When the election came they polled no less than 589,581 votes and carried thirty-nine electoral votes against Douglas's twelve and Breckinridge's seventy-two. But their hope of throwing the election into the House of Representatives was doomed to disappointment.
The Republican convention met at Chicago on May 16, and after some contest nominated Mr. Lincoln. When all the nominations were made, presenting three candidates in opposition to him, Mr. Lincoln's election was practically certain, with only the remote chance that the choice might be thrown into the House of Representatives, as a possible doubt of that result. In fact he was elected, though the majority against him on the popular vote was nearly a million.
In the meantime the canvass had mightily tended to additional embitterment. It had drawn the line more sharply than ever between the sections. It had completely disrupted and scattered into three warring groups all those forces that stood out against a party which had no being except in one section of the Union. It had familiarized men's minds with the idea of disunion. It had been a campaign of threats and defiances. It had well-nigh made an end of conservatism as a sentiment influential on either side. It had intensified distrust, accentuated hatred, embittered the relations of men, and prepared the minds of the people North and South for disunion and war.
The time had come which statesmen had so long foreboded when threats of disunion—oft repeated on both sides and usually received scoffingly as mere vaporings—took on a seriously menacing character. The time had come when the warring sectional interests, prejudices and principles were ready to make final appeal to the brutal arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. The situation had been strained to the breaking point, and the fact that it did not break at once was due to conditions and inspirations which need another chapter for their explanation.
[CHAPTER X]
The Birth of War
The election of Mr. Lincoln filled the whole country with alarmed apprehension. At the North no less than at the South men anxiously asked of themselves and of their neighbors "What is going to happen?"
What had already happened was something unprecedented in the history of the country. On its face it was merely the election of a president by a majority of the electoral college vote, against whose election there had been a heavy popular majority.
The like had happened several times before and the occurrence had never before excited the least apprehension or created the least alarm or suggested the smallest protest. It had been accepted in every case as a natural result of our complex electoral system, which combines representation of population with representation of the states as such without regard to population, and which gives to each state the right to cast the whole of its electoral vote in accordance with the will of a majority of its people. It was a recognized fact that under this system a president might easily be chosen by a minority vote of the people, provided that minority vote was so distributed among the states as to secure an electoral majority in his behalf. There was no ground of complaint, therefore, and in fact no complaint was anywhere made, that Mr. Lincoln was elected in the face of an adverse majority of about 950,000 popular votes.