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:
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The Republican Vice Presidential Candidate ... asks you to place him a heartbeat from the Presidency.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)