John Bicknell has written and edited for FCW, Congressional Quarterly, Roll Call, and was coeditor of the 2012 edition of Politics in America, CQ's twelve-hundred-page guide to the US Congress.
The year 1844 saw a momentous presidential election, religious turmoil, westward expansion, and numerous other interwoven events that profoundly affected the U.S. as a nation. Author and journalist John Bicknell details these compelling events in this unusual history book. He explains how the election of James K. Polk assured the expansion that brought Texas, California, and Oregon into the union. This took place amidst anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic violence, the belief in the imminent second coming of Christ, the murder of Joseph Smith, Charles Goodyear’s patenting of vulcanized rubber, the near-death of President John Tyler in a freak naval explosion, and much more. All of these elements illustrate the competing visions of the American future and how Polk’s victory cemented the vision of a continental nation.
The election of 1856 was the most violent peacetime election in American history. Amid all the violence, the campaign of the new Republican Party, headed by famed explorer John C. Frémont, offered a ray of hope that had never before been seen in the politics of the nation—a major party dedicated to limiting the spread of slavery. For the first time, women and African Americans became actively engaged in a presidential contest, and the candidate’s wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, played a central role in both planning and executing strategy while being a public face of the campaign. The 1856 campaign was also run against the backdrop of a country on the move, with settlers continuing to spread westward facing unimagined horrors, a terrible natural disaster that took hundreds of lives in the South, and one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history, which set the stage for the Civil War. Frémont lost, but his strong showing in the North proved that a sectional party could win a national election, blazing the trail for Abraham Lincoln’s victory four years later.
