RateItAll: The Opinion Network

This has to be the most important election in our history. A Lincoln loss might have postponed the Civil War at the cost of prolonging slavery. Talk about the devil and the deep blue sea.

Acutally a correction should be made here. Sen. Stephen Douglas, who was Lincoln's opponent in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, was the Democratic party nominee. President James Buchanan didn't run for re-election in 1860. That said, this was quite possibly one of the most divisive and seminal elections in US history. The Republicans chose Abraham Lincoln, a former member of the House and lawyer from Springfield, Illinois as their nominee over other more well-known candidates like Salmon P. Chase and William Seward, who both would go on to serve in Lincoln's cabinet. The Party supported higher tariffs and a stop to the expansion of slavery by promoting free homesteads in the West. The South was adamantly opposed to all these positions; in fact there was already talk of sucession from the Union if Lincoln were to be elected. The Democratic Party split in three ways; Northern Democrats selected Stephen Douglas, who advocated President Buchanan's moderate approach to the situation in the South. The South and the Border States split two ways: The border states of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky went for John Bell, he ended up getting 39 total electoral votes. John Breckenridge, the Vice President of the United States, ended up carrying the entire Southern vote, but that only came to 72 electoral votes. Stephen Douglas was shut out in the dark essentially. He only carried Missouri, but he came in 2nd Place despite his poor electoral college showing. Because the electorate was so split, Lincoln only got 39% of the vote, the lowest total plurality ever recorded in Presidential politics. Yet he did manage to win every Northern state, giving him a solid 180 Electoral college votes. This election very neatly demonstrated the major factions in US politics, many of which are still evident even into today. Lincoln's election in November of 1860 guaranteed that South Carolina would be the first to secede from the Union. They wanted a political figure who would rally the South against the North and they got it in Lincoln. In February of 1861, seven Southern states formed a provisional Confederate government. In his inaugural address a month later, Lincoln called the issue legally void and pleaded for a political solution to the issue. The division between the Northern government and the South was already far too deep. A month later the Civil War began with the first shots that were fired in Fort Sumter outside of Charleston, SC. The bloodiest war in US history began. One cannot study the history of this dark period in history without looking at how the political divisions ravaging this country manifested themselves in the 1860 Election.