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President Abraham Lincoln: Elections
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When the Republican National Convention met to choose its presidential candida te for 1860, Lincoln was the first or second choice of most delegations. As a result, when serious objections were raised against other first choices, many turned to Lincoln. That he stood well in the states which the Republicans had lost in 1856 ... helped; the bargains and promises which Lincoln's managers made did the rest. He was nominated on the third ballot. The split in the Democratic party and the formation of the Constitutional Union party made Lincoln's election certain. He would be a minority, sectional president.
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Lincoln won the election easily. When a mentor in the legislature recommended that he study law, he took the challenge. It would be a good profession to accompany politics, in particular the politics of the Whig party, which drew its strength from the growing number of urban and industrial professionals. In the early nineteenth century, attorneys commanded a kind of awe, embodying the stately Anglo-Saxon tradition of common law and domestic order. Gaining "the secrets of that science," explained the poet-author William Allen Butler, would give a person a perpetual glow, for the law, "more than all other human forces, directs the progress of events."
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The Republicans' Lincoln took every free state except New Jersey, where he received four of seven electoral votes. His honest rail-splitter image, with its connotation of the right to rise blending into his stand opposing slave labor, was enough to give him the electoral college. There being almost no Republican votes in the southern states, his popular vote (1.9 million) was not quite 40 percent of the total. (He received 180, or 59.41 percent, of the electoral vote.) A shift of 25,000 votes, out of a total of 675,000 in New York, an area with a high concentration of swing voters, would have thrown the election into Congress, where his chances would have been very slim. Thirty-nine thousand voters merely staying away from the polls in four smaller strategic states would have done the same.
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Lincoln served in congress in 1847-49. He joined the Republican party in 1856. Lincoln engaged in a series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas which made him nationally known. He was elected to the Presidency in 1860. The Civil War broke out shortly after the election because Lincoln was elected without any votes from Southern states.
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In 1832 Lincoln decided to run for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives as a member of the Whig Party. He was defeated. In fact, Abraham Lincoln lost more elections than he ever won, but he showed great persistence in overcoming the obstacles that belabored him and never gave up. Soon thereafter
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The political power of Lincoln's rhetoric was undeniable. Even a Copperhead with the misfortune of Mrs. Bixby would be moved by Lincoln's call to "be here dedicated to the unfinished work" that men like her sons had ... far so nobly advanced. Perhaps the most important political consequence of the power of the Gettysburg Address is that Lincoln indeed won the election in 1864, thus assuring that the war would continue until the victory had been achieved.
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