The Most Contested Election since 1860 Changes the Party Battleground
What do the historically divisive elections of 1860 and 2020 have in Common? They were both about changing demographics.
Question: What do the results of these contests telling the losing party?
Answer: That in the jungle of politics, as in nature, you have to adapt to survive.
When we see a Confederate flag flying on the steps of the Capitol building, we can’t help being reminded of some other deeply divisive moments in American history.
The deepest of these, of course, is the occasion that gave birth to that Confederate banner — which, as if in a nightmare, we saw waving on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
And it may be time to remind ourselves that just as the current assault on American democracy followed a deeply contested election, the secession of Southern states followed directly from the divisive Presidential election of 1860.
What lessons for today can be drawn from that fraught period?
First, that the 1860 election year stimulated changes in the American political party system of the time that was then — as now — regarded as the sacred and inviolable ‘two-party’ system. Everything fundamental that could happen to a political party did in fact happen to one or another of the political parties contesting the national election that year.
One of the major parties the mid-19th century, possessing a generational legacy that included several presidents — the Whigs —simply disappeared after its poor showing in the 1856 election.
Their one-time major party role was seized by a relatively new party, the Republicans, who had come into being only a half-dozen years before in order to back the “Free Soil” cause: categorical opposition to the expansion of slavery into new states and territories.
Another major party, the oldest and most deeply rooted of American political parties, suffered a near-mortal schism that rendered its presidential candidate a hopeless loser in the 1860 contest. That of course was the party of Thomas Jefferson, which had won by the greatest haul of 19th century presidents prior to 1860, the Democrats.
In 1860, as the crisis over the expansion of slavery came to a head: The dissident pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party left the national party convention and formed their own sectional party, popularly known as the Southern Democrats, which proved competitive only in the slave-state region of the country. While this splinter party swept most of the slave-holding states and amassed a good number of electoral votes, it still came far short of victory.
The major take-away from 1860 for the future of the American political party system is that parties do morph significantly over time — especially during national crises. Sometimes, like the Whigs, they simply disappear. Most Whig voters went over to the Republicans in order to support the Free Soil position, and the 1860 election was widely regarded as a referendum on that single, divisive issue.
It was not only former Whig voters who voted for the Republican candidate, a former Congressman named Abraham Lincoln, who had gained notice from the national publicity given to his closely followed series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas over the expansion of slavery. After the Southern Democrats left the party, the remnant “Northern Democrats” nominated Douglas, who neither embraced the Free Soil position, nor defended slavery. As a result Free Soil Democrats abandoned their party in droves to vote for Lincoln as well. On notable example: A lifelong ‘regular Democrat’ who edited and wrote for Democratic Party newspapers, poet Walt Whitman voted for the Republican candidate, Lincoln, because he so deeply opposed the spread of slavery.
Led by Douglas, Northern Democrats stood for a policy of ‘reconciliation’ between the sections. But the party won only one state in the general election, the slave-holding “border state” of Missouri.
And a fourth party, newly founded to contest the 1860 election, called itself the Constitutional Union Party and in its platform chose to avoid any mention whatsoever either of slavery or the “free soil” question. Northern voters also rejected that stand, and the new party did not win any electoral votes, quickly disappearing.
In effect, the 1860 election modeled all the major ways in which parties could undergo fundamental change:
They could suffer a stillborn disappearance, as the Constitutional Union party did. They could disappear, despite relatively recent successes, as the Whigs did, because a new party had taken a stronger position on the fundamental question of the day.
They could rise swiftly to a dominant place in the national government, as the Republican Party did, if their platform expressed the viewpoint of a majority (or plurality) of voters in a large number of states.
Or they could fragment, as the nation’s formerly largest party, the Democrats did, and suffer a major identity crisis.
American political history following 1860, however, also suggests that even parties that suffer deep, and temporarily disabling, fragmentations may rise again to reclaim power and win national elections. As, of course, the Democratic Party did, in less than a generation.
Yet a more detailed examination of the 1860 election reveals a less obvious parallel between 1860 and the facts of political life politics today.
While he won a strong majority in the Electoral College with 180 votes, Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote. His vote total was suppressed by the presence of four major candidates in the race. And it was also artificially reduced because the Republican Party was simply not permitted to appear on the ballot in slave-holding states. (Talk about bitter sectional divides!) While it was unlikely Lincoln would have received many votes in the deep South, insofar as secret ballot voting was practiced he would have received some.
Douglas, a runner-up in the Northern states, won 29.5 percent of the national total, but only (as mentioned) Missouri’s 9 electoral votes, plus a few from states that divided their electoral vote, for a total of 12
The Southern Democrats’ candidate John Breckinridge finished second in the electoral vote column, with 72 votes. While he swept the deep Southern states that would soon secede to form the Confederacy, his percentage of the popular vote was well below Douglas’s.
Bell, with the lowest percentage of the popular vote, took 39 electoral votes by winning three of the “border” slave states, including Virginia and Tennessee, both of which would soon secede and join the Confederacy.
When you do the math, interesting conclusions arise. If you add all three losing candidates’ electoral votes together, the total is 72, far below Lincoln’s 180.
The numbers show that Lincoln could score a dominant victory in the Electoral College even though he fell significantly short of a majority vote.
And this fact, I suggest, helps explain why the Deep South slave states — or, rather, their slave-owning ruling class — was so quick to choose the radical, and dangerous, path of secession from the Union.
The reason: The pattern revealed by Lincoln’s triumph — victory in all of the populous Northern states — convinced Southern political leaders that they would never win another presidential election and would therefore be unable to dominate the national government, as they effectively had done for generations.
The idea of ‘secession,’ after all, had been around for four decades. It had been raised first by New Englanders early in the century, when a federal embargo of trade with European powers was ruining that region’s economy. Southern politicians first brought the idea up in 1820 before a Congressional compromise allowed the introduction of slavery into the state of Missouri.
The reason why Southern leaders decided to take a step in 1860 that they had threatened, but rejected during previous sectional crises was that that the election math of 1860 showed that control of the federal government was shifting decisively to the North, because its population growth (and economic strength) was steadily exceeding that of the South.
Electoral votes, along with representation in the House of Representatives, is re-apportioned after each census. And every 10-year count of population revealed that the “free” Northern states, fed by industrial growth and immigration, were growing significantly faster. More people meant a greater share of Congressmen. More Congressional districts meant more electoral votes.
Slave-owning Southern leaders left the national Union not because they ‘hated’ or feared Lincoln, but because they could no longer “see a path” — to use the electoral vote-counting cliché of our own recent national elections — to victory.
Why was Northern voters Free Soil position — no further expansion of slavery to territories or new states— so threatening to the South’s ruling class?
No doubt there were cultural and ideological factors. But the decisive factor, as if often the case, was economic. Nothing that Lincoln said before his election in 1860 suggested the he sought to dismantle the institution of slavery in the states in which it was currently legal. His Free Soil position was certainly objectionable to Southern slave-owners. But that position did not pose an existential crisis for slave owners in 1860.
It was what his election promised for their future that caused the slave-owning class to recognize the fundamental and ultimately fatal long-term threat. If slavery could be not be exported to any of the new Western territories, slave owners’ most valuable possessions — their human possessions — would decline in value. The demand for them would inevitably decline. When slave-owners were running out of arable land to grow cotton in the Carolinas and other long-settled Eastern states, the cotton industry needed to find new lands. Texas had supplied that need, but even Texas real estate suitable for cotton farming (the part of the state with sufficient water) could not supply it forever.
Only new cotton fields sustained the demand for slaves, and that market would dry up in front of their eyes, slave-owners saw, if Free Soil Northerners controlled the government in Washington. And in 1860, for the first time ever, Free Soil opinion now sat in the White House. And representatives of Northern sates would increasingly dominate the House as well.
As argued above, demographic trends made clear that a permanent power shift would increasingly likely. New York bankers might support slavery, because they made money from the cotton trade, but even wealthy bankers could not deliver their state at election time to a pro-slavery candidate.
Faced by a future of federal government dominance by Free Soil Northerners, the Southern ruling class decided they might just as well make the break now, in 1860, while they still dominated some national institutions — such as the officer corps of the US Army.
The lesson to be learned by examining the set of conditions that led to the secession crisis of 1860 (and the disastrous Civil War that followed) has value for today’s divided politics because these are essentially the same conditions the Republican Party faces today.
The key to understanding the steep divisions of the anti-democratic Trump phenomenon is — once again — demographics. The United States is an increasingly diverse nation in all respects and will only grow more so under current demographic trends. We are in the midst of the last decades of a white-majority nation. For the Trump wing of the Republican Part — “white nationalist” is a polite term for those whose see their grip on hereditary privilege weakening — the existential threat is the plainly increasing visibility, number, and importance of nonwhite Americans, whether native, immigrants, Black, Brown or Asian, or well-educated ‘essential’ works from other countries.
Whether medical professionals, university teachers, scientific researchers, entertainers in the media — or as the occupant in the White House — “they” are all over, perhaps especially in the media on screens of all sizes and descriptions. One consequence of this demographic trend is that white nationalists, worried (perhaps correctly) over losing the advantages of historical ‘privilege,’ are voting for whoever promises to roll back the clock.
Regardless of how many walls you desire to build, demographic change is an enemy that cannot be defeated. And as it is currently constituted, the party of white resentment, Republicans are simply “aging out.”
The army of deplorables and misled ignoramuses that attacked the Capitol waving a Confederate flag earlier may have been mostly on the younger side of the age divide, but they represent a distinct minority within Republican voters. The far greater number of Trump voters come from an older demographic. An analysis of the 2020 election vote shows that aside from Evangelicals, Trump lost white voters, 54 to 46 percent. And when it comes to the younger demographics, they favor Democratic candidates and policies by very large majorities. For a ‘numbers’ discussion of the statistical trends see https://journalistsresource.org/studies/politics/elections/election-republican-party-future/
In 1860, as argued above, the South chose to “secede” from the game it could no longer win. But fighting a war against a stronger opponent led directly to the destruction of the very institution the slave-holders were seeking to preserve.
After the election of 2020 the Republican Party, per the above, is now faced by the same long odds. And if all the votes are counted — as Trump notoriously conceded, somehow unaware of the truth of his own words, “a Republican will never win another election.”
He’s right. Hence we understand the necessity of all of his party’s nasty techniques for suppressing the country’s Black and Brown voters: Unrepresentative redistricting (gerrymandering); voter suppression; massive incarceration of Black men, accompanied by loss of suffrage. Huge fines imposed on ex-prisoners, again resulting in loss of suffrage.
And, this year — the last resort of the scoundrel — false claims of electoral fraud. There’s been a lot of fraud in American elections, all right, but it’s almost always been committed by the person who makes these claims.
Election fraud: the dying wail of the loser.
But there is no need for the Republican Party to follow that self-destructive path. When the old way of winning is no longer open, the smart money looks for a new way to invest. There is a way onward to political relevance, and, again, history has shown the path.
Let’s look at what happened after 1860. The Democratic Party split in 1860, and finished last of four parties in the electoral total. But they still received a lot of votes. While Republicans generally dominated the national agenda for decades after the Civil War, as Democrats clung to their Southern base, eventually the party realized it could become nationally competitive again by by supporting issues that appealed to Northern voters as well. Democrats gained new constituencies. While the party had always captured some votes of some immigrant groups in Northern cities, notably the Irish in New York and Boston, many other immigrant groups arrived in large numbers in the latter 19th century and through 1920, when new laws began to restrict them. Democratic Party ‘machines’ won votes in Northern states by helping new Americans settle into their new world, helping them find housing and jobs, in return for support at the polls.
Competitive in both the North and the Midwest now, when the national crisis appeared, a new coalition swept FDR into power and dominated national politics for 20 years. I has of course remained a major party ever since.
The road to recovery will be open to Republicans now — once the party divorces itself from Trump and its war on democratic elections. Single party dominance does not last in democracies, so long as the ruling party is not allowed to put its thumb on the scale. Absent — and beyond — Trump, and voter suppression, the Republican party will find new issues and new communities of support when it finds something to stand for other than a nostalgic longing for a whiter past.
Republican mayors and governors have been elected in big cities and big states in recent years. Liberal Massachusetts has a Republican governor. Democracy means that those who not agree with the ruling party, or its office holders, or with ‘majority’ positions on any issue, have the right to express and publish their opinions, to rally with others, and to ‘associate’ into a party of opposition. Inevitably, there will always be a second party and, as history shows, the balance of opinion will likely shift one way, and then another.
It’s possible that some entirely new party will emerge and replace the Republican party altogether. But only if Republicans fail to free themselves of the band of cheaters who now control them and accept the role, at least for a short run, of “loyal” opposition.
