150-Year Anniversary ยท November 1860
The presidential canvass of 1860 split along sectional lines as no contest before it. The Democratic Party fractured at its Charleston and Baltimore conventions, nominating the northern candidate Stephen A. Douglas and the southern candidate John C. Breckinridge separately. The new Constitutional Union Party put forward John Bell of Tennessee, while the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois on a platform opposing the extension of slavery into the western territories.
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln carried every free state and won a clear majority in the Electoral College, though he gathered under forty percent of the popular vote and appeared on few southern ballots. The result confirmed the deepest fear of the slaveholding South: a president elected entirely by northern votes, pledged to halt slavery's growth.
Within weeks of the count, South Carolina called a convention to consider leaving the Union. The election of 1860 did not by itself cause the war, but it removed the last hope of the fire-eaters' opponents that the sectional crisis could be postponed any longer.
Lincoln's election was the political spark; the military story came after. That military story begins on the American Civil War homepage.