How we elected Lincoln

by Abram J. Dittenhoefer

After fifty-seven ballots for President, in which Douglas had the majority in every instance, but not the two-thirds required for nomination in Democratic conventions, the convention adjourned on May 3, 1860, to reassemble at Baltimore, June 18. There, the places of the seceders having been filled, Douglas received one hundred and seventy-three and a half votes on the first ballot and one hundred and eighty-one and a half on the second, still lacking the vote of two-thirds of the three hundred and three delegates in convention. On motion of Sanford E. Church, of New York, who, in later years, became chief-justice of the Court of Appeals of that State, he was declared the nominee. Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia, was named as candidate for Vice-President.

The remnant of the Charleston convention gathered itself together in a separate convention, also held in Baltimore, on the eleventh day of June. It adjourned on the 25th of that month, when John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky,—at that time Vice-President under Buchanan—was unanimously named for President, with Gen. Joseph H. Lane, of Oregon, as his running mate.

In the Charleston convention Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, who during the Civil War became identified with the North and was made a major-general in the Union Army, cast a solitary vote for Jefferson Davis as the Democratic candidate for President.

The three-cornered contest that followed between Lincoln, Douglas, and Breckenridge is paralleled in American political history by the famous campaign of 1824 when Jackson, Adams, Clay, and Crawford, all of the same party, were running for the Presidency. As none of the latter received a majority of the electoral vote, the election, under the provisions of the Constitution, was thrown into the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams received the nomination.

When the committee went to Springfield to notify Mr. Lincoln of his nomination, Judge Kelly, of Pennsylvania, known, because of his service of over thirty years in Congress, as the father of the House of Representatives, was one of the committee. The judge was unusually large in stature, and his great height attracted Mr. Lincoln, who, upon shaking hands with him, asked, “What is your height, Judge?”

“About six feet three,” said Judge Kelly. “What is yours, Mr. Lincoln.”

“Six feet four,” replied Lincoln, with a smile, pulling himself up to his full stature.

“Pennsylvania,” said Judge Kelly, “bows to Illinois. My dear man, for years my heart has been aching for a President that I could ‘look up to,’ and I have found him in the land where we thought there was none but ‘Little Giants.’”

Lincoln replied, “There is one man in this country who, though little in stature, is a giant in mind, and he has given me much hard work to do.”

Mr. Lincoln’s reply to the committee that visited Springfield on May 19, to notify him of his nomination, and his formal letter of acceptance, dated May 23, avoided all reference to what Mr. Seward had described as “the impending crisis.” In his letter Mr. Lincoln pledged “due regard to the rights of all States and Territories and people of the nation, to the inviolability of the Constitution, and the perpetual union, harmony, and prosperity of all.” This assurance satisfied neither slaveholders of the South nor anti-slave men of the North. This letter often rose to haunt Lincoln in the latter part of the war, after he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation which gave freedom to all the slaves.