se platform
bespoke sectional interests and the isolation of the South.

[Illustration: The Presidential Election of 1860 California & Oregon]

[Illustration: The Presidential Election of 1860]

In the end Lincoln received a popular vote slightly greater than that of
Buchanan in 1856, and the electoral vote of every State from Maine to
Iowa and Minnesota. Douglas received a larger vote than Fremont had
received, but only twelve electoral votes. It was plain that the people
of the North were by no means unanimous, and that Lincoln would have
great difficulty in carrying out any severely anti-Southern measures,
especially as the Republicans had failed to carry a majority of the
congressional districts. Thus the blunders of Douglas and Chase in 1854
had started the dogs of sectional warfare, and now a solid North
confronted a solid South, with only two or three undecided buffer
States, like Maryland and Missouri, between them.

Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky of Virginia parentage, married to a
Southern woman, accustomed from boyhood to the narrow circumstances of
the poor, and still unused to the ways of the great, was called to the
American Presidency. He was not brusque and warlike as Jackson had been;
he was a kindly philosopher, a free-thinker in religion at the head of
an orthodox people, or peoples. A shrewd judge of human character and
the real friend of the poor and the dependent, Lincoln, like his
aristocratic prototype, Thomas Jefferson, believed implicitly in the
common man. He was ready to submit anything he proposed to a vote of the
mass of lowly people, who knew little of state affairs and who never
expected to be seen or heard in Washington. People who had preached
democracy to Europe for nearly a century had now the opportunity of
submitting to democracy. It was the severest test to which the Federal
Government had ever been subjected.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Rear Admiral Chadwick's _Causes of the Civil War_, in the _American
Nation_ series (1906); Nicolay and Hay's _Abraham Lincoln: A History_
(1890); Ida M. Tarbell's _The Life of Abraham Lincoln_ (1900); O. G.
Villard's _John Brown; A Biography_ (1910); G. T. Curtis's _The Life of
James Buchanan_ (1883); A. H. Stephen's _War between the States_
(1868-70); Jefferson Davis's _Rise and Fall of the Confederate
Government_ (1881); Murat Halstead's _Conventions of 1860_; G. Koerner's
_Memoirs_; Carl Schurz's _Reminiscences_; James A. Pike's _First Blo