Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Election of 1860

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

In 1860, the United States was as divided as it ever had been. The issue of slavery had been growing more and more contentious over the decades and by 1860, things were nearing a breaking point. The presidential election of 1860 literally would determine the future of the country, or if there would continue to even be a country. Learn more about the presidential election of 1860, the most important presidential election in American history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1860, the United States was as divided as it had ever been. The issue of slavery had been growing more and more contentious over the decades, and by 1860, things were nearing a breaking point. The presidential election of that year would literally determine the future of the country, or if there would even continue to be a country. Learn more about the presidential election of 1860, the most important presidential election in American history, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Do you ever climb into bed, ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest.

and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. I've done several episodes in the past about various presidential elections throughout history. These have usually been elections that were unusual in some respect. They may have been really close, like in 1876 or 1824. odd like in 1800, or just had weird accounting like in 1960.

While those elections were unique and had interesting stories, they weren't particularly important elections in the big scheme of things. The presidencies of John Quincy Adams and Rutherford Hayes really haven't reverberated throughout history. For almost every presidential election that I can personally remember, there have been people who have said that it was the most important election in American history. And they are always wrong, because it is near impossible to have an election that would be more important than the election of 1860. It was the election that

ultimately resolved the issue of slavery in the United States and sparked a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. As I've mentioned in previous episodes, the first American political party system fell apart in 1828 with the collapse of the Federalist Party. The second party system saw the Democrats and the Whigs as the two major parties. That system eventually fell apart as the issue of slavery tore apart normal political alliances. With the collapse of the Whig Party. A new political party was created in 1854 called the Republican Party. It was created in direct response to the Kansas-Nabrasca Act, which allowed slavery to expand into newly created Western territories. The Republicans first nominated a presidential candidate in 1856, John C. Fremont

of California, who lost a Democrat James Buchanan. One of the primary issues in the Republican platform of 1856 was stopping the expansion of slavery. Coming into 1860, there were many fractured interests and factions throughout the United States. There were groups that were staunchly pro-slavery, some that were strongly abolitionist, and many people who fell somewhere in between. On top of that, many of these groups existed within the same political party. 1860 had four different nominees for president who all won electoral votes representing four different political parties. At this point in the 19th century, parties usually decided everything at their national conventions. Candidate names may have been floated before the convention, but there were no primaries. Everything was debated and resolved at the

convention. The first convention was held by the Democrats. They were the largest, oldest, and the incumbent party. They first met on April 23rd in Charleston, South Carolina. The convention rules held that a candidate had to win two-thirds of the ballots to win the nomination. The early favorite was Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas held a position that was called the Freeport Doctrine. The Freeport Doctrine was Douglas's way to thread the needle between his belief in popular sovereignty and the Supreme Court's dread Scott decision. He thought that a territory could just not enforce laws on slavery if they didn't want to. It was a position that did not satisfy Southern Democrats. Douglas won a majority on the first ballot, but he didn't have the two-thirds majority required to win the nomination.

There were 57 ballots over the next 10 days, and on each one, Douglas won a majority and did not win the nomination. the nomination. The Democrats adjured the convention without a nominee and agreed to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18th. When the delegates arrived in Baltimore, many of the southern delegates boycotted the convention and held a convention of their own. They split over the Democrat position that they would honor whatever the Supreme Court said on the issue of slavery. With many of the delegates gone, Douglas quickly won the nomination, and Herschel Vespasian Johnson of Georgia was selected as his running mate. The Southern Democrats nominated their own pro-sumption slavery candidates at their Splinter Convention in Baltimore.

The incumbent vice president, John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, was their presidential candidate. And Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon was their vice presidential candidate. On May 9th, the Constitutional Union Party held its convention in Baltimore. The Constitutional Union Party was created by former Whig Party members from the South who opposed secession and couldn't bring themselves to join either the Republicans or the Democrats. They were basically a status quo party that didn't want the country to break. break up, yet honor what the Constitution said about slavery. Their primary appeal was to border states. Their nominee for president was Senator John Bell of Tennessee, and for vice president,

Edward Everett of Massachusetts. This was the only election that the Constitutional Union Party ever fielded a candidate. The last party to hold their convention were the Republicans. They convened on May 18th in Chicago. Going into the convention, the leading candidate was Senator William Seward of New York. However, there were several other candidates. which had significant support amongst the delegates, including Governor Salman P. Chase of Ohio, former Representative Edward Bates of Missouri, and Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, and of course, a former congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Going into the convention, Lincoln wasn't even in the top four in consideration for the

party nomination. The Republicans were by far the most abolitionist party, although their party platform did not call for the outright abolition of slavery. On the first ballot, Seward was not surprisingly the top vote-kitter, but he didn't have enough to get a majority. The man from Illinois was a surprising second. They were then followed by Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Salman P. Chase, and Edward Bates. Seward was considered radical, and he gave speeches that indicated he thought that war was inevitable. This scared many of the delegates and thought it would make him toxic to too many voters. Salman Chase used to be a Democrat, which turned away many former Whigs. Bates was a former member of the No-N-Nothing party, which alienated many of the ethnic

Germans. On the second ballot, Seward actually got a few more votes, but Lincoln got dramatically more and almost closed the gap. On the third ballot, Lincoln took the lead coming within three votes of securing the nomination. Finally, on the fourth ballot, support for everyone else collapsed, and Lincoln was a Republican nominee for president. The Republicans then chose Senator Hannibal Hamlin from Maine as the vice president. This was the first major party to ever select a presidential ticket without a southerner in American history. With four candidates in the mix, there was a lot of gamesmanship going on. To become president, you have to win a majority of votes in the electoral college, with each state getting electoral votes equivalent to the number of members they have in

Congress. If there isn't a majority, then the election is sent to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. That has only happened once in history. That has only happened once in history, in the election of 1824. The worst-case outcome for the southern slave states was a Lincoln victory. The majority of the electoral votes were in the northern states, so having the election sent to the House was their best option. Campaining was highly contentious, but mostly focused on getting out the vote. The candidates were so geographically split

that many only had hope of getting votes in certain states. Threats of secession grew throughout the campaign, although many people assumed that they were just threats and that no one would actually go through with it. regardless of the outcome of the election. Presidential campaigns at the time didn't have candidates speaking on their own behalf. They usually had other party members speak for them, and given the difficulties of transportation back then, a single candidate couldn't campaign that widely anyhow.

Douglas was the only candidate to campaign for himself, and he was the only candidate to actively campaign in both the north and the south. In 1860, ballots weren't secret, and everyone wasn't given a fresh ballot at the time of the election. political parties would provide their own ballots, usually in newspapers, that people could take to the polling place. Getting ballots into the hands of voters was probably the biggest thing a campaign did. The election was held on November 6, 1860, and at 81.2%, it was the highest turnout for an election in American history up to that point. And it remains the second highest turnout in history after the election of 1876. Lincoln swept all of the northern free states, save for three electoral votes from New Jersey, which,

split their votes. Lincoln got four and Douglas got three. He handily won ending up with 180 electoral votes, meaning only 152 to win. Of the 11 states, which would go on to leave the union, Lincoln received zero votes in 10 of them. The Republican Party never even bothered to hand out ballots. The one state where he did receive votes was Virginia, and in Virginia, he didn't get a vote in 121 of the states 145 counties. All of his votes in Virginia came from the area which would later break off and form the state of West Virginia. Outside of Douglas's three electoral votes from New Jersey, the only state he won was Missouri. Bell, from the Constitutional Union Party, won Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Everything else, including Delaware and Maryland, which stayed in the Union, went for Breckenridge and the Southern Democrats. One concern going into the election was that the anti-Republican vote was going to be split amongst three candidates. In the end, it wouldn't have mattered. Assuming they all had been grouped together, Lincoln would have only have only been, lost the then sparsely populated Oregon in California, which had a total of seven electoral votes. Because of the four-way race, Lincoln received only 39.7% of the popular vote, the second lowest winning amount in history behind only John Quincy Adams. The election of Lincoln was the worst-case scenario for the southern states come true. As it turned out, the threats of secession

by the southern states weren't threats. Just six weeks after the election, on December 20th, South Carolina formally left the Union. Over the next six weeks, six more states would leave, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Four more would leave in the months immediately after Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. Just one month after Lincoln took office, the Battle of Fort Sumner took place, which formally began the Civil War. The other candidates for president were mostly forgotten to history after the election. Stephen Douglas died in June of 1861. Had he been elected, he would have only been president for three months. He remained a supporter of the union and worked in the Senate to try to keep it together. John Bell supported the preservation of the

Union up through the attack on Fort Sumter, at which point he changed his alliance to the Confederacy, which shocked and disappointed his supporters as he ran on an anti-secession platform. After this, he retired from public life and died in 1869. John C. Brickenridge supported the Confederacy, even though his home state of Kentucky stayed in the Union. He became a major general in the Confederate Army, and later was appointed Secretary of State of the Confederate States of America. After the war, he fled to Cuba, then took a boat to England, and then crossed the Atlantic again to be reunited with his family in Toronto.

He eventually took up residence in Niagara Falls with an eyesight of the United States. He finally returned to the U.S. in 1869 after President Andrew Johnson had issued a general amnesty to all former Confederates. Back in Kentucky, he returned to his law practice and died in 1875. As for Abraham Lincoln, I'm sure most of you know the story, but I'll save the events surrounding his assassination for another episode. The election of 1860 was, at least in my mind, without any doubt, and by a wide margin, the most important election in American history. It literally broke the country apart. If there is ever an election that is more important than the election of 1860, I don't want to be around for it.

The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Jerry Westerby on Apple Podcasts. They write, Bite-sized fact snacks. This is a wonderful free gift. I like learning about things I didn't even know I was interested in, like Benedict Arnold. The length is right for my attention challenge brain. I feel smarter after each podcast. I'm not, but it's fun to feel that way. Thank you for making these episodes for curious minds. Thank you very much, Jerry. You have discovered the same. secret of this show. If you don't know what an episode will be about, those are the ones where you will learn the most. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show.