The Election of 1860 is often remembered for electing Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency and conditions that led to the Civil War, but there is a lot more you should know. Did you know that there were four candidates from four parties? Do you know that both the Democratic and Republican candidates were from the same state? What about the results of the election, did you know that the second most popular candidate won the electoral college in only one state?

The first thing that everyone should know is that divides between the South and North led to fracturing within political parties, especially within the democratic party.

Thankfully, in 2024, both major parties elected candidates by the end of their convention, even if the process was different than it has been in the past. In 1860, that wasn’t the case. The Republican Party elected Abraham Lincoln at their convention with little argument, but the Democratic Party on the other hand failed to elect a candidate at their first convention.

Eventually, the Democratic Party elected Stephen Douglas, but the party remained split on the topic of slavery, and two new parties formed. The new pro-slavery Southern Democratic Party elected John C. Breckinridge (the Vice President at the time) and the Constitutional Union Party (who avoided the topic of slavery), elected John Bell. In the end, the election became a race between Lincoln and Douglas in the North with the complication of Breckinridge taking away a few votes in the South.

The fact that there were four candidates is already weird, but somehow two of them were from the same state. Interestingly, Lincoln and Douglas were both from Illinois and served in state legislature together. Can you imagine a world where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris served in the same state legislature or even as representatives from the same state?

Today, it seems hard to imagine two presidential candidates being from the same state, but technically, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both claimed residency in New York in 2016. Before the 2016 election, two major party candidates hadn’t claimed residency in the same state since 1944.

 

Maybe it isn’t all that interesting that Douglas and Lincoln were from the same state, but what is interesting is the outcome of the election. As seen in the 1860 electoral college map, Lincoln won both the popular vote and Electoral College, carrying 18 northern states, and 1.8 million votes. Douglas on the other hand carried only one state, yet still accounted for a total of 1.3 million votes. To complicate the results further, Breckinridge and Bell both carried more states than Douglas but received considerably fewer votes.

All in all, the upcoming election may be unprecedented, but at least it isn’t as complicated as the election of 1860.