The subtext of most elections is change – the need for change when times are bad or the direction of the country is troubling and the need to resist change when times are good. Each voter’s assessment of the temper of the times and thus his decision whether to select one candidate over another are often discussed as rational acts, but they contain an emotional component as well, touching that voter’s hopes and fears. Our times have shown us that election campaigns seek to make both rational and emotional connections with individual voters.
Although the rhetoric of campaign speeches presents itself as reasoned discourse, the overall election experience is an appeal to emotions, and in the election of 1860 this meant catchphrases, slogans, songs, rallies, and torchlight parades. Even though a political speech in 1860 might go on for more than an hour, the more successful speakers did not attempt to educate their listeners so much as they tried to entertain and engage them. Politics in 1860 was a form of popular entertainment, and the purpose of the election campaign was as much to rally the party faithful as it was to reach out to the undecided.
The pattern of most successful election campaigns is a crescendo of emotion that peaks just before the vote, and in the normal course of events the outcome prompts elation among supporters of the victors and disappointment among supporters of the defeated candidates, each of which generally subsides in a short time and gives way to acceptance of the results. The normal course of events did not occur in 1860. The election was emotionally charged due to the decades of political controversy over slavery, which intensified just before and during the election season, and the often repeated proposition that the election of a Republican candidate as president of the United States would be sufficient cause for the southern states to secede from the federal union. Whereas southern anxiety, fear, and anger might have subsided following the election of Abraham Lincoln, it remained whipped up as the states of the lower South called secession conventions and held a second set of elections to select delegates to them. These circumstances kept emotions charged as much as the just-completed presidential election and converted southern anxiety, fear, and anger into hope, righteousness, and determination.
The prior chapters have examined the resources, capabilities, products, and processes that existed in the United States in 1860 and treated the year as a point in time, the sequence of events having relatively little importance in the discussion. When we turn to politics in 1860, and in particular to the presidential election, sequence becomes significant for two reasons. First, an election is an event that occurs at a fixed point in time: the events that precede the vote influence the result, and the election tally affects the events that follow. Second, the election of a Republican as president in 1860 was the precipitating cause of the of the secession movement. The causal connection between the election result and the Civil War is less proximate but nonetheless direct: without a Republican victory, the secession movement would not have occurred, and without a secession movement, the war would not have occurred. President Lincoln’s statement in his second inaugural address – that he “accepted” war rather than let the nation perish – is a strained interpretation of the events culminating in the attack on Fort Sumter. As discussed below, President Lincoln took a high-stakes, low-risk gamble on the predictability of human nature that brought the war.
Accordingly we will examine the sequence of several periods of time leading up to the 1860 election and from it to the start of the Civil War. These include the preliminary events to distinguish the 1860 presidential election from those that preceded it and that reinforced the conditions that led to war; the campaign preliminaries in which the political parties chose their candidates; the election campaigns that involved advocacy on behalf of the four candidates as well as agitation for secession if the Republican won; and the balloting and the election result that immediately gave rise to the secession movement and, shortly thereafter, to the formation of the Confederacy and the start of the war.
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