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By Root 1669 0

sentiment. Overall, Lincoln received 1,866,000 votes, more than any other man who had run for president and half a million more than Frémont polled four years earlier. This represented only 40 percent of the national total. But under the Electoral College system, Lincoln’s sweep of the North was more than enough to secure victory. Indeed, if the electoral votes for Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas had been united on a single candidate, Lincoln would still have been elected. His victory did not arise from the division among his opponents but from the nature of the American electoral system, which enables a party to capture the presidency by concentrating its votes in the most populous region.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1860

The “old guard” of the antislavery movement exulted in Lincoln’s triumph. “At length,” wrote Salmon P. Chase, “the first of the great wishes of my life is accomplished. The Slave Power is overthrown.” Southerners, of course, reacted differently. “The Northern people,” wrote a New Orleans newspaper, “in electing Mr. Lincoln, have perpetuated a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage on the people of the slaveholding states.” Lincoln’s victory demonstrated that a united North had the power to determine the nation’s future. Throughout the 1850s, an influential group of southern political leaders had insisted that the only way to safeguard the future of slavery in such a circumstance would be to strike for independence. As the Louisville Courier exclaimed, “The ‘irrepressible conflict’…is now upon us.”24

II

BY THE TIME Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, he addressed a divided nation. The seven slave states stretching from South Carolina south and west to Texas had declared their independence and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. As the states seceded, they seized federal property: post offices, forts, arsenals, and the U.S. Mint in New Orleans, whose holdings of gold and silver financed the Confederacy in its initial months. In this unprecedented crisis, Lincoln struggled to develop a consistent policy to prevent the contagion of secession from spreading and to keep his party from splintering. Although his stance evolved as the crisis developed, he proved willing to be conciliatory on what he deemed nonessential questions, but steadfastly refused to compromise on the non-extension of slavery. And he unwaveringly insisted on the permanence of the Union and his right to assume the presidency.

North and South, the secession crisis energized the public sphere. By the tens of thousands, ordinary Americans took part in mass meetings and petition drives, penned letters to political leaders, and anxiously followed deliberations in Congress and state legislatures. As soon as the election results were announced, advice flooded into the mailboxes of Lincoln and other Republicans. Overall, grassroots Republicans seemed adamant against compromise. From Galesburg, Illinois, Alfred Babcock, a former Whig member of Congress, informed Lincoln that “all the Republicans with whom I have conversed” believed that any concession would simply “give more strength to the institution of slavery and correspondingly weaken the principles established by our fathers in the erection of this government.” No compromise, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, a Republican moderate, wrote in December, would satisfy the secessionists because the North’s real offense was its hostility to slavery. The only way to keep the Lower South in the Union would be to “agree to the proposition that slavery is a benign, constitutional system, and that it shall be extended in the end all over this continent.”25

Republicans of Democratic ancestry seemed to view the secession winter as a replay of the nullification crisis of the 1830s. They insisted that the South needed to be taught a lesson. “In these trying times,” wrote one former Democrat, “there is need of Jacksonism.” Many Republicans of Whig backgrounds also invoked Old Hickory’s legacy. As a result of the crisis, as the New York Times put it, Andrew Jackson