The Election of 1860 Reconsidered ed. by A. James Fuller (review)

Although little remembered today, the presidential contest of 1860 actually featured four candidates—Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell—vying for the nation’s highest office. In this new volume on the election, editor A. James Fuller has assembled a comprehensive and innovative series of essays on the “most important election in American history” (1). The impetus for the volume stemmed from the third annual symposium of the Civil War Study Group, held in September 2010 and hosted by the Institute for the Study of War and Diplomacy at the University of Indianapolis. Several of the contributors teach history in the state of Indiana or nearby, which makes this collection not only a contribution to the literature on the election of 1860 or to the historiography of the causes of the Civil War, but also to the practice of academic history of Indiana and the Midwest more generally.

While the topic and intention of this volume is self-evident from the title, the project also contributes to a growing revitalization of political history in the American academy. In the introduction, the editor lays out three key themes—political biography, ideology, and political culture—and argues for this volume’s contribution to the wider historiography. Although the short introduction offers a valuable first blush to the topic, readers already familiar with the election will benefit from starting with the final chapter of the volume—”An Inscrutable Election?: The Historiography of the Election of 1860,” by Douglas G. Gardner. In the first half of the chapter, Gardner offers an eminently useful review of major works on the election of 1860. In the second half, the author provides insightful analysis about the essays in the present volume and therefore helps to direct readers toward topics of interest.

The first four chapters feature essays by the historians Michael S. Green, James L. Huston, and A. James Fuller. Given that each in turn addresses one of the four principal candidates—Lincoln, Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell—they collectively present a satisfying set of chapters in terms of unity of scope and clarity of focus. Michael S. Green places the emphasis on candidate Abraham Lincoln and proceeds through the three distinct phases of the presidential campaign. James L. Huston considers in some depth Douglas’s southern tour and lays out the multiple dilemmas facing each side. In particular, Huston’s essay helps to illustrate the near impossible position from which a northern Democrat such as Douglas operated in the fall of 1860. In a pair of essays on Breckinridge and Bell, A. James Fuller draws the reader’s attention to two of the less well-known figures in the election of 1860. Fuller attempts to unite various historiographical interpretations of Breckinridge’s campaign under the lens of honor, which feels to this reader somewhat overwrought given his careful attention to the complexity (and validity) of other interpretations. With respect to candidate Bell, Fuller finds the presidential contender to be “last true Whig” and argues that historians should better know him.

The next several essays move beyond the quadrangle of presidential aspirants and turn to views of the election from a variety of other perspectives. In his essay on Frederick Douglass, the historian John R. McKivigan provides the background to Douglass’s long and conflicted relationship to national electoral politics and uses the election of Abraham Lincoln to confirm the merit of this caution. Thomas E. Rodgers stakes a claim for republicanism as an explanatory cause in the election’s outcome, tying the concept to the ethnocultural approaches of past historians. Although Rodgers mentions the state of Indiana in passing, A. James Fuller makes the Hoosier State the central focus of his delightfully polemical essay on realignment theory with respect to the election of 1860. In his focus on contingency, short-term strategy, and valence issues, Fuller stands in some ways opposed to the claims made in the Rodgers essay, but at times, the former...