Election of 1860
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected 16th president of the United States, having won 39.8% of the popular vote and 180 of 303 electoral votes. The years leading up to that election encompassed events not unlike those surrounding the election of 2020: A divided country; a president elected without a majority of the vote; conspiracies and violence; pressure on a vice-president to deny the electoral college vote; and contested mid-term elections. The country’s thirty-three states split over the issue of slavery. Lincoln represented the anti-slavery Republican Party. Its platform did not oppose slavery in the existing fifteen southern and border states, but opposed its extension into new territories.
Lincoln was opposed by three major candidates. Northern Democrats selected Stephen Douglas as its candidate. Southern Democrats convened independently, selecting Vice President John Breckenridge as their nominee. The Constitutional Union party nominated an ex-senator from Tennessee, John Bell, for president. Douglas received 29.5% of the popular votes but only 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge had 18.1% of the popular votes and 72 electoral votes. Bell received 12.6% of the popular votes and 39 electoral votes.
Lincoln and the Republican Party won seventeen free states in the north and west. Breckenridge won eleven southern slave states, nine of which did not have the Republican ticket on the ballot. Bell won the three remaining southern slave states. Douglas won only the border state of Missouri and half the electoral votes in New Jersey, splitting the state with Lincoln.
Following Lincoln’s victory the country was torn by rumors. Conspiracies proliferated of a march on Washington to prevent Lincoln’s taking office. Secessionists were said to be bribing federal troops, cutting telegraph wires, and sabotaging the rail lines. Lincoln would be assassinated en route to Washington. Plans were made to stop the counting of the Electoral College votes.
It fell to the Vice-president, John Breckenridge, who had lost the election to Lincoln, to certify Lincoln’s election, a role taken by Mike Pence in 2020. As told in Jon Meacham’s new book, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, “A hundred plainclothes police from New York and Philadelphia” were engaged to secure the route Breckenridge would take to the House chamber. Breckenridge declared Abraham Lincoln duly elected as President.
Following Lincoln’s victory, eleven southern states voted to secede from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America to preserve the institution of slavery. The Confederates’ attack on April 12, 1861 on the Union’s Fort Sumter began the Civil War, prompting five additional southern states to join the Confederacy.
Lincoln deployed executive power at times even though his actions were ruled unconstitutional by Chief Justice Roger Taney, a southerner. Lincoln was guided by his belief that slavery was wrong and the U.S. was chosen to end it. He was willing to compromise as long as he maintained a path to his ultimate goal of abolition. At times he took action that offended Black and white abolitionists, allowing Black soldiers to be paid less than white soldiers, and considering voluntary colonization of freed slaves in Africa or Latin America. But he always based his decisions on the ultimate goal of ending slavery.
Mid-term elections in 1862-1863 produced victories for Republicans in Ohio and Pennsylvania over opponents regarded as “rebel sympathizers.” The wins were vindication for Lincoln’s policies in his first two years in office. Following Lincoln’s victory in the 1864 presidential election, assassination conspiracies surfaced. Pro-slavery journalists denounced Lincoln as a tyrant, despot and usurper, likely influencing John Wilkes Booth to conspire with four others to assassinate Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward.
While Lincoln’s occasional hesitation in pursuit of ending slavery caused abolitionists to question his commitment, he knew he had to bring his country along gradually toward that goal. The division he encountered is not unlike that confronting executive, legislative, and judicial levels of government today. In Jon Meacham’s words:
A president who led a divided country in which an implacable minority gave no quarter in a clash over power, race, identity, money, and faith has much to teach us in a twenty-first century moment of polarization, passionate disagreement, and differing understandings of reality…. His story illuminates the ways and means of politics, the marshaling of power in a democracy, the durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to help shape events.