1860 United States presidential election
The 1860 United States presidential election was the 19th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin[2] won a national popular plurality, a popular majority in the North where states already had abolished slavery, and a national electoral majority comprising only Northern electoral votes. Lincoln's election thus served as the main catalyst of the states that would become the Confederacy seceding from the Union. This marked the first time that a Republican was elected president. It was also the first presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1904, 1920, 1940, 1944, and 2016.
303 members of the Electoral College
152 electoral votes needed to win
The United States had become increasingly sectionally divided during the 1850s, primarily over extending slavery into the western territories. The incumbent president, James Buchanan, like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, was a Northern Democrat with Southern sympathies. Buchanan also adamantly promised not to seek re-election. From the mid-1850s, the anti-slavery Republican Party became a major political force, driven by Northern voter opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. From the election of 1856, the Republican Party had replaced the defunct Whig Party as the major opposition to the Democrats. A group of former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to avoid disunion by resolving divisions over slavery with some new compromise.
The 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate former one-term Whig Representative from Illinois. Its platform promised not to interfere with slavery in the South but opposed extension of slavery into the territories. The 1860 Democratic National Convention adjourned in Charleston, South Carolina, without agreeing on a nominee, but a second convention in Baltimore, Maryland, nominated Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas's support for the concept of popular sovereignty, which called for each territory's settlers to decide locally on the status of slavery, alienated many radical pro-slavery Southern Democrats, who wanted the territories, and perhaps other lands, open to slavery. With President Buchanan's support, Southern Democrats held their own convention, nominating Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The 1860 Constitutional Union Convention, which hoped to avoid the slavery issue entirely, nominated a ticket led by former Tennessee Senator John Bell.
Lincoln's main opponent in the North was Douglas, who won the popular vote in Missouri, electoral votes in New Jersey, and the second highest popular vote total nationally. Douglas was the only candidate in the 1860 election to win electoral votes in both free and slave states. In the South, Bell won three states and Breckinridge swept the remaining 11. Lincoln's election motivated seven Southern states, all voting for Breckinridge, to secede before the inauguration in March. The American Civil War began less than two months after Lincoln's inauguration, with the Battle of Fort Sumter; afterwards four further states seceded. Lincoln would go on to win re-election in the 1864 United States presidential election. The election was the first of six consecutive Republican victories. Despite Lincoln's commanding victory, this was the first election in American history in which the winner has failed to win his home county, with Lincoln narrowly losing Sangamon County, Illinois to Douglas. However, he would win Gasconade County, Missouri, which as of the 2020 United States presidential election, has voted Republican ever since, marking the beginning of the longest active voting streak for any party at the county level.
Vector Map of presidential election results by county
Map of presidential election results by county
Map of Republican presidential election results by county
Map of Northern Democratic presidential election results by county
Map of Southern Democratic presidential election results by county
Map of Constitutional Union presidential election results by county
Map of "Fusion" slate presidential election results by county
Cartogram of Republican presidential election results by county
Cartogram of Northern Democratic presidential election results by county
Cartogram of Southern Democratic presidential election results by county
Cartogram of Constitutional Union presidential election results by county
Cartogram of "Fusion" slate presidential election results by county
Lincoln's victory and imminent inauguration as president was the immediate cause for declarations of secession by seven Southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) from 20 December 1860 to 1 February 1861. They then formed the Confederate States of America. On 9 February 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederacy.
Several other states also considered declaring secession at the time:
All of the secessionist activity was motivated by fear for the institution of slavery in the South. If the President (and, by extension, the appointed federal officials in the South, such as district attorneys, marshals, postmasters, and judges) opposed slavery, it might collapse. There were fears that abolitionist agents would infiltrate the South and foment slave insurrections. (The noted secessionist William Lowndes Yancey, speaking at New York's Cooper Institute in October 1860, asserted that with abolitionists in power, "Emissaries will percolate between master [and] slave as water between the crevices of rocks underground. They will be found everywhere, with strychnine to put in our wells."[45]) Less radical Southerners thought that with Northern antislavery dominance of the federal government, slavery would eventually be abolished, regardless of present constitutional limits.[46]
Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that secessionists desired independence as necessary for their honor. They could no longer tolerate Northern state attitudes that regarded slave ownership as a great sin and Northern politicians who insisted on stopping the spread of slavery.[47][48][49]
Another bloc of Southerners resented Northern criticism of slavery and restrictions on slavery but opposed secession as dangerous and unnecessary. However, the "conditional Unionists" also hoped that when faced with secession, Northerners would stifle anti-slavery rhetoric and accept pro-slavery rules for the territories. It was that group that prevented immediate secession in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas when
Lincoln took office on 4 March 1861. He took no action against the secessionists in the seven "Confederate" states but also declared that secession had no legal validity and refused to surrender federal property in those states. (He also reiterated his opposition to slavery anywhere in the territories.) Preparing to form an army, on 6 March 1861 Davis called for 100,000 volunteers to serve for twelve months.[50] The political standoff continued until mid-April, when Davis ordered Confederate troops to bombard and capture Fort Sumter.
Lincoln then called for troops to put down rebellion, which wiped out the possibility that the crisis could be resolved by compromise. Nearly all "conditional Unionists" joined the secessionists. The Virginia convention and the reconvened Arkansas convention both declared secession, as did the legislatures of Tennessee and North Carolina; all four states joined the Confederacy. Missouri stayed in the United States, but had an unrecognized dual government.