1860 United States presidential election: Difference between revisions

The U.S. presidential election of 1860 is widely considered to be a realigning election. The nation had been divided through most of the 1850s on the issue of slavery, with Northerners and Southerners disagreeing over whether or not it should be expanded to the territories, and fighting for each new state admitted to the Union. In 1860, this issue finally came to a head, bringing Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party to power, while it simultaneously fractured the formerly dominant Democratic Party in two.

The immediate result was the secession of seven southern states to form their own country and the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Since the previous election, the nation had been radicalized along sectional lines by many factors, including the Dred Scott decision, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Lecompton Constitution, and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Moreover, the Panic of 1857 had weakened the incumbent Democratic Party and the following recession had started to draw the North and the West closer together economically.

Diehard former Whigs and Know-Nothings who felt they could not support the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party and formed the Constitutional Union Party, nominating John C. Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett for vice president in Baltimore on May 9, 1860 (one week before Lincoln was nominated).

John Bell was a former Whig and large slaveholder who had opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Lecompton constitution. Edward Everett had been president of Harvard University and a former secretary of state and Cotton Whig in the Fillmore administration. The party platform advocated compromise to save the Union, with a slogan of “the Union as it is, and the Constitution as it is.”

The Democratic Party was similarly divided. At the convention in Charleston in April 1860, 50 southern Democrats walked out over a platform dispute.

Six candidates were nominated: Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, Joseph Lane of Oregon, James Guthrie of Kentucky, and Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter of Virginia. Douglas was ahead on the first ballot, needing 57 more votes. On the 57th ballot, Douglas was still ahead, but was still 50 votes short of the nomination. In desperation, on May 3 the delegates agreed to stop voting and adjourn the convention.

They convened again in Baltimore on June 18. This time 110 southern Democrats (led by “fire-eaters”) walked out when the convention would not adopt a resolution supporting slavery in the territories. After many ballots, the remaining Democrats nominated the ticket of Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for President and Herschel Vespasian Johnson of Georgia for Vice President.

The Southern Democrats reconvened in Richmond, Virginia and on June 28 nominated incumbent Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge of Kentucky for President, and Joseph Lane of Oregon for Vice President.

This divide was, of course, caused by the issue of slavery. Those in the South nominated a solidly pro-slavery candidate, while those in the North nominated a candidate who maintained a middle field when discussing slavery.

When the Republican National Convention met in mid-May, the Democrats had been forced to adjourn their convention in Charleston after 57 ballots. With the Democrats in disarray and with a sweep of the Northern states possible, the Republicans were confident going into their convention in Chicago, Illinois. William H. Seward of New York was considered the frontrunner, followed by Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, and Pennsylvania's Simon Cameron.

As the convention developed, however, it was revealed that Seward, Chase, and Cameron had each alienated factions of the Republican Party. Delegates were concerned that Seward was too identified with the radical wing of the Republican Party, and Seward's moves toward the center had alienated the radicals. Chase, a former Whig himself, had alienated many of the former Whigs by his coalition with the Democrats in the late 1840's and opposed tariffs demanded by Pennsylvania. Cameron had little support outside Pennsylvania and was distrusted by many former Whigs because he had switched from the Whig Party to the Democratic Party before becoming a Republican.

Since it was essential to carry the West, and because Lincoln had a national reputation from his debates and speeches as the most articulate moderate, he won the party's nomination on the third ballot on May 16, 1860.

The party platform clearly stated that slavery would not be allowed to spread any farther, and also promised that tariffs protecting industry would be imposed. A law granting free homesteads in the west to settlers was also part of the platform.

The contest in the North was between Lincoln and Douglas, but only the latter took to the stump and gave speeches and interviews. In the South John Breckinridge and John Bell were the main rivals, but Douglas had an important presence in southern cities, especially among Irish Americans. Fusion tickets of the non-Republicans developed in New York and Rhode Island, and partially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (the northern state in which Breckinridge made the best showing).

Stephen Douglas became the first presidential candidate in history to undertake a nationwide speaking tour. He traveled to the South where he did not expect to win many electoral votes, but he spoke for the maintenance of the Union.

The 1860 campaign was less frenzied than 1856, when the Republicans had crusaded zealously, and their opponents counter-crusaded with warnings of civil war. In 1860 every observer calculated the Republicans had an almost unbeatable advantage in the electoral college, since they dominated almost every northern state.

The election was noteworthy for the exaggerated sectionalism of the vote, with Lincoln not even on the ballot in nine Southern states - and winning only 2 (St. Louis County, Missouri and Gasconade County, Missouri) of 996 counties in the entire South[1].

This election is a textbook example of how to win an electoral majority without a popular majority. While Lincoln captured less than 40% of the popular vote, the sectional divisions of the nation allowed him to capture 17 states plus 4 electoral votes in New Jersey for a total of 180 electoral votes. Although the three-way split of the non-Republican vote confuses the issue, the vote split was irrelevant to Lincoln's victory, because he would have won an outright majority in the electoral vote, 169-134, even had the 60% of voters who supported other candidates united behind a single candidate. Except for California, Oregon, and New Jersey, Lincoln won a popular majority in every state that cast its electoral votes for him.[2] Only in California, Oregon, and Illinois had Lincoln's victory margin been less than 7%.

Meanwhile, Douglas finished second in the popular vote, but due to the north-south split garnered only Missouri's 9 electoral votes and three of seven electoral votes in New Jersey, good for fourth place. Bell won Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia's electors, while Breckinridge won every other slave state except Missouri.

The voter turnout rate in 1860 was the second-highest on record (81.2 %, second only to 1876, with 81.8 %). The Fusion ticket of non-Republicans drew 595,846 votes[3].

Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. "1860 Presidential Election Results". Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Retrieved July 27, 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |access-date= (help)

Source (Electoral Vote): "Electoral College Box Scores 1789–1996". National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved July 31, 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |access-date= (help)

^(a) The popular vote figures exclude South Carolina where the Electors were chosen by the state legislature rather than by popular vote.

The election of Lincoln made South Carolina's secession from the United States a foregone conclusion. The state was long waiting for an excuse to secede and unite the southern states against the anti-slavery forces. Upon confirming that the results were final, South Carolina declared, “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the ‘United States of America’ is hereby dissolved,” precipitating the American Civil War.

• History of the United States (1849–1865)
• History of the United States Democratic Party
• History of the United States Republican Party
• President of the United States
• Third Party System
• United States House election, 1860

• Daniel W. Crofts; Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis University of North Carolina Press, 1989
• Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession (1931), contains well-chosen editorials from the 1860 presidential campaign and the secession crisis in both the upper and lower South
• Foner, Eric (1995). Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.
• Holt, Michael F. (1978). The Political Crisis of the 1850s.
• Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), pages 180-221,
• Luebke, Frederick C. (1971). Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln.
• Nevins, Allan (1950). The Emergence of Lincoln. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help) 2 vols.
  • covers 1857–61
• Roy Franklin Nichols. The Disruption of American Democracy (1948), 348-506, a history of the Democratic party
• H. Parks, John Bell of Tennessee (Louisiana State University Press, 1950),
• Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 2 vols. (1942)
• Potter, David (1976). Impending Crisis 1848–1861. ISBN 0060905247.
• Rhodes, James Ford (1920). History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896. vol. 2, ch. 11.
  • highly detailed narrative covering 1856–60
• Stampp, Kenneth M. (1950). And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861.

• 1860 election: State-by-state Popular vote results
• 1860 popular vote by counties
• Election of 1860
• Electoral Map from 1860
• Lincoln's election - details
• Report on 1860 Republican convention
• U.S. Department of State infoUSA site