What if Abraham Lincoln was not elected President of the USA

[deltaforce]

Nov 14, 2016 23:39:45 GMT doug181 said:

If the North were seceding remember a great many Northern professional soldiers and West Point grads fought for the Union not necessarily to end slavery. Grant an example of this.

There were also many officers who resigned their commissions rather than fight against their home states, including Robert E. Lee.

[lordroel]

Mar 14, 2017 7:46:53 GMT deltaforce said:

Nov 14, 2016 23:39:45 GMT doug181 said:

If the North were seceding remember a great many Northern professional soldiers and West Point grads fought for the Union not necessarily to end slavery. Grant an example of this.

There were also many officers who resigned their commissions rather than fight against their home states, including Robert E. Lee.

Would that still happen even if Lincoln was not elected president.

[deltaforce]

Mar 16, 2017 23:35:09 GMT lordroel said:

Mar 14, 2017 7:46:53 GMT deltaforce said:

There were also many officers who resigned their commissions rather than fight against their home states, including Robert E. Lee.

Would that still happen even if Lincoln was not elected president.

It wasn't uncommon for people to have more loyalty to their states than to the federal government at the time of the American Civil War.

[lordroel]

Mar 17, 2017 6:06:56 GMT deltaforce said:

Mar 16, 2017 23:35:09 GMT lordroel said:

Would that still happen even if Lincoln was not elected president.

It wasn't uncommon for people to have more loyalty to their states than to the federal government at the time of the American Civil War.

Well we see that, otherwise there would most likely having been no civil war.

[dalecoz]

Strong elements in the deep south wanted to secede because they saw the long-term trends going overwhelmingly toward unshakable northern control of the Union. Lincoln's election gave them their excuse to take action, but the momentum toward secession would have been there even without Lincoln. A compromise candidate winning might lead to a kind of split verdict on secession. The border south almost certainly wouldn't secede in this scenario. It almost didn't historically. Parts of the deep south might secede, only to see the rest reject secession.

[lordroel]

Would we see Abraham Lincoln try a second time in 1864.

[dalecoz]

One problem in a "No Lincoln" scenario is that even if there was no immediate secession, there was already a low-level civil war going on in some parts of the country. Kansas had been in a local civil war since the mid-1850s. Whoever became president would have to face the issue of whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Legally, it would be difficult to justify making it a slave state, but admitting Kansas as a free state without an offsetting slave state admission would have upset the carefully preserved balance of power in the Senate.

Also, the fighting in Kansas radicalized people on both sides, pulling in abolitionists and pro-slavery radicals from all over the country. Some of the abolitionists, like John Brown, wanted to take the fight to the rest of the south. Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 was an inevitable fiasco, but the northern reaction to it set off alarm bells in the south.

Even if no state seceded, I could see continued low-level violence, not just in Kansas but in areas of the west with considerable pro-slavery sentiment. There was considerable pro-slavery sentiment in parts of California and around the Comstock Lode area in Nevada if I recall correctly.

[dalecoz]

Interesting side-note to this: Lincoln apparently thought about joining the Donner Party--the infamous wagon train that got trapped in a mountain pass and lost a great number of people, with survivors alleged to have resorted to cannibalism to survive. Any hint of that would have probably scuppered Lincoln's career, assuming he was one of the survivors, but it wouldn't necessarily have prevented a Republican victory under a different candidate.

[lordroel]

Aug 3, 2017 3:33:29 GMT dalecoz said:

 Kansas had been in a local civil war since the mid-1850s. 

Never knew that Kansas had somewhat of a state civil war until i google it and found out about Bleeding Kansas, would think with Abraham Lincoln not being elected President this might get worse.

[dalecoz]

How close were the votes for secession historically? That’s kind of hard to say because delegates often switched sides when it became apparent that secessionists had the votes and that negotiations for some kind of compromise at the federal level were not going to reach a conclusion acceptable to the secessionists. I’m guessing that probably five out of the initial seven states that seceded would secede

We can divide the deep south states into a wavering category and a hard core one. The wavering states might very well not secede in the absence of a Lincoln victory.

For example, in Georgia the initial votes indicated the convention of secession was initially divided about 150 to 130 between immediate secessionists and people who either wanted to stay in the union or wanted to negotiate some sort of changes to the federal government that would mollify secessionists. By the time of the final vote, the gap had increased, with only 89 delegates opposing immediate secession.

Alabama wasn’t nearly as hard-core. There was a strong Unionist element in the northern part of the state. Historically, the secession vote was 61 to 39 in favor, though many of those who voted against secession signed onto it after the vote. Without Lincoln as a lightning rod, Alabama might have gone the other way. It would probably depend on how many other states seceded and how the federal government handled secession.

Then there were the hard-core secessionist states.

South Carolina voted 189 to 0 for secession. There is a good chance they would secede or attempt to no matter what happened at the federal level. There was very little dissent there, even when the war turned against the Confederacy.

Florida was another hard-core secession state, voting for secession 62 to 7. They did have some dissent though from the beginning and it got stronger as the war progressed.

Mississippi was another hard-core secession state, with a vote of 84 to 15 for secession. It was probably going to secede under most foreseeable circumstances if any state did.

Louisiana was also pretty hard-core secessionist, with a vote of 113 to 17 in favor of secession.

Texas delayed their secession vote for quite a while because their governor, Sam Houston, was a strong unionist, but when they did vote, the vote was 166 to 8 for secession.

And those are the initial seven states that seceded. The rest didn’t secede until after the Civil War actually started and they faced the prospect of fighting on one side or the other.

[dalecoz]

Let’s sketch out a scenario where Lincoln didn’t get enough electoral votes to be president, then see where it would put the southern states. The 1860 election was a four-way race. Lincoln, of course, was the Republican nominee. The Democrats split in two, with the deep south voting for Breckinridge for the southern branch of the Democrat party and Douglas (of the Lincoln/Douglas debates) running as the Democratic candidate in the northern states. Complicating matters, a major third (fourth?) party was in the mix, the Constitution/Union, which ran John Bell on a ticket of preserving the Union.
Lincoln won 180 electoral votes. He only needed 152, so he won with 28 electoral votes to spare.

Looking at the popular vote state by state, it looks as though the most likely switches would have been:
• California, with 4 electoral votes, where Lincoln won with only 32.3% of the popular vote in the four-way race, beating Douglas by less than 800 votes.
• Oregon, with 3 electoral votes, where Lincoln won with 36.1% of the popular vote, beating Breckinridge by less than 200 votes
• New Jersey, where Douglas actually won the popular vote by a pretty good margin but Lincoln ended up with 4 out of the 7 electoral votes due to some still murky maneuverings on the part of the local Democratic party which was divided, like the national Democratic party, into pro-Douglas, pro-Breckinridge and pro-Bell factions.

That’s 11 of the 28 electoral votes that would have needed to shift. After that, it’s tough to visualize any of the other states flipping. Lincoln won the rest of the states he won with solid majorities, over 50% even in the four-way race. Ironically, the only other race where Lincoln won the state but someone else was within 5% was Illinois, where the popular vote margin was 3.5%. Illinois had 11 electoral votes, so flipping it, though it would have been embarrassing, still wouldn’t have denied Lincoln the victory. Even if somehow he lost the close ones, plus Illinois, he would still win with 158 electoral votes.

[dalecoz]

None of the other states Lincoln won were very close at all. It would take a major shift to deny him an outright victory.

What if the Republicans had nominated someone other than Lincoln? The most likely candidate was Seward, who led in the first two ballots, but was opposed by the large and influential Pennsylvania and Indiana delegations. Key leaders in both states thought that Seward couldn’t carry their states for various inside baseball reasons and were looking for an alternative, which was a large part of the reason Lincoln won the nomination. If Seward won the nomination and actually did lose those states, while the Republicans didn’t win any states Lincoln lost in, that would have flipped 40 electoral votes from the Republicans to someone else, leading to an Electoral College with no majority. That’s when we get into uncharted territory. The Breckinridge people would probably not support Douglas. They might support Bell if the alternative was Seward and the Republicans.

If the Electoral College chose someone other than the Republican candidate, that president would have a very hard time of it. The Senate would, I believe, have been divided almost exactly evenly, with 30 Democrats, 29 Republicans and 1 Unionist (before the southern Democrats started resigning), but the Democrats would have been bitterly split into Northern and Southern factions.

In the House, the Republicans would have 108 seats. The Democrats would have had their 45 historic seats, plus the 43 that they vacated when the south seceded. The Constitutional Unionists would have had 30 seats. So no one would have had a majority in the House—the non-Republicans would have a combined total of 118 seats, versus 108 for the Republicans. It would have been very difficult to even organize the House with four bitterly opposed factions jockeying for power.

[dalecoz]

Let’s say Bell gets the presidency as a compromise candidate to keep the Republicans out. He has no Senators supporting him, at least not on a party line. He has the smallest contingent of the four factions in the House. He would have only won with support of both the Southern and Northern Democrats, who were bitterly feuding and would probably have pushed Bell for diametrically opposed concession in the Electoral College. It would have taken a political genius to keep divisions in the country from getting worse during the next four years. Bell would have to deal with Northern efforts to nullify Fugitive Slave laws. He would have had to deal with Northern states where John Brown had become somewhat of a martyr despite being a total fool who would have gotten a lot of slaves killed if his plans had succeeded. The North would have kept getting stronger relative to the south and some people on both sides would have been preparing for war.

The Republicans would be very suspicious of Bell because of the way he got the Presidency and they would be looking for the quid-pro-quo they would assume, rightly or wrongly, that he gave the southern Democrats. Bell had a lot of political experience, but was in his mid-60s. The southern Democrats fought an increasingly bitter election fight against him in the 1860 election, so they would be, at best, reluctant supporters. I’m guessing that the south doesn’t necessarily secede under his presidency, but the divide would get deeper, with a Republican victory and resulting secession coming in 1864 instead of 1860. How that would play out, I have no idea.