United States Presidential Election, 1860
The United States presidential election of 1860 was a quadrennial election held on November 6, 1860, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War.
The United States had been divided during the 1850s on questions surrounding the expansion of slavery and the rights of slave owners. In 1860, these issues broke the Democratic Party into Northern and Southern factions, and a new Constitutional Union Party appeared. In the face of a divided opposition, the Republican Party, dominant in the North, secured enough electoral votes to put Abraham Lincoln in the White House without support from the South.
Before Lincoln's inauguration, seven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy. Secessionists from four additional Border states joined the rebellion at Lincoln's call to restore federal property in the South. Following South Carolina's secessionist movement, the Union admitted Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada as free-soil states. Nevertheless, the Civil War disrupted the electoral process to the extent that no Presidential Electoral votes were recognized from all eleven Southern states in 1864.
Read more about United States Presidential Election, 1860: Historical Background, Campaign, Results, An Election For Disunion, Results By State
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or presidential:
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as “right” in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as “brute force.””
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)