ridiculed in the older Republican States as no other presidential
candidate had been since "Old Hickory" offered himself as against the
seasoned statesmanship of John Quincy Adams. The gentry of the East were
in a worse plight than were the Southern statesmen of 1828, for Lincoln
was more of a democrat than Jackson had been.

But if certain classes of the East accepted mournfully the candidate of
their party, the plain people everywhere, farmers, mechanics,
shopkeepers, and the smaller industrial interests, rejoiced that one of
their own had been selected. While it is not likely that this caused
many changes from one party to another, it did tend to bring out the
vote and prevent the election from going to the House. Professional
abolitionists could not honestly support the platform of the
Republicans, but anti-slavery men, old-line Whigs, half of the former
Know-Nothing party, and all of those who had so long feared or hated the
South could cheerfully vote for Lincoln. In the Northwest it was an
evenly matched contest. Douglas was only a little less popular than his
great rival, the cause of his final defeat being the decision of the
German element to cast in their lot with the Republicans. Carl Schurz,
one of the best men who ever took part in American public life, and a
radical of the radicals, exercised a decisive influence and turned the
tide in Illinois and Iowa, where a few thousand votes lost would have
defeated Lincoln. Though the enthusiasm of the Republicans was not so
great as it had been in 1856, the people of the East and the Northwest
did unite against the South, as planned in the Chicago platform, which
so well represented the interests of the combination.

The South gave every evidence that secession would follow the election
of Lincoln, and when the Maine campaign indicated that Lincoln would
surely be chosen, Douglas gave up his canvass in the Northwest and went
South in the hope of saving the Union by urging the leaders there that
secession would mean war. In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama he
foretold plainly the awful consequences of secession. But the lower
South paid little heed; their leaders, Rhett and Yancey, were ready to
take the first steps to disrupt the Union upon the receipt of news that
the Democrats had lost the election. To them Lincoln was not only a
democrat who believed in the equality of men before the law; he was
also a "black Republican," the head of a sectional party who