1860: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
Republican Party: Abraham Lincoln (Illinois) and Hannibal Hamlin (Maine)
Southern Democratic Party: John Breckeridge (Kentucky) and Joseph Lane (Oregon)
Constitutional Union Party: John Bell (Tennessee) and Edward Everett (Massachusetts)
Democratic Party: Stephen Douglas (Illinois) and Herschel Johnson (Georgia)
Election Results:
Lincoln/Hamlin: 180 electoral votes, 1.86 million popular votes
Breckenridge/Lane: 72 electoral votes, 848,000 popular votes
Bell/Everett: 39 electoral votes, 590,000 popular votes
Douglas/Johnson: 12 electoral votes, 1.38 million popular votes
Summary:
The 1860 presidential election is perhaps one of the most muddled and brutal in American history and it expedited the process of secession by the Southern states. The presidencies of pro-slavery “dough faces” Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan did more to separate the nation than the previous problems with regionalism and expansion into the West combined. The Kansas-Nebraska conflict, ending in bloodshed and disunity, was a microcosm of the civil strife to come. The 1858 debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln for the Senate seat in Illinois led to the launching of the Republican Party as the dominant northern party and Douglas as a prominent politician for the middle ground in America.
In the two years following his loss to Douglas in the Illinois election, Lincoln became a prolific campaigner and orator in support of Republican congressional candidates and the cause of abolition. The Republican successes in the late 1850s led to their prominence as the most united political party going into the 1860 election. The Republicans had two choices for president: William Seward, the New York politician, and Lincoln. Seward was a rabid abolitionist who had strong connections to the New York political machine, while Lincoln was a more measured politician who claimed to owe nothing to anyone in the party. In the end, Republicans were worried about the corruption of New York politics and the effect of having Irish Catholics in the party upon Midwestern states. Lincoln’s advisors indeed made deals to give cabinet positions to key delegates in Pennsylvania and Indiana in order to get him nominated after three ballots. The Republican platform included a denouncement of the raids of John Brown on Harper’s Ferry and on the expansion of slavery westward.
The Democratic nominating process was rife with tumult. The first attempt to nominate a candidate was derailed in the summer of 1860, when Stephen Douglas and the northern wing of the party rejected a federal slave code in the party’s platform. The Democrats from the southern states broke off talks and had their own nominating convention, in which they nominated current vice president John Breckenridge and Oregon politician Joseph Lane. The Southern Democrats created a plank including a provision for the annexation of Cuba, the creation of an intercontinental railroad, and the creation of a federal slave code. The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas and former Harvard president Herschel Johnson. The Northerners had a similar platform to the Southerners, but the noticeable difference was their rejection of a federal slave code.
A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, was formed out of border state politicians, frustrated Republicans and former Whigs, and their main objective was the preeminence of the Constitution as a guide for the direction of the nation. Nominee John Bell, a former War secretary and veteran of both the U.S. House and Senate, advocated for the maintenance of the Union and the division of legislation between state and federal governments. In the end, the Republicans received a plurality of the popular votes and a strong majority of the electoral votes. Stephen Douglas’ popularity was close to Lincoln’s but only yielded the electoral votes of Missouri because of the Democratic Party divide. If the Democrats had indeed been able to resolve their fundamental differences, they would have had over 2 million votes, which would have swung the election their way in many of the border and southern states and possibly have led to the election of another pro-slavery president.
