Rebecca Onion: How did the 1860 election set Lincoln up for this rough transition?
Susan Schulten: The 1860 election was unlike any other, because for the first time the contest wasn’t only party versus party. Of course there was a long history of robust partisanship in the antebellum era, but for the first time the country was also divided politically by section.
The Democratic Party broke apart on sectional lines. They couldn’t even agree on a single candidate in the summer of 1860, so the North went with Stephen Douglas, and the Southerners went their way with John Breckinridge, a pro-slavery, states-rights, pro-secession candidate. And of course the Republicans had no hope of getting any electoral votes in the South; they barely appeared on any Southern ballots.
In the postmortem, even if you add up the electoral votes of the other three candidates [Douglas, Breckinridge, and the Constitutional Union candidate John Bell], Lincoln still prevailed. That’s really important because part of the radical Southern pro-slavery position had to do with the fact that they considered the Republican Party illegitimate. By its party platform, radical Southerners considered it by definition hostile to slavery—because the party, of course, was born out of the desire of Congress to regulate slavery.
So the very outcome of the election confirmed to the South, particularly South Carolina, which ended up leading the secessionist movement, that it had no voice.
Now Northerners would say, and Lincoln says something like this in his first inaugural address: Get over it. We had elections; this is what democracy is.
Basically, “elections have consequences.”
Right. But for Deep Southern pro-slavery ideologues, the election itself was unacceptable, and so the outcome wasn’t a surprise to them. And as soon as the outcome was clear, they put their plans in motion.
If you were paying attention, in the sense that you knew where Electoral College power was in 1860, it wasn’t a surprise that the Republicans won. But in the aftermath of that, there was this interminable period of transition—four months. It must have felt like an absolute eternity.
What did Buchanan do during that time?
What he did had tremendous consequences. He had this weird position, which is that he was against secession. He was a Unionist—he didn’t believe that the Constitution gave the Southern states the right to secede. But at the same time, he repeatedly made these public statements, saying, I don’t have any power to bring these seceding states back, and I have no power to control federal forts or garrisons. So his actions seemed to belie his stated commitments.