J. Calvin Schermerhorn
22 June 2002
AmericanPresident.org
Summer Assignments: Phase I
Event:
Lincoln elected President (Buchanan administration, 1860)
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with just 39% of the popular vote. The 1860 presidential election was unusual in American politics. Four major candidates contended against one another. Northern Democrats ran Stephen A. Douglas while southern Democrats ran Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. John Bell of Tennessee (formerly of the southern Know-Nothing or American party) ran on the Constitutional Union party ticket. He was popular in the upper South among old unionist Whigs for whom Republicans were too radical.
The election of 1860 revealed a dangerous North-South division. The four-way race was in fact two sectional two-way races, between Lincoln and Douglas in free states and between Breckenridge and Bell in slave states. Lincoln’s plurality of the popular vote belied the fact that Lincoln supporters were concentrated in states that held most of the electoral votes. Lincoln won 180 electoral votes and carried every free state except New Jersey, which divided its electoral votes between Lincoln (4) and Douglas (3). Breckenridge won 72 electoral votes and took a solid lower South plus Texas. Bell took Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. He ended up with 39 electoral votes; Douglas received 12 and carried only Missouri.
In 1860, Republicans ran a colorful and boisterous campaign. Lincoln remained in Springfield and did not campaign in his own behalf. Enthusiastic supporters called him “Honest Old Abe” and paraded replicas of rails he had split to show him off as a son of the frontier. Republicans raised a good deal of money and were very effective at mobilizing public speakers and vigorously partisan editorial writers to whip up support for Lincoln and Republican vice presidential nominee Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. Republicans made no effort to win over southerners who mistakenly thought Lincoln an abolitionist.
When Lincoln was elected, the South was in shock. Since the Republicans had concentrated all their resources in free states, southerners were inclined to believe the worst rumors about a man they had never seen. Republicans did not seek southern votes. Some were terrified that Lincoln would distribute federal patronage in the South and form a southern Republican party by doing so. The national party system had disappeared. With a new president-elect that had not even appeared on the ballot in seven southern states, the seeds of disunion had germinated.
Sources:
Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 215-216.
.David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (New York, 1976), 432-447.