Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Concise Lincoln Library) - Softcover

Michael S. Green, a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada, is the author of seven books, including Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War and Freedom,Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War.

“God help me, God help me,” Abraham Lincoln said late the night of November 6, 1860. From the election returns arriv­ing in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln learned what he and other Re­publicans had anticipated for the past month: he would be the next president. Little did he imagine how much help he actually would need. After going home and telling his wife, “Mary, Mary, we are elected,” he mapped out a cabinet that drew on his party’s regions, leanings, and political antecedents. Six weeks later, South Carolina seceded; six other southern states followed suit before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861.1
 
Thanks to his abilities and the swirl of events around him, Lin­coln became the president who guided the United States through the Civil War. One of the least experienced men to occupy the White House—briefly a militia captain, a four-term state legislator, a one-term congressman, a veteran attorney, and a Whig and Republican operative—he evolved into the Great Emancipator, a commander-in-chief whose strategy won the war for the North, and an architect of an expansion of industry and government power that reshaped American life. Throughout the secession winter, though, he expected not that series of events but that a tide of southern unionism would engulf se­cessionists. The firing on Fort Sumter and the ensuing war that killed 620,000 proved him wrong. While hindsight always suggests clearer answers, it shows that the threads holding the Union together were thin, and the 1860 election snapped them. The divide over slavery had grown too large for increasingly sectional parties and leaders to bridge, and understanding what happened in 1860 requires an understanding of what produced the times and the men who made them.
 
The First Party System
 
The Founding Fathers bridged the gap over slavery, but not easily. The Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of In­dependence only after cutting Thomas Jefferson’s criticism of slavery from his draft but also temporarily ended the African slave trade. As the American Revolution turned colonies into states, the writers of state constitutions in the North abolished slavery gradually and with little controversy, due to its limited impact on their region’s economy and society. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Or­dinance of 1787 banned slavery from the territories that later became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. According to James Madison, at the Constitutional Convention, “the institution of slavery and its implication formed the line of discrimination.” The Constitution required states to return fugitive slaves to their owners, kept Congress from barring the African slave trade for twenty years after ratification, and counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for determining each state’s members of the House of Representa­tives and electoral college—all advantages to the South. In turn, the document never mentioned slavery, suggesting the Framers’ desire to avoid the topic and possibly their dislike for it. Delegate James Wilson expected a future ban on the slave trade to lead to abolition: “Yet the lapse of a few years, and Congress will have power to exterminate slavery from within our borders.”2
 
Whether or not Wilson divined the future, the other Founders’ intentions became central to the political developments leading up to the 1860 election and the events that followed. Clearly, though, the Constitution’s authors never envisioned the interlocking factors that prompted the disputes over slavery that characterized American politics for a significant part of the nineteenth century. First, in 1793, the cotton gin’s invention reduced the labor required for separating seeds from the cotton, speeding production. Other improvements fostered industrialization, making it easier to convert raw materials into finished products and to reach markets to sell them. With the demand for more cotton came the need for more land on which to grow it, prompting southerners to push west with their slaves into Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, expanding the insti­tution beyond the Framers’ expectations. In 1793, wanting to protect their economy and investments, and with the possibility of Congress banning the African slave trade as soon as the Constitution allowed, southerners won passage of a fugitive slave law, requiring northerners to help return runaways to their owners.
 
Blossoming over issues unrelated to slavery, political parties repre­sented another break with the Framers’ expectations—and, eventu­ally, became inseparable from slavery. In the early and mid-1790s, the first party system developed over ideological differences between the first secretary of state, Jefferson, and the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson’s Republicans advocated a limited government with most of its power in congressional hands and an agricultural economy; Hamilton’s Federalists preferred more federal involvement in building an economy based on industry and bondholders. These disagreements went beyond ideology: each party expected to destroy the other, given that neither group recognized the other as legitimate. Jefferson and Hamilton saw each other not merely as political opponents competing for votes and power but as traitors to the new Republic’s well-being. Thus, Jefferson declared in his inauguration, “We are all republicans; we are all federalists,” but sounded a far different note when he later wrote privately, “I shall . . . sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it.”3
 
With the Federalist Party’s demise after the 1816 election, the first party system collapsed, but the issue of slavery gained new resonance. Missouri’s quest for admission as a slave state in 1819 prompted a sectional debate, resolved with a compromise that admitted Missouri and Maine, maintaining a balance between free and slave states, with slavery otherwise banned north of Missouri’s southern border. Jefferson wrote that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” More significant, a Georgia congressman complained to a northern colleague who fought efforts to allow slavery in Missouri, “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.” Less than two generations later, northerners and southerners proved him right.4
 
The Second Party System
 
Slavery had little to do with the rise of new political parties, except that many participants in those parties hoped to limit the issue’s scope or ignore it entirely. However, old divisions died hard, and connec­tions to slavery, even when relegated to the political sidelines, proved inescapable. Federalists disappeared as a party, but believers in ex­pansive government and industrial growth found little refuge among those committed to Jefferson’s belief in limited government and a mostly agricultural economy. Also, southerners and some northern­ers shared the conviction that Jeffersonian Republicans eliminated the Federalists by adopting too many of their views and expanding federal power beyond wise or constitutional limits. In turn, their beliefs hardened and narrowed beyond Jefferson’s intentions.5
 
Mainly from this strain of Jefferson’s ideas, the Democratic Party emerged. The odd coupling of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Bu­ren remade American politics in the late 1820s and 1830s. A wealthy...