The U.S. Presidential Election of 1860

The presidential campaign of 1860 was one of the most divisive in American history. The outcome of the election directly led to the secession of seven states and ultimately, the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, only received a mere thirty-nine percent of the popular votes. Yet, the votes Lincoln received were enough to propel him to the presidency because of the split in the Democratic Party.

Slavery was a significant issue of the Election of 1860. The election revolved around federal policy regarding the status of slavery under the state and federal constitutions. The Northern states abolished slavery by the nineteenth century. Both Britain and American banned the slave trade. As Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire, a few northerners began to criticize the Southern slaveholders. By 1860, many northerners became annoyed at the South's insistence for slavery to be legal in the Western territories.¹ Many people in the North and West viewed slavery as an entity that needed to be defeated. The only way slavery could be defeated was to abolish it.²

The increased support the South received using black Republicanism for the pro-slavery movement showed that the Slave Power was gaining power. The threat of slavery expanding was a cause of the anti-slavery movement in the North.³ The slave power is "that control in and over the government of the United States which is exercised by a comparatively small number of persons, distinguished from the other twenty millions of free citizens, and bound together in a common interest, by being owners of slaves."⁴ The Slave Power was an aristocracy that believed slavery was not morally wrong but rather a right of the slaveholder.⁵ Senator Collamer described southern society as:

The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master as its head, who concentrates in himself the united interest of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative. These small communities aggregated to make the State.⁶