[Yesterday saw the beginning of The American Interest’s commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial over at The Long Recall. I will be following the Civil War era news day by day on our new aggregator, and from time to time will play Civil War pundit: writing political commentary on the events of the day as far as possible as if I was reading this news for the first time. These posts will be cross-posted on the Civil War site.]
As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to begin in March of 1861. 152 of the 303 electoral votes were needed; although West Coast results will not be known until the Pony Express brings the news across the western deserts, the Illinois rail-splitter appears to have won 173 even without California and Oregon.
Second, as southern critics immediately and vociferously pointed out, Lincoln’s victory was entirely regional. He failed to carry a single state or even a congressional district south of the Mason Dixon line. Of the 16 free states reporting in he carried all except New Jersey (which split its electoral votes); of the 15 slave states he carried not a one.
Not only did he fail to carry any of the slave states. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, the President-elect of the United States failed to receive one single popular vote. In nine states of the Union, not one citizen could be found willing to stand up and vote for the Republican candidate. (In South Carolina, no popular poll was held; had one been, it seems certain that Lincoln would have failed to receive any support there.)
The third fact is also of the discouraging kind likely to temper the celebrations in Springfield. Abraham Lincoln was elected by only 39.8% of the popular vote. This is the weakest mandate that any American president has had since the election of 1824 when the popular vote was first counted. Had the Democrats not split, Lincoln would have lost the popular vote in a landslide: 2,823,965 for the Democrats versus 1,865,593 for the Republican. The sixteenth president of the United States will take the oath of office knowing that almost two thirds of his fellow citizens voted against him.
When Lincoln’s southern opponents denounce him as a minority president who owes power more to a flawed electoral system than to the will of the people, they will not just be whistling Dixie. Should talk of secession escalate into civil war, Lincoln will have to persuade voters who wanted another candidate elected to fight and die for his right to be President.
Paradoxically, Lincoln would have won the presidency even if the Democrats had united. If the popular votes against Lincoln are combined, with the possible exceptions of late-reporting Oregon and California, no states shift out of the Republican column.
But his weak — or, more candidly, his non-existent — popular mandate is not the only grave weakness with which the new administration must cope. The Republican Party lacks majorities in both the House and the Senate. With only 28 out of 68 seats in the Senate, the new president cannot expect much help with his legislative agenda.
Meanwhile, the president-elect will face competition from the barons of his party, many of whom are still smarting from his surprise, dark horse win at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia. William Seward, Salmon Chase and Charles Sumner feel no loyalty and perhaps little respect for the awkward outsider who has not held national office since a brief stint as a one term congressman during the Mexican War. The Republican Party itself is a new and fragile thing; old Whigs, Know-Nothings, American Party zealots and even anti-slavery Democrats rub along uncomfortably in a party that could fly apart under stress. It is hard to know whether Lincoln should worry more that his party will fall apart or that it will revolt against him; either event would be a disaster for an inexperienced president facing a skeptical public and hostile Congress.
Arguably, America’s greatest problem in the last 12 years has been a string of weak presidents. Not since James Knox Polk left the Executive Mansion in 1849 has a president mastered the political currents to provide real leadership to a distracted and divided people. Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore (perhaps the best of a bad lot), Franklin Pierce and the current (very) lame duck incumbent James Buchanan: history is unlikely to remember, much less honor, any of these names.
The best news for the incoming President — that the opposition remains hopelessly split — does not augur well for the ability of Congress to find compromise solutions to the political tension gripping a divided country. In the past, great congressional leaders like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay managed to find common ground between North and South when tensions over slavery boiled over. Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem well placed to play that role in the new Congress.
Moderates like Stephen Douglas (D-Il) and ex-Whig “Constitutional Unionist” John Bell have just spent the last election campaign attacking each other. The bitter feelings of last summer’s breakup between Northern and Southern Democrats grew worse in the fall; Democrats seem unable to unite themselves, much less pull the country together. Few Republicans on the other hand seem willing to follow the path Daniel Webster took in 1850. Webster’s still-controversial decision to accept the Compromise of 1850 and support the deeply unpopular Fugitive Slave bill cost him dearly in New England and forced his resignation from the Senate. No Republican senator commands the instinctive respect that ‘godlike Daniel’ once did, and in today’s polarized climate, compromise with the so-called Slave Power is even more unpopular than in 1850.
What the country can look forward to, then, seems to be this: the discredited and divided lame-duck Buchanan administration will limp on until March, wringing its hands and perhaps feebly quacking. Congress will wrangle much but likely produce little. And a politically weak president elect, conscious that he lacks majority support and constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure his party is still behind him, will have very little room for error in what seem, if the latest dispatches from South Carolina are to be believed, to be difficult times ahead.