The Election of 1860: “A Campaign Fraught with Consequences.” by Michael F. Holt (review)

A leading historian of antebellum politics, Holt pulls no punches in his concise study of the election of 1860. So far as he is concerned, it was “the most consequential presidential contest in all of American history” (xi). Ironically, most voters opposed the victorious (Republican) party and simultaneously desired to “throw the Democratic rascals out” in a fit of “national, not . . . sectional, passion” (xiii). The book is of greatest service to historians and other scholars by de-centering Abraham Lincoln and the Republican victors. The increasing division in the Democratic Party between Stephen Douglas’ supporters and James Buchanan’s loyalists about popular sovereignty and slavery extension was crucial to Lincoln’s chances, as were Republican efforts to win over northern nativists. Southern Whig and northern conservative anger at Democratic corruption— including alleged bribery and fraud crucial to Buchanan’s 1856 victory in several northern states—was decisive in convincing many white southerners in the border states to support an alternative to the Democratic candidates as well as to Lincoln. Holt complicates the traditional argument that this was an election of two different races—Lincoln versus Douglas in the North and John Bell versus John Breckinridge in the South. Rather, Holt emphasizes that all four candidates’ supporters made efforts to attract support outside their supposed section and that Bell attacked not only the Republican platform but also the corrupt Buchanan administration for endangering the Union.

Holt utilized two innovative sources instead of manuscripts for his study of this pivotal election—the state and national party platforms and newspapers. As he notes, antebellum American voters went to the ballot to support a party platform, not to elect a candidate. Presidential candidates were not supposed to campaign on their own behalf, a precedent that Douglas broke in this exceptional contest. An eminence grise among political historians, Holt is to be commended for his emphasis on local newspapers, venturing beyond the usual suspects of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. For instance, a Democratic newspaper in New Orleans presciently noted that if “the Democratic party breaks to pieces” at the party convention in Charleston, there would be “no bulwark to the encroachment of fanaticism” and Republican victory in 1860 (52).

Holt notes that savvy political observers could foresee a Republican presidency barely a week into October, when first-time voters in Pennsylvania and Indiana gave Republican state-level candidates strong victories in previous Democratic strongholds. “Defeatism among Democrats caused by the October result offers the best explanation for” a plunge in Democratic turnout in November, enabling Lincoln to win narrow victories in several midwestern and western states (177). Holt steers away from the traditional narrative that Lincoln was selected as the Republican candidate, rather than William Seward or Salmon Chase, because of his moderation regarding slavery, highlighting instead Lincoln’s reputation as an honest politician as opposed to Buchanan’s as a corrupt one. More crucially, Lincoln hailed from one of the “Lower North” states of Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania that Republicans needed to win in 1860, having lost them four years earlier due to a limited appeal among nativist voters.

Holt refers to the statistical analysis of this election published in the 1980s by historians Crofts and Gienapp; political scientists might prefer that he had featured the quantitative aspects of Crofts and Gienapp’s analysis more prominently. ¹ An early ecological regression of this election focusing on the Deep South, published in this journal’s winter 1978 issue, features Holt’s coverage of slaveholders’ voting patterns.² This book’s emphasis on party platforms (in the appendixes) and its analysis of the internecine debate about them at party conventions will be of interest to political scientists and historians seeking to integrate institutional rhetoric into studies of voter persuasion and turnout. A recent analysis of these platforms may be found in the third chapter of a recent book by Engstrom and Kernell...