During the presidential election campaign of 1856, secessionist voices moved from the radicalized margins toward the political mainstream, and many within the nation’s longest-running and most successful established party, the Democratic Party, had ominously warned that the election of a Republican president would provoke nothing less than “secession and revolution.” The outcome of the election of 1860 pushed secession from threat to reality, and so began a deadly civil war that had been looming at least since the Missouri Compromise. The political landscape was fractured. There were still numerous policy issues to debate—tariffs, the old concerns involving the banking system, the administration of the western territories, allocation of resources for internal improvements, the location and building of railroad lines, etc.—and these issues did receive some attention. But only one issue overshadowed every other concern, and that was unequivocally the fate of the nation with regard to its long-standing Peculiar Institution, slavery. Differences over tariffs and banking could be peacefully resolved, and indeed they had been more or less resolved in the past, but slavery was the irresolvable problem and the single crisis that threatened the very Union itself.
The irresistible forces behind the nation’s doom since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 gained momentum almost exponentially. Three events in particular rocketed the nation along the course toward civil war: the 1856 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Chief Justice Taney’s untenable Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857), which in effect stated that slavery could not be banned in the territories or in those new states derived from them; and militant abolitionist John Brown’s violent raid on Harper’s Ferry (then in Virginia) in the hope of sparking a slave rebellion that would result in the liberation of all slaves in the South and the establishment of a free republic in which they could live untouched by racial bigotry. These events cut a clear and seemingly irreconcilable schism between North and South. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became widely popular and stirred throughout the North a groundswell of sympathy for the plight of the slave. The raid on Harper’s Ferry filled Southerners with a palpable dread and gave all abolitionists a martyr for their cause. Dred Scott was roundly criticized by abolitionists and Republicans, and it even caused division within the Democratic Party itself. Northern Democrats disagreed with the decision because it destroyed the party doctrine of popular sovereignty. Southern Democrats regarded the decision as a vindication of the rights of individuals to own slaves anywhere within the boundaries of the entire United States. These three events, along with the crisis in Kansas that had occurred before the previous election, drove the nation hard toward the brink of secession and bloodshed. But it was still left to a fourth event to push the country into the maw of war. That decisive event was the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln of Illinois to the presidency of the United States.
As stated above, the result of Dred Scott on the Democratic Party was to severely divide it along sectional lines. Up to this point, the party had remained fairly cohesive in spite of serious cross-sectional differences. It was the Whig Party that had been ripped apart over the issues of territorial expansion and slavery; the Democrats, by contrast, had weathered those forces and, at least for a time, enjoyed a position of political dominance because of it. The Republican Party, scarcely six years old and cobbled together from a diverse array of interests, was now the more unified party, but because it was inhabited by a sizeable number of party regulars who were critical of slavery, it was a party that was spurned throughout the South. Nonetheless, its cohesion in the North and the West gave the Republicans political and moral clarity, while the Democrats now suffered an internal fragmentation that thoroughly undercut their influence. They held the White House, but their incumbent, President Buchanan, who had already announced in his inaugural address that he would not seek a second term, had provoked controversy since the earliest days of his administration when he announced his public support of the Dred Scott decision and his open and insistent endorsement of “popular sovereignty.”
From the first moments of his presidency, Buchanan made his position clear. “It is the imperative and indispensable duty of the government of the United States,” Buchanan intoned in his inaugural address, “to secure to every resident inhabitant the free and independent expression of his opinion by his vote. This sacred right of each individual must be preserved. That being accomplished, nothing can be fairer than to leave the people of a territory free from all foreign interference to decide their own destiny for themselves, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” Buchanan also endorsed the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution that would, if passed, place Kansas among the ranks of the slave states. The Lecompton Constitution was considered by many within Buchanan’s own party to have been fraudulent, and even though Buchanan managed to persuade the House of Representatives to support it, the Senate, led by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, blocked it. The contest pitted Douglas, who believed in popular sovereignty but opposed Lecompton because of the allegations of fraud, against Buchanan, an unwelcomed rivalry that the president could not withstand. The Lecompton instrument was rejected and returned, and in a second vote in 1861 (into the next administration), the people of Kansas eventually joined the Union as a free state. Both his public support of the Dred Scott decision and controversy over the fate of Kansas damaged Buchanan’s administration; moreover, the country suffered an economic recession that further exacerbated the president’s troubles.
In the midterm elections, the new Republican Party made huge strides, even stunning the Democrats by gaining the majority in the House, a Republican triumph that further eroded Buchanan’s position as well as intensifying the sectional divisions in the government. Never before had a new party accomplished such remarkable gains in such a short time, and a young party that did not even exist scarcely more than four years ago was now in control of one-half of Congress. Meanwhile, among the Democrats, Senator Douglas gained in influence as Buchanan’s fortunes turned increasingly sour. Prior to his election to the presidency, Buchanan distinguished himself as an able public servant. But his record was now tarnished by a sequence of questionable choices that both weakened his party and fueled the crisis that was threatening to break the Union. The Democrats needed leadership and unity—but the lack of the latter made it impossible to reach agreement on the former.
In April 1860, the Democratic Party convened in Charleston, South Carolina, to nominate its candidate for president and hammer out its platform. But the divisions between Northern and Southern Democrats were so deep that neither a single candidate nor a generally acceptable platform could be established. Senator Douglas had been, even as far back as the last convention, considered the party’s front-runner for the Campaign of 1860. In the past, his support of “popular sovereignty” had made him an appealing candidate in the South, but some Southerners regarded him to be a soft moderate on the issue of slavery. Douglas’s open, albeit convoluted, criticism of the Dred Scott case (during one of his famed debates at Freeport, Illinois, against Abraham Lincoln, who also rejected the decision and reasoning in Dred Scott root and branch) in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign angered the Fire Eaters, who now proposed an official endorsement of the Dred Scott decision as a platform plank and regarded Douglas as an unacceptable candidate. Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine was, unlike Lincoln’s stern rebuke against Dred Scott, a more qualified criticism. At Freeport, Douglas, fearing that the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision might actually militate against popular sovereignty, asserted that citizens in the western territories could simply avoid passing legislation that would encourage the spread of slavery across their borders. Southern militants were highly agitated, but Northern Democrats managed to thwart the Fire Eaters’ designs, thereby provoking fifty militant pro-slavery delegates to bolt the Charleston convention.
With the Fire Eaters holding their rump convention elsewhere, a Douglas victory seemed inevitable. But six other candidates emerged (notably including Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson, who carried approximately a dozen supporters in the early ballots), and with the two-thirds majority required to gain the nomination, the large field forced a deadlock, even after the number was narrowed to four candidates after the thirty-eighth ballot. Douglas led by at least 80 votes on every ballot but continued to fall 50 or more votes short of the needed 202. No other candidate received more than the 66 votes won by Kentucky’s James Guthrie on the thirty-eighth ballot, still trailing well behind Douglas’s 151. Guthrie polled second on every ballot after the ninth but never came close to Douglas in absolute numbers. Virginia’s Robert Hunter, who ran second on the first eight ballots, and Joseph Lane from the Union’s newest state, Oregon, received as high as 42 and 21, respectively, and were the only other candidates to earn more than 20 votes at any point in the convention.
Given this irresolvable deadlock, a resigned convention adjourned, quitting Charleston and reconvening in Baltimore the following June. At Baltimore, a controversy immediately arose over the question of readmitting those delegates who had bolted from the previous Charleston convention. When the credentials committee, after some debate, decided to admit most of the bolters with the exception of the dissenting delegates from Alabama and Louisiana (preferring instead to recognize replacements from those two states), still more delegates were provoked into walking out, including almost the entire Southern bloc of delegates, along with a few sympathetic delegates from both the North and the West. With a good portion of the convention’s delegates now absent, Douglas easily won the nomination on the second ballot with 181 votes to 7 for incumbent vice president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (who was not a candidate in the Charleston convention) and 5 votes for Guthrie. In an effort to patch sectional cracks, Alabama’s Benjamin Fitzpatrick was nominated for the vice presidency, but he refused to accept; thus the convention turned to Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia to serve as Douglas’s running mate. Those Democrats who bolted from this convention assembled in another rump session, nominating in one ballot Vice President Breckinridge, a competent, respected, experienced, yet youthful individual (he was thirty-nine years old at the time), to stand as their choice for the presidency, and Oregon’s Lane as his running mate. Breckinridge, who received the blessing of President Buchanan as well as the endorsement of former presidents John Tyler and Franklin Pierce, embraced the pro-slavery platform, concluding that the nation’s sectional fissures could never be closed. Douglas continued to hope for some kind of compromise between the divided sections, but his support in the South had utterly evaporated.
Much is revealed in looking at the platforms: (1) the Northern Democrats backing Douglas defended popular sovereignty and supported the Fugitive Slave Laws, the annexation of Cuba, and the westward expansion of the railroad; (2) the Southern Democrats behind Breckinridge included similar planks on less volatile issues such as Cuba and the railroads, but they added a more insistent demand for the protection of slavery, declaring that “all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in [a] Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation” (emphasis added).
Meanwhile, another third party stepped into the picture. Known as the Constitutional Union Party, cobbled together from a combination of Old Line Whigs, Know-Nothings (i.e., the American Party), and a few Southern Unionist Democrats, the party attracted such prominent figures as Kentucky’s John J. Crittenden (formerly associated with both the Whigs and the Know-Nothings), renowned orator and Massachusetts statesman Edward Everett, former senator and current governor Sam Houston of Texas, former associate justice John McLean of Ohio (who at one time had been considered as a candidate for president by the Whig Party and who also had received some support at the Republican convention), Georgia’s Howell Cobb (a stern critic of Southern secessionism, at least until the outcome of the election of 1860, which apparently inspired him to change his mind), Henry Winter Davis of Maryland (another former Whig with Know-Nothing affiliations who would go on to become well known for the Wade-Davis Bill), and John Bell of Tennessee, who began his political career as a Jacksonian Democrat but, after having become disillusioned with Jackson over the bank controversy, joined the Whig Party in the mid-1830s. The convention nominated Bell for the presidency, to be joined by Everett as his running mate. Their concise platform was just a few sentences long; using uppercase letters for effect, they resolved “that it is both the part of patriotism and of duty to recognize no political principle other than THE CONSTITUTION OF THE COUNTRY, THE UNION OF THE STATES, AND THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAWS,” and they pledged to “ourselves to maintain, protect, and defend, separately and unitedly, these great principles of public liberty and national safety, against all enemies, at home and abroad; believing that thereby peace may once more be restored to the country; the rights of the People and of the States re-established, and the Government again placed in that condition of justice, fraternity and equality, which, under the example and Constitution of our fathers, has solemnly bound every citizen of the United States.” Bell offered nothing on the issue of slavery, but he was on record as having earlier supported then-representative John Quincy Adams’s fierce and sustained denunciation of the 1836 congressional gag order blocking petitions to Congress against slavery (Adams finally won the day in 1844 when Congress removed the ban). Bell’s silence on slavery in the 1860 campaign caused critics to lampoon him as a “Do Nothing” candidate with no allegiance, “no North, no South, no East, no West—no anything.” These attitudes were prevalent among the electorate; thus the Constitutional Union Party would, aside from the border states, receive only sporadic support throughout most of the Union.
Republicans fatefully met at Chicago in May to conduct their second national nominating convention. William Seward of New York and Ohio’s Salmon Chase, “free soil” men from way back, were considered the front-runners at the commencement of the proceedings; also in the running were Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Edward Bates of Missouri, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, William L. Dayton of New Jersey, John McLean (who, as mentioned above, also had supporters among the Constitutional Unionists), Jacob Collamer of Vermont, Ohio’s Benjamin F. Wade, John M. Read of Pennsylvania, Cassius Clay of Kentucky (the abolitionist cousin of Henry Clay), and, rounding out the field, John C. Fremont (who had sportingly served in defeat as the party’s standard-bearer in the election of 1856) and Abraham Lincoln, who had earned a reputation as a formidable debater, eloquent orator, keen intellect, and sober moderate. Lincoln had been considered, briefly, as a potential candidate to join as running mate on the Fremont ticket in 1856, and since then, he had increased his reputation as one of the party’s more skilled debaters in the 1858 Illinois senatorial debates against Douglas, mentioned above. Chase, Sumner, Wade, and Fremont represented the wing of the party that embraced immediate abolition most ardently and who came to be known as the Radical Republicans.
Seward was the most confident coming into Chicago; he appeared to have the largest cohort of supporters and was, at that time, the party’s biggest name. In the initial balloting, it was indeed Seward who led the field, gaining 173 votes on the first ballot with 233 needed for the nomination, a respectable first showing given the crowded field of over a dozen candidates. Lincoln, who was initially something of a dark horse, surprised the convention by pulling into second on the first ballot with 102 votes, followed by Cameron with 50, Chase with a surprisingly low 49, Bates with 48, and 42 votes scattered across the remaining candidates (Dayton’s 14 votes being the largest share among the remainder). Through the vigorous efforts of Illinois delegate David Davis, a longtime friend and supporter of Lincoln who had stepped forward in Chicago to serve as something resembling Lincoln’s campaign manager, Lincoln’s position improved considerably on the second ballot, in which he won 181 delegates to Seward’s 184. Chase with 42 and Bates with 35 were the only other candidates to win more than 10 votes, as the rest of the field faded quickly. Davis and Lincoln’s other friends doubled their efforts, managing to win a stunning 231 votes on the third ballot, just 2 votes shy of the nomination, with Seward slipping to 180. After the initial tallies for the third ballot were announced, three members of the Ohio delegation, observing that Lincoln’s victory was at hand, changed their votes to Lincoln, thus securing for him the nomination. This event prompted a wave of switched votes, and a “corrected” third ballot would result in Lincoln winning 349 delegates to Seward’s 111, and the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Historians have noted that Lincoln’s sudden ascent was in large part the result of Davis’s Herculean labor on the convention floor in Chicago, for even though Lincoln had gained a much-deserved reputation as an intelligent voice for the new party, both Seward and Chase were considered the party’s true leaders. Davis’s achievement serves both as an example of the importance of energetic campaign canvassing and as a historical reminder of the importance that the national conventions once held in the selection of presidential candidates. Lincoln, now joining both Polk (1844) and Pierce (1852) as successful dark horses in the historical annals of convention politics, would now enter a cluttered field of four nominated candidates competing for the White House in 1860. From a field of nine candidates (including Cassius Clay and Sam Houston), former governor and current senator from Maine Hannibal Hamlin, a vocal opponent of slavery and ally of the Radical Republicans, was selected for the vice presidency, striking a balance between Midwest and Northeast. Hamlin won the nomination on the second ballot, with Cassius Clay placing a distant second.
Throughout his life, Lincoln found slavery reprehensible and a tyrannical stain that had soiled the young republic’s founding principles of personal liberty, political equality, and rational self-government. Throughout his political career, Lincoln had openly criticized slavery on four counts: as blatantly immoral, patently illogical, directly contrary to the political creed of the nation as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, and in unfair violation of the economic principles of free labor. He was also a true believer in constitutional government and the unadulterated rule of law, and as such, he realized that slavery needed to be addressed legally, formally, and gradually, soberly arguing for its immediate containment and, eventually, its natural and peaceful extinction. As a one-term congressman, Lincoln had opposed the Mexican War in the realization that the acquisition of vast new lands in the West would surely provide renewed opportunities for slavery to expand, something that Lincoln sorely dreaded, as he regarded such an eventuality to be the ruin of the Union and its republican principles. Abolitionists throughout the North criticized him for his comparatively moderate tone, arguing that Lincoln’s more gradualist position was neither strong enough nor forthright enough in opposing slavery and working toward its swift elimination. And yet in the South, Lincoln was viewed with great apprehension, a sign that his was a position not entirely comforting to the slave owner and pro-slavery apologist.
As with Fremont in 1856, Southerners found Lincoln, solely based on his position toward slavery, to be completely intolerable and a real threat to their Peculiar Institution on the same order as John Brown and his militants. Lincoln abhorred such extremist measures as those employed by Brown, and while he continued to criticize slavery as a repugnant disgrace to the political creed of the American republic and the moral cultivation of the American character, he always insisted, out of his fealty to the Constitution, that the authority of the federal government was limited in what it could actually do to slavery where it already existed. His overall vision was that of a country neither half free nor half slave, but rather wholly free throughout all the states, but he stopped short of calling for immediate abolition. His strategy of containment and his moderate approach drew sharp criticism from all sides, North and South, and had the Democrats presented a united front behind one candidate as they did in 1856 behind Buchanan, Lincoln likely would have been defeated. As it was, the Democrats were split in two, with a third party also tossed into the mix; thus the Republicans were able to mount the serious campaign that eluded them four years earlier with Fremont then serving as their standard-bearer. Lincoln’s views on other issues, such as the government’s role in internal improvements, matched the Whig policies of his political hero, the Great Compromiser Henry Clay, and were typical of his proclivities as a political moderate.
But in the Campaign of 1860, as with the previous two campaigns of 1852 and 1856, no one paying attention really cared about any other issue but slavery, and Lincoln had always unabashedly held slavery to be a great evil; and on that one explosive question, Lincoln evoked nothing less than horror within the slaveholding South. In line with Lincoln’s views, the Republican platform denounced the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution of Kansas; scolded the Supreme Court for perversely, inhumanely, and criminally restoring the “slave trade, under cover of [the] national flag”; asserted that the “normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom”; and denied “the authority of Congress, or a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.” For many, Lincoln’s victory on Election Day and the ascent of the Republicans would require nothing less than secession. It was the same reaction to Fremont, but this time, given the fragmentation of the political landscape and the unity enjoyed by Lincoln and the Republicans, advocating secession was now more than a simple threat.
The Republican Party conducted a vigorous campaign that made use of every available method to get out the vote for Lincoln. Republican slogans included “Free Homes for Free Men”; “Millions for Freedom, Not One Cent for Slavery” (riffing off the old phrase, “Millions for Defense, Not One Cent for Tribute”); “The Constitution and the Union, Now and Forever” (inspired no doubt by the late Daniel Webster’s famous peroration exhorting both “liberty and union”); “Slavery Is a Moral, Social, and Political Wrong” (aptly summarizing Lincoln’s views); “Vote Yourself a Farm” (seemingly incongruous given the way in which slavery overwhelmed all other issues); and, with a reference to a famous biblical line cited by Lincoln in his 1858 speech accepting his party’s nomination to run for the U.S. Senate against Douglas, “A House Divided against Itself Cannot Stand.” With the help of the organized and energetic Wide-Awake clubs, the Republican Party conducted numerous rallies and marches replete with songs celebrating Lincoln. To his supporters Lincoln was “Honest Abe,” the “Rail Splitter,” the “People’s Nominee,” slogans drawing upon his bona fide humble origins. That is to say, unlike William Henry Harrison, Lincoln was actually born on the frontier in a log cabin, was raised in rustic and modest circumstances, and was the best (but not sole) example since Andrew Jackson of a candidate who truly came from a humble background. Following previous custom, Lincoln cagily remained distant from the campaigning, leaving it to the Wide-Awakes and other political allies such Seward and Cassius Clay to mount the campaign stage. By contrast, Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas invested tremendous energy in the campaign. Unlike Lincoln, his old rival, the Little Giant traveled extensively, enthusiastically addressing large crowds throughout all sections. Throughout the campaign season, Douglas refused to abandon his support for the doctrine of popular sovereignty or to comment either way on the moral considerations of slavery. Shamefully, the Campaign of 1860 grew ugly. Hostile political prints presented cruel and racist images of a simian Lincoln fraternizing with monstrously drawn slaves and advocating interracial “free love.” Such beastly behavior was the low point of the long tradition of the political cartoon.
In the election, Lincoln won the higher number of popular votes, a total of somewhere around 1,856,000 votes, which was actually a new record, in absolute numbers exceeding President Buchanan’s 1856 total by over 25,000 votes; but in 1860, it was but a meager plurality of approximately 39.7 percent. Douglas polled second in the popular vote with approximately 1,380,000 votes (just under 30%), young Breckinridge taking around 850,000 (18%) and Bell somewhere in the neighborhood of 590,000 (slightly under 13%). The percentage of the 1860 popular vote for Lincoln is the second lowest for a winning candidate in the nation’s history (John Quincy Adams won the election of 1824 after having polled only 31% of the popular vote and 32% of the electoral vote, that election having failed to produce a majority in the Electoral College and thus decided in the House of Representatives), and it was also the lowest in the era of modern parties that had quickly emerged after the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Lincoln was not even on the ballot in ten southern states, and in the only southern or border states where his name could be found on the ballot, the border states of Maryland and Kentucky (where he was born before moving to Indiana and from there to Illinois) and the southern state of Virginia, he won 2,294 votes, 1,929 votes, and 1,364 votes, respectively. In the popular vote, he ran strongest in Vermont, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, all northern and midwestern states. All told, he won seventeen states for a total number of 180 electoral votes, or just over 59 percent, a substantial Electoral College victory in stark contrast to his thinner share of the popular vote (by comparison to recently held elections, even without any support in the southern states, Lincoln’s Electoral College results were slightly stronger than Buchanan’s in 1856 and Taylor’s in 1848 and not nearly as strong as Pierce’s 85% in 1852). Lincoln did win clear majorities in fifteen of the seventeen states that he carried in the Electoral College, the exceptions being California and Oregon, which he won with pluralities in the popular vote.
Although Douglas received the second-highest percentage of the popular vote, he managed to win only twelve electoral votes from the states of Missouri and New Jersey, starkly illustrating that the Democratic Party was dead in the North. Douglas nearly split the vote with Lincoln in Illinois, which was home to both candidates; but this time, unlike the senatorial campaign in the midterm election of 1858, the Rail Splitter edged out the Little Giant, taking his home state’s eleven electoral votes. In the end, Lincoln won a clean sweep in the states that were carved from the old Northwest Territory, a region of the country in which Douglas might have run more successfully had it not been for the loss of votes to Bell and Breckinridge. In spite of the results of the popular vote, it was the much younger Breckinridge, not Douglas, who ran second in the Electoral College, taking seventy-two electoral votes, all from southern states. Even though he had the smallest percentage of the popular vote (and around 800,000 fewer votes than Douglas), Bell also exceeded Douglas’s Electoral College total, winning thirty-nine electoral votes from Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
True to their word, Southern leaders, in response to Lincoln’s electoral victory, began the movement to break from the Union. Buchanan’s administration was utterly ineffective in forestalling secession. Prior to the final break, southern states managed to corner Congress into drafting a constitutional amendment protecting the institution of slavery where it had currently existed. Before the amendment was proposed for ratification, the war broke out, rendering such efforts irrelevant. South Carolina, historically at the center of Fire Eater agitation, moved first to secede from the Union. Other slave states soon joined South Carolina to form the rebellious Confederate States of America. Before Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states had left the Union, with the remainder seceding after Lincoln’s military response to the assault on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. After decades of debate, compromise, invective, posturing, agitation, repression, polarization, demonization, pleas, threats, and the occasional incidents of bloodshed from the slave uprisings in the South to the open plains of Kansas to the sullied floor of the Senate, the nation’s original sin would finally be purged in the fires of war.
The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
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