Unlikely Election

When seven southern states seceded from the Union over the winter of 1860– 61, they did so mainly as a result of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln was an unlikely winner from an unlikely party in an unlikely year.

- Michael Green

The unlikely party was the Republican party. It had emerged when the Democratic party split and the Whig party collapsed— both over the issue of slavery and its expansion into western territories. The Republicans mostly were antislavery northerners, and they had sought to win the presidency for the first time in 1856. In that year, they chose onetime explorer John C. Fremont as their candidate, and their party platform opposed the spread of slavery into new territories. That same year, another new political party, the American, or Know-Nothing, party, nominated former president Millard Fillmore. Their platform focused on stopping immigration.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were proslavery southerners or northerners who did not care whether or not slavery expanded into new western territory. The Democrats’ nominee in 1856, Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, was a northerner. Since southerners refused to support any antislavery candidate, the election divided along regional lines. Buchanan ran against Fremont in the North and against Fillmore in the South. Buchanan won the 1856 election, but Fremont’s showing gave the Republicans confidence. With the right candidate, they believed they could win in 1860.

Initially the strongest candidate in the unlikely year of 1860 was Senator William H. Seward of New York. But he struck fellow Republicans as too radically antislavery to be elected. Critics accused him and his ally, New York political boss Thurlow Weed, of corruption. Powerful New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley had a personal grudge against Seward, and he used his influence to weaken Seward’s candidacy.