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

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 Frémont 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 Blows of the Civil War (1879); George W. Julian's Political Recollections (1884); and Henry S. Foote's Casket of Reminiscences (1874), may be added to the works already mentioned. E. D. Fite's The Campaign of 1860 (1911) is valuable, although Rhode's account of the campaign equals Fite's; and E. Stanwood's A History of the Presidency (1898) gives the platforms and the votes of the parties for each national election.

The Tribune Almanac gives the votes by counties, while Richardson's Messages and Papers of the Presidents, already named in earlier notes, and the Statutes at Large of the United States supply the texts of important papers, laws, and treaties. Richard Peters's Reports of Cases Argued in the Supreme Court and B. C. Howard's continuation of this series supply the decisions of the Federal Supreme Court. U. B. Phillips's Correspondence of Toombs, Stephens, and Cobb, in the Reports of the American Historical Association (1911), is a valuable contribution to the sources of the period.

Special studies of importance are: W. E. B. DuBois's Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896); M. G. McDougall's Fugitive Slaves (1891), J. C. Hurd's Law of Freedom and Bondage (1858); Edward McPherson's Political History of the United States (1865); John H. Latané's Diplomacy of the United States in Regard to Cuba, in American Historical Association Reports (1907); J. M. Callahan's Evolution of Seward's Mexican Policy (1909); Phillips's Life of Robert Toombs (1914); and H. White's Life of Lyman Trumbull (1913). Of peculiar value for the spirit of the times are: Mrs. Roger A. Pryor's Reminiscences of Peace and War (1905); Mrs. James Chesnut's A Diary from Dixie (1905); and William H. Russell's My Diary North and South (1863).