By 1860 the country was even more divided than ever.
In 1859 John Brown, hoping to start a slave uprising, had led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He was captured, tried, convicted, and executed; he became a martyr in the northern states, but the southern states became convinced that secession was their only recourse.
The northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party were split and ended up choosing different candidates: Stephen Douglas in the North and John Breckinridge in the South.
There was also a Constitution Union Party that consisted mainly of former Whigs who were chiefly concerned with preserving the Union. They nominated John Bell.
From Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller Jr.:
The Republicans met in a huge box-like structure called the “Wigwam” in Chicago in May and drew up a platform opposing the extension of slavery, denouncing Brown’s raid, and upholding the Union. As in 1856, their platform also contained a number of economic proposals designed to attract businessmen in the Northeast and farmers in the West: a protective tariff, the building of a transcontinental railroad, and a homestead act giving free land to settlers. The chief contenders for the Republican nomination were William H.Seward of New York and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Seward had long been prominent in national affairs and was far better known than Lincoln, but he had made many political enemies. Furthermore, although a moderate, he had made statements from time to time that made him sound like an outright abolitionist. Lincoln, fifty-one, a newcomer to national politics, had “excited no hates anywhere,” was skillful in debate, and, as a self-made man, appealed to plain people in the West.’ In addition, he came from Illinois, an important state for the Republicans to carry. His friends worked hard for his nomination and finally succeeded in putting him over on the third ballot. The convention chose Hannibal Hamlin, former Democrat from Maine, to run with him.
…
Lincoln was not on the ballot in the South, and the 1860 campaign resolved itself essentially into two campaigns: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North, and Bell vs. Breckinridge in the South. Bell’s supporters rang bells of all sizes, shapes, and sounds at their rallies, Breckinridge orators warned of the threat to the South posed by a Republican victory, and Douglas men told voters: “We need a statesman, not a rail splitter as President.” But the Republicans conducted the most energetic canvass of them all. They sponsored torchlight parades of young men called “Wide Awakes,” rail-splitters’ battalions, and marches made up of men just as tall as Lincoln (six feet four in stocking feet); they also attacked the Buchanan administration as wasteful and corrupt, extolled “High Old Abe,” the “Woodchopper of the West,” and urged people: “Vote yourselves a Farm.” Lincoln himself decided not to “write or speak anything upon doctrinal points” lest his remarks be distorted by his opponents; but he received a stream of visitors-friends, politicians, officeseekers, reporters, photographers, painters-in Springfield, Illinois, during the campaign.
Douglas went out on the stump. He was the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person. Not only did he campaign in New England; he also took his campaign to the South, where he urged people to accept the outcome of the election peacefully. “The election of a man to the Presidency by the American people in conformity with the Constitution of the United States,” he told them, “would not justify any attempt at dissolving this glorious confederacy.” But many Southerners were implacable. “The South,” announced the Southern Confederacy in Atlanta, Georgia, in August, “will never permit Abraham Lincoln to be inaugurated President of the United States; this is a settled and a sealed fact. It is the determination of all parties in the South. Let the consequences be what they may, whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies, or whether the last vestige of liberty is swept from the face of the American continent, the South, the loyal South, the constitutional South, will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.”
Douglas was in Iowa when he heard that Lincoln had carried Pennsylvania and would probably win the election. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” he exclaimed. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.”9 And he boarded the train, headed south, and gave scores of speeches from balconies and car platforms upholding the Union.
The split in the Democratic party made Lincoln’s victory an almost foregone conclusion. “THE THING IS DID!” exulted the Bucyrus Journal in Ohio. “The Most Glorious Triumph Ever Achieved! Lincoln Elected! Disunion Rebuked! DOUGLAS NON EST. BRECKINRIDGE NOWHERE! BELL THE COUNTRY SAVED! A Chance for a Big Yell.”‘” But with 1,866,452 votes, Lincoln polled only about 40 percent of the popular vote; his three opponents together won almost a million more votes than he did: Douglas, 1,376,957 (29 percent), Breckinridge, 849,781 (18 percent), and Bell, 588,879 (13 percent). But his electoral victory was substantial: 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72, Bell’s 39, and Douglas’s 12. Even if the votes of Lincoln’s three opponents had been cast for one candidate, he would still have won a decisive majority in the Electoral College because he carried the populous states of the North and the West.
James Russell Lowell had predicted the election would be a turning point in American history and he was correct. The electoral vote showed that the American people had, for the first time, voted along sectional lines: Lincoln carried 18 free states, Breckinridge, 11 slave states, Bell, 3 border states, and Douglas, Missouri and 3 New Jersey votes. But the majority of voters undoubtedly favored the preservation of the Union. Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell all stood for the Union; and Douglas and Bell outpolled Breckinridge in parts of the South. On December 20, however, a special convention meeting in Charleston, resolved that “the Union now subsisting between South Caroline and other States, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.”” Soon other states in the South followed South Carolina out of the Union. And then came America’s worst war.
Lincoln’s Looks
Many newspapers in the North approved the selection of Lincoln as Republican candidate, but some papers were extremely hostile. Complained the Atlas and Argus in Albany, New York: “He… is not known except as a slang-whanging stump speaker of which all parties are ashamed.” The New York Herald was even more contemptuous: “The conduct of the Republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of the small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over Seward, Chase and Bates, who are statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar, and who, to raise the wind, delivers his hackneyed, illiterate compositions at $200 apiece. Our readers will recollect that this peripatetic politician visited New York two or three months ago on his financial tour, when, in return for the most unmitigated trash, interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes, he filled his empty pockets with dollars coined out of Republican fanaticism. If, after he becomes President of the United States, the public finances should fail, he can set out on a lecturing mission through the country, taking Horace Greeley along with him.”
The reaction to Lincoln in the South was, to say the least, unfriendly. “A horrid looking wretch he is,” said the Charleston Mercury, “sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man, a creature ‘fit evidently for petty treason, small stratagems and all sorts of spoils.’ He is a lank-sided Yankee of the uncomeliest visage, and of the dirtiest complexion. Faugh! after him what decent white man would be President?” The Houston Telegraph also stressed his bad looks. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.”
— Presidential Campaigns by Paul F. Boller Jr.
On the fatal night, April 14, 1865, Lincoln did not want to go to the theater. He had seen the play, Our American Cousin, once before and was not anxious to see it again. He tried to get out of going, but Mrs. Lincoln had her heart set on it. “It has been advertised that we will be there,” Lincoln told White House guard Colonel William H. Crook, “and I cannot disappoint the people. Otherwise I would not go. I do not want to go.” As he left, he said, “Goodbye, Crook.” This puzzled the guard. Ordinarily the President said, “Good-night.”
— Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller Jr.
If you believe that the Union was worth preserving, then there are two persons that deserve the credit for that. Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln.
And Grant couldn’t have done it without Lincoln.
Lincoln gets my vote as the best president we ever had (but if you want to nominate George Washington, I won’t argue against it).