Year of Meteors by Douglas R. Egerton

Author:Douglas R. Egerton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Voters in 1860 did not yet use paper ballots or vote behind curtains. Voters had to obtain a ticket, which included all state party candidates, from a party functionary and then deposit the ticket into a bowl or box marked by party affiliation. Only 1,887 courageous Virginians, or 1.1 percent of the state’s voters, obtained a Republican ticket. Because Republicans fielded no candidates for governor or Congress, the Virginia ticket was shorter than in northern states. Courtesy Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield.

As is ever the case, many voters surely cast their ballots against one candidate as much as they did for another. After eight years of Democratic blunders, scandals, and mismanagement, Douglas was badly tainted by his party affiliation despite his public break with the unpopular Buchanan. Although Douglas endorsed many of the legislative items important to northern voters—a railroad to the Pacific, a homestead act, and federal support for internal improvements—his party did not, while the Republican platform embraced all three. Douglas might be the enemy of his party’s fire-eating southern wing, but they remained members of the Democracy, and the northern candidate paid the price for their disloyalty. In the popular vote, Douglas ran second with 1,380,201, but that was a meager 29.4 percent of the ballots cast. He won only 3 electoral votes in the free states, by taking half of New Jersey’s count; the only state he carried outright was Missouri, and there his tally of 58,801 votes inched ahead of Bell’s count by a mere 429 ballots. With 12 electoral votes, Douglas, once so sanguine of victory, finished fourth in the College; only Gerrit Smith, who never expected to carry any state, did worse.67

Most of the upper South stood behind Bell, who carried Virginia, Tennessee, and Breckinridge’s Kentucky for a total of 38 electoral votes. Although he came in third in the Electoral College, his popular count of 590,901 placed him fourth among voters, with only 12.6 percent of the ballots cast. In the three states Bell captured, he carried those counties once loyal to the Whigs. But in the free states, former Whigs rallied to Lincoln, himself a former Whig. In Massachusetts, once a reliable Whig stronghold, Bell gathered only 13.1 percent of the votes, while in Pennsylvania, a state carried by Whig candidate Zachary Taylor in 1848, only 2.6 percent of the votes went to the Constitutional Unionists. “The ‘old line Whigs,’” as William Herndon had confidently predicted, were “almost unanimously and wildly for Lincoln.” In Indiana, one of the states Frémont had failed to carry in 1856, Lincoln won at least 40 percent of the votes once cast for Millard Fillmore, while Bell garnered only 1.3 percent of that state’s votes.68

As late as July 4, Douglas had been confident that Breckinridge could not “carry a single State, except South Carolina, and perhaps Miss[issippi].” In fact, the vice president won eleven states, from Maryland and Delaware along the border to Texas in the Southwest. Breckinridge’s electoral vote of 72 put him in second place and was greater than the combined electoral count of Bell and Douglas.

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