Politics
Although winning only 40% of the vote nationwide in 1860, Abraham Lincoln won Indiana's 13 electoral votes with 51.09% of the vote statewide, compared to Stephen Douglas's 42.44%, John Breckenridge's 4.52%, and John Bell's 1.95%.
Due to their location across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, the Indiana cities of Jeffersonville, New Albany, and Port Fulton saw increased trade and military activity. Some of this increase was due to Kentucky's desire to stay neutral in the war. In addition, Kentucky was home to many Confederate sympathizers, and bases were needed for Union operations against Confederates in Kentucky. Militarily, it was safer to store war supplies in towns on the north side of the Ohio River. Camp Joe Holt was established between Jeffersonville and New Albany in what is the present-day visitor's center of the Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville, Indiana. Towards the end of the war, Port Fulton was home to the third-largest hospital in the United States, Jefferson General Hospital, which was built on land confiscated from expelled U.S. Senator and Confederate sympathizer Jesse D. Bright.
Read more about this topic: Indiana In The American Civil War
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The real grounds of difference upon important political questions no longer correspond with party lines.... Politics is no longer the topic of this country. Its important questions are settled... Great minds hereafter are to be employed on other matters.... Government no longer has its ancient importance.... The people’s progress, progress of every sort, no longer depends on government. But enough of politics. Henceforth I am out more than ever.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices.... Politics has once again become religious.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)