On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected the 16th president of the United States with just under 40% of the popular vote — and no electoral votes from a single Southern state. Within weeks, seven slave states voted to leave the Union. Lincoln’s election set America on the road to civil war and, through it, to the end of slavery.
The Rail-Splitter Who Split the Race
Lincoln’s victory was a feat of political engineering. The Democratic Party — the dominant force of the era — fractured into Northern and Southern factions over the expansion of slavery, while the Republicans, only four years old, united behind Lincoln, a former one-term congressman whose prairie origins and antislavery moderation made him acceptable across the North. Lincoln won every free state except New Jersey (which he split), taking 180 electoral votes against three divided opponents. He was the first Republican president, and the first elected with zero support from the South.
The Secession Winter
Southern secessionists had promised exactly this: Lincoln’s election would be the signal. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860; six more states followed by February. Lincoln refused to recognize secession as legal — “the Union of these States is perpetual” — but also refused to fire the first shot. That came at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and the war that followed became, in Lincoln’s own evolving understanding, a crusade against slavery: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), black troops in Union blue, and finally the 13th Amendment (December 18, 1865, covered elsewhere in this series).
The Measure of the Man
Lincoln carried the war to victory and was re-elected in 1864, then murdered by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865, days after Appomattox. His genius, historians agree, was a rare combination: absolute firmness on the Union’s survival, humility about his own certainties, and language that gave the war’s slaughter meaning — the Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863 (covered in this series), and the second inaugural’s “malice toward none.” One hundred sixty-six years after that November Tuesday, Lincoln remains the American ideal of presidential character — the man elected with the fewest votes, who did the most.
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