Political flag of the day / credit telegraph.co.uk On the 6th of November, the 150th anniversary of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was being celebrated. This election shall in many avenues, change the fact of this nation from hence forth. The 1860 election proved to be one of the most momentous in American history at it came at a time of national crisis, and brought Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency.
The man viewed many as an abolitionist or black Republican who fought the war for the freedom of the slave, is not as you would be lead to believe. Today, he by some is viewed as a racist in some respects.
Abraham Lincoln immortalized in American history by the role that he played in abolishing the institution of slavery, but he arrived at this distinction only after a long career of opposition to abolitionism. This at first seems paradoxical, for he had always actively disliked slavery, and he came into national prominence as a politician by strenuously opposing its extension into the territories. However, in the 1850s, with the breakup of the Whig party, Lincoln parted ways with some of his oldest political associates by deciding to make common cause with antislavery activists in the newly formed Republican Party. But he was never an abolitionist, and the question that inevitably presents itself, "if he hated slavery so much, why did Lincoln not become an abolitionist?"
To answer this; Lincoln’s attitudes toward slavery and what he, as a politician, proposed should be done about it. Though the historical record has always been reasonably clear, the Great Emancipator legend has had a decidedly distorting effect on our understanding of Lincoln’s position, confusing him with those who openly advocated the abolition of slavery. In fact, Lincoln was always keenly aware that slavery, though morally wrong in his eyes, was sanctioned by law, and he frequently acknowledged that the rights of slave owners, both to retain their slaves and to have fugitive slaves returned, were clearly guaranteed in the Constitution. Before the outbreak of civil war, he advocated nothing that would directly challenge those rights. This position sharply distinguished him from abolitionists, many of whom were actively involved in supporting runaway slaves, and all of whom viewed the returning of fugitive slaves as unconscionable, whatever the Constitution might dictate. The most radical abolitionists openly denounced the Constitution for its protection of slavery and repudiated its authority.
The issue of secession was being talked about even before the 1860 election, and Lincoln's election intensified the move in the South to split with the Union. And when Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, it seemed obvious that the nation was on an inescapable path toward Civil War. Indeed, the Civil War began the next month. With it came the deaths of over 630,000 Americans from both the Union and Confederate Armys.
The players;
In the 1860 election, the Democratic Party split into two factions. The northern Democrats nominated Lincoln’s perennial rival, Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge, the incumbent vice president, a pro-slavery man from Kentucky. Those who felt they could support neither party, mainly disaffected former Whigs and members of the Know-Nothing Party, formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee.
Before the end of the war, the two main participants, Lincoln and Douglas will be dead.
The presidential election was held on November 6, 1860. Lincoln did very well in the northern states, and though he garnered less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide, he won a landslide victory in the Electoral College. Even if the Democratic Party had not fractured, its likely Lincoln still would have won due to his strength in states heavy with electoral votes.
Ominously, Lincoln did not carry any southern states being that he was not even on the ballot in 11 of them.
The Breakdown is as follows:
On Tuesday, November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected with Hannibal Hamlin of Maine his Vice-President. Lincoln and Hamlin received 1,866,452 popular votes and 180 electoral votes in 17 of the 33 states. The Northern Democratic ticket of Douglas and Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia drew 1,376,957 popular votes, but only 12 electoral votes (9 from Missouri and 3 from New Jersey). The Southern Democratic ticket of Breckinridge and Joseph Lane of Oregon received 849,781 popular votes from 11 of the 15 slave states, for 72 electoral votes. The Constitutional Unionists Bell and John Everett of Massachusetts received 588,879 popular votes and 39 electoral votes (Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia).
Even before taking office, he had to deal with the issues of the day. His predecessor, President James Buchanan, left him with a country on the edge of Civil War.
On Dec. 11, 1860, with South Carolina’s secession looming, President-elect Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to Illinois Rep. William Kellogg, a fellow Republican. Publicly, Lincoln was keeping silent on the emerging crisis. But his letter was designed to achieve one objective: to sabotage a sectional compromise to save the Union.
Marked “Private & confidential,” the letter instructed Kellogg to “entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The instant you do, they have us under again; all our labor is lost, and sooner or later must be done over. … Have none of it. The tug has to come & better now than later.”
Crittenden’s plan consisted of a package of constitutional amendments and congressional resolutions, all of which would be “unamendable.” Among their provisions, these amendments would have protected slavery in all of the slave states from future actions by Congress; permitted slavery to spread in all federal territories and future territories below the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude (which runs roughly along the northern border of North Carolina, Tennesee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona); forbidden Congress from abolishing slavery on federal property within a slave state; prevented Congress from interfering with the interstate slave trade; and indemnified owners whose runaway slaves could not be recovered under the Fugitive Slave Law.
The compromise won immediate praise; many politicians hailed it as a gesture of supreme wisdom that could forestall secession. Even William Seward, the New York senator whom Lincoln would soon tap to be secretary of state, seemed to support it.
Lincoln’s letters of the time proved decisive in the compromise’s eventual defeat. To examine the plan, the Senate had established the Committee of Thirteen; thanks in large part to Lincoln’s goading, all five Republicans on the committee opposed it. In turn two southern members on the committee, Robert Toombs and Jefferson Davis, voted against it on the grounds that such unified Republican opposition made the compromise worthless. When Crittenden took his plan to the Senate floor on Jan. 16, 1861, it was voted down 25-23. Every one of the 25 no votes were cast by a Republican.
But Lincoln was being disingenuous. His object had always been to save the Union his way: with the institution of slavery on course for “ultimate extinction,” as he put it in his 1858 House Divided speech. “I believe,” he had proclaimed in that fiery address, that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.” Lincoln meant to guarantee that his American “house” would be united in the right way – with slavery on course for extinction – not the wrong way, with slavery spreading.
Then… An Ordinance to dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States," or the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, 20 December 1860
Confederate States of America - Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, may be found at
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Abhorring war, Abraham Lincoln accepted War as the only means to save the Union….and the rest as they say is history…
For more information of the election and the war;
http://americancivilwar.com/north/abe_lincoln.html
www.civilwarhome.com/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/abrahamlincoln
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