion.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

At the time of the debate, IA and WI had just been added (1849 I beleive.), balancing out Texas and Florida providing for an evenly devided Senate once again. Any addition of a state or states that would result in the balance of the Senate being tipped against the South would have resulted in the South reacting with much hostility, threatening secession etc etc.  


PA, NJ, CT, MA, NH, NY, RI, VT, OH, IN, ILL, ME, MI, IA and WI (15 states, 30 Senators)

DE, GA, MD, SC, VA, NC, KY, TN, LA, AL, MS, MO, AR, FL and TX (15 States, 30 Senators)

Prior to 1850, the states had always been either evenly balanced or tilted toward the slave states, ensuring a Senate that was at the very least pro-status quo, which was by default pro-slavery. In the 1790's such wasn't the case, but some of the northern states had yet to abolish it or were in the process of implementing gradual abolishment like PA, the first of the 13 original colonies to abolish slavery in 1780. It was so gradual that the last slave died in the 1830's, still in bondage. Vermont abolished slavery in the 1770's.  The Senate was such an epicenter of contention because the House had already become heavily northern as exemplified by the passage of measures outright that conflicted with the south such as gradual abolition in MO in 1819 and the Wilmot Proviso in 1846.

Adding California, Utah and New Mexico would have meant adding two free and one slave state, which has the same impact on the Senate as just adding California. The south would scream bloody murder. If Taylor saw this as a solution to the controversy, he was more naive then I thought. From my interpretation of the events in question, he didn't really seek a solution to the controversy, just a resolution to the issue which prompted it. An issue which he saw in terms of expanding the nation, not maintaining precarious political balances.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Utah probably would have been a free state, not because the Mormons didn't want slaves, they didn't want blacks.

New Mexico probably would have had slavery under another name, peonage.

Of course, California was much the same. They didn't want blacks coming in and competing with the white miners, farmers etc etc. In many places abolition was motivated to a large degree by racism. Preventing competition from blacks was justification/motivation for people on both sides of the issue. The Irish and other working class groups tended to favor pro-slavery politicians and opposed abolitionists, as a means of keeping the blacks in the South and out of the North. One of the reasons Dred Scott did so much to shift Northern opinion and help Republicans in 1858 and 1860, was that no longer was preservation of slavery an insurance policy against such competition.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Taylor took it as axiomatic that the Federal government would never interfere in the peculiar institution in the States, so he saw Statehood for the territories as a way of ending the issue.

But he failed to account for the impact of adding states on the Senate and its balance and how the the South would react to losing that.

The only reason the status of territories mattered was because the South was concerned that a Federal ban like that which existed in the Northwest Ordinance, would ensure that the territories would choose free status by default upon statehood. The controversy always revolved around what choice would be made at statehood and how it affected the Senate. Making states prematurely would simply move the day of reckoning up, not resolve it.

I am beginning to think there is artificial disagreement here. All we are doing is layering more detail on without changing the underlying points. If Taylor took the position that making all the territorities in question states was the magic bullet, he missed the boat on what caused the South's objections. Even so, it doesn't alter what I said previously about his motivations. Slavery wasn't at the forefront of his thinking when it came to statehood and he viewed statehood from a perspective of expanding the nation, which he saw as positive. Such a position as you describe, only adds further weight to my point that he failed to appreciate the political impact and the cancerous effect of the slave debate on that political situation. It in no way contradicts that point. If I were to have included every last detail in my intial post, its primary purpose of correcting Snowstalker would have been lost as the post would have taken on book length.