• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1725 0

to black civil and political rights, his abolitionist admirers counterposed his commitment to racial equality in enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. Lydia Maria Child wrote that she trusted Lincoln because during his debates with Douglas, he had said that “a negro is my equal; as good as I am” (an imperfect paraphrase, to be sure). Considering that Illinois “is very pro-slavery,” she added, “I think he was a brave man to entertain such a sentiment and announce it.” Frederick Douglass could not bring himself to vote for Lincoln, but praised him in his monthly magazine as “a man of will and nerve.” Even though Lincoln fell far short of the principle of equal rights for all, he added, “it will be a great work accomplished when this government is divorced from the active support” of slavery.21

Four candidates contested the election of 1860. After the split in their party proved unresolvable, northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas while southerners put forward John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who pledged congressional enforcement of owners’ right to bring their slaves into all the territories. The hastily organized Constitutional Union party chose John C. Bell of Tennessee on a platform pledging to preserve national unity by loyalty to the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws. The new party appealed to many voters in the Upper South desperate to avoid disunion. The conservative Philadelphia diarist Sidney George Fisher, however, noted its flaw: it did not represent “any definite principles or opinions.” The “overwhelming and exciting subject before the country is slavery,” Fisher wrote, and no party “that passes this question by” could “hope for success.” Far from the Democratic split ensuring Lincoln’s election, it actually made victory more difficult. Even though he expected Lincoln to win, Trumbull warned in June that “by cutting loose from the administration and the Fire Eaters, [Douglas] will be less assailable than if he were the candidate of the united Democracy.” Facing a Democratic candidate who had acceded to southern demands in order to obtain the nomination would have made Lincoln’s task much easier.22

The election campaign was intense. “Town meetings, stump oratory, torchlight processions, and all other means of excitement are rife throughout the state,” wrote Fisher about Pennsylvania. Along with the themes their party had perfected during the 1850s—the rights and opportunities of free labor, the necessity of halting slavery’s expansion—Republicans also emphasized their refusal to countenance southern secession in the event of Lincoln’s election, while simultaneously downplaying the danger of disunion. And while insisting they would not interfere directly with slavery in the states, numerous Republican newspapers and speakers predicted that Lincoln’s election would launch a slow process of abolition in the states of the Upper South. The southern press reported such statements with alarm.23

In effect, two presidential elections took place in 1860. Breckinridge captured most of the slave states, but Bell carried about 40 percent of the southern vote and three states of the Upper South. Lincoln solidly defeated Douglas in the free states by holding on to the gains Republicans had achieved in the elections of 1858. He won 54 percent of the northern popular vote, carrying every county in New England (the only time a candidate achieved this feat between 1832 and 1896) and an absolute majority in every state of the Old Northwest. But Lincoln was not even on the ballot in a majority of the slave states and won only 2 percent of the southern vote. Republicans who believed their party was poised to make inroads in the Border South could find encouragement from the results in Delaware, which gave Lincoln 23 percent of the vote, and Missouri (the only state carried by Douglas), where Lincoln polled 10 percent, mostly in St. Louis and its vicinity. But the results in Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia, where Lincoln received less than 3 percent of the total, did not suggest the existence of significant Republican