1860 Presidential Election
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  1860 Presidential Election
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Poll
Question: Who would you have voted for?
#1
Abraham Lincoln (Republican)
 
#2
Stephen Douglas (Democratic)
 
#3
John Breckinridge (Southern Democrat)
 
#4
John Bell (Constitutional Union)
 
#5
Write-in
 
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Partisan results

Total Voters: 46

Author Topic: 1860 Presidential Election  (Read 2003 times)
ElectionsGuy
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« on: August 29, 2014, 12:09:15 PM »

1804: 85.7% Thomas Jefferson
1808: 50.0% George Clinton
1816: 69.2% James Monroe
1820: 60.0% James Monroe
1828: 48.0% John Q. Adams
1832: 51.5% Henry Clay
1844: 50.0% James Birney
1852: 69.2% John Hale
1864: 71.4% Abraham Lincoln
1868: 77.1% Ulysses Grant
1872: 65.4% Ulysses Grant
1888: 51.6% Grover Cleveland
1896: 32.5% John Palmer
1904: 51.4% Theodore Roosevelt
1912: 37.5% William Taft
1944: 56.8% Franklin Roosevelt
1948: 35.7% Harry Truman
1952: 63.9% Dwight Eisenhower
1964: 49.2% Lyndon Johnson
1968: 44.4% Hubert Humphrey
1980: 26.2% Ronald Reagan
2008: 53.8% Barack Obama


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860

Lincoln, as at the time my number 1 concern would be abolishing slavery despite disagreeing with him on economic issues and despite Douglas being a semi-decent candidate.
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Goldwater
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« Reply #1 on: August 29, 2014, 12:21:04 PM »

Lincoln (normal)
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MATTROSE94
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« Reply #2 on: August 29, 2014, 12:27:10 PM »

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H. Ross Peron
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« Reply #3 on: August 29, 2014, 12:30:36 PM »

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Chuck Hagel 08
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« Reply #4 on: August 29, 2014, 12:33:46 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.
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Rockefeller GOP
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« Reply #5 on: August 29, 2014, 12:36:37 PM »

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TDAS04
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« Reply #6 on: August 29, 2014, 12:47:22 PM »

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Gass3268
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« Reply #7 on: August 29, 2014, 12:48:43 PM »

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« Reply #8 on: August 29, 2014, 02:39:39 PM »

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TNF
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« Reply #9 on: August 29, 2014, 03:42:31 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

If you're a revolting piece of garbage, then sure, yeah, I guess that would make sense. But for everyone that doesn't think that people should be able to own other people, or that government should be a mere appendage of a class of parasites that raped, murdered, and enslaved an entire group of people in the pursuit of profit, i.e. people that aren't terrible or apologists for any sector of that class, Lincoln is the only actual choice here. Voting for anyone else is voting for the Slave Power.
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SWE
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« Reply #10 on: August 29, 2014, 03:47:38 PM »

Lincoln is the only option for any decent human being living in 2014.
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IceSpear
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« Reply #11 on: August 29, 2014, 06:36:35 PM »

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Chuck Hagel 08
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« Reply #12 on: August 29, 2014, 06:38:23 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

If you're a revolting piece of garbage, then sure, yeah, I guess that would make sense. But for everyone that doesn't think that people should be able to own other people, or that government should be a mere appendage of a class of parasites that raped, murdered, and enslaved an entire group of people in the pursuit of profit, i.e. people that aren't terrible or apologists for any sector of that class, Lincoln is the only actual choice here. Voting for anyone else is voting for the Slave Power.

Had Lincoln campaigned on an abolitionist platform, or made the Northern cause more explicitly an abolitionist crusade rather than an attempt to subjugate states desiring independence (albeit for nefarious reasons), or demonstrated a modicum of concern for restraint on executive power and respect for civil liberties while embarking on said crusade, then yes. However, liberation of the slaves appears to have come more as a fortunate accident of Lincoln's punitive measure against the seceding states rather than any principled belief in human freedom.

Abolition of slavery is an incontrovertible good. However, said objective should have been accomplished either through the constitutional process, or through an extraordinary measure without the pretension of setting any larger precedent regarding the relationship between the federal government and the states.  
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Mr. Illini
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« Reply #13 on: August 29, 2014, 06:48:26 PM »

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Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook
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« Reply #14 on: August 29, 2014, 07:16:26 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

But remember, Douglas would have died soon after entering office, and Bell joined the Confederacy.
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Illuminati Blood Drinker
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« Reply #15 on: August 29, 2014, 07:21:10 PM »

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Chuck Hagel 08
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« Reply #16 on: August 29, 2014, 08:27:00 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

But remember, Douglas would have died soon after entering office, and Bell joined the Confederacy.

As did Herschel V. Johnson
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #17 on: August 29, 2014, 10:26:46 PM »

Obviously not Breckenridge, and voting for Bell only sweeps the slavery issue under the rug rather than getting rid of the mess, so Douglas and Lincoln are the only possible options.  We have the advantage of knowing how a Lincoln Presidency would have gone.  We don't know how a Douglas and then a Herschel Johnson presidency would have gone.  I doubt that a Douglas presidency would have caused secession, tho there certainly would have been talk of it.  We likely end up with four years of political deadlock leading up to the election of 1864. So the net result of a Douglas win is probably a Civil War four years later with everyone better prepared for the start of it.
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TNF
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« Reply #18 on: August 29, 2014, 10:27:34 PM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

If you're a revolting piece of garbage, then sure, yeah, I guess that would make sense. But for everyone that doesn't think that people should be able to own other people, or that government should be a mere appendage of a class of parasites that raped, murdered, and enslaved an entire group of people in the pursuit of profit, i.e. people that aren't terrible or apologists for any sector of that class, Lincoln is the only actual choice here. Voting for anyone else is voting for the Slave Power.

Had Lincoln campaigned on an abolitionist platform, or made the Northern cause more explicitly an abolitionist crusade rather than an attempt to subjugate states desiring independence (albeit for nefarious reasons), or demonstrated a modicum of concern for restraint on executive power and respect for civil liberties while embarking on said crusade, then yes. However, liberation of the slaves appears to have come more as a fortunate accident of Lincoln's punitive measure against the seceding states rather than any principled belief in human freedom.

Abolition of slavery is an incontrovertible good. However, said objective should have been accomplished either through the constitutional process, or through an extraordinary measure without the pretension of setting any larger precedent regarding the relationship between the federal government and the states.  

Lincoln did campaign on an implicitly abolitionist platform. The Republicans called for the expansion of slavery to be halted. Everyone then (and everyone now) with half a brain knows that meant to strangle slavery from without; slavery, much like wage slavery in our current epoch, would not have survive if strangled from without and prevented from expanding and growing. This is why the Slave Power had designs for Kansas and Nebraska, and hell, Mexico, Cuba, and the 'Golden Circle' of nations whereby they would be able to colonize said areas, expel the natives and transform them into new slave states in order to maintain their favorable position within the federal government and continue their agricultural project.

I believe in the right of all nations to self-determination, but what happened in 1861 was not a war for independence, it was an attempt by the Southern states to void the Election of 1860. Those states rejected the fact that they had been outvoted (democratically, in a fair and free election, by 1860s standards, anyway) and thus tried to destroy the result of that election. They fired first. They attacked the Union. They tried to destroy democracy, not the other way around. To argue otherwise is to argue in favor of the Slave Power and white supremacy. This is not a gray area, it is very black and white. You're either for the Union and the destruction of slavery, or you're for the Confederacy and the enslavement of an entire group of human beings.

I do not give a damn about the 'civil liberties' of those who held human beings in bondage or those who gave them aid and support on the homefront. Did a lot of people end up on the wrong end of the bayonet or in a prison cell as a result of policies that Lincoln carried out? Undoubtedly. But those things happen in a revolutionary context, and that's what the American Civil War was. We wouldn't whine and prattle on about the 'rights' of the Tories during the first American Revolution, would we? Same principles apply here. The Copperheads were counterrevolutionaries in league with the South or at the very least blocking the revolutionary war against the Slave Power. They resisted and were thus dealt with in the same way that the Tories were dealt with in the 1770s and 1780s (hell, they were treated far more leniently). Same thing for the slaveholders.

If anything, the Republicans did too little, not too much, in the conflict and immediately afterward. They bumbled their way through Reconstruction, did not confiscate the land of the traitors in the South that funded the war, and just poorly ran the whole thing to the point that by 15 years after the start of the conflict, the counterrevolutionaries were in power and the rights of African Americans brutally suppressed by the terror of the Klan and the white supremacist Democratic Party.

Lincoln did what he had to do; it's a shame that he did not do more to bring the Southern gentry in line. For starters, they should have just barred all former slaveholders from ever voting again (along with all Confederate officers), confiscated all of their land and split it up between freedman and white yeoman, and hanged every high ranking Confederate official after giving them a trial with a jury composed entirely of the people they had formerly held in bondage. That would have probably done the trick.
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Simfan34
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« Reply #19 on: August 30, 2014, 05:08:03 AM »

Lincoln is the only option for any decent human being living in 2014.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #20 on: August 30, 2014, 06:07:12 AM »
« Edited: August 30, 2014, 06:09:42 AM by True Federalist »

No one living today could have voted in 1860.  A Douglas presidency would have offered a slim chance that the slavery issue could be resolved without a civil war, and no one in 1860 could have predicted that Lincoln would prove to be as great a president as he proved to be.
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Chuck Hagel 08
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« Reply #21 on: August 30, 2014, 06:40:27 AM »

I previously thought Douglas would be the best option here, but looking at the election again, it appears that Bell may be preferable.

If you're a revolting piece of garbage, then sure, yeah, I guess that would make sense. But for everyone that doesn't think that people should be able to own other people, or that government should be a mere appendage of a class of parasites that raped, murdered, and enslaved an entire group of people in the pursuit of profit, i.e. people that aren't terrible or apologists for any sector of that class, Lincoln is the only actual choice here. Voting for anyone else is voting for the Slave Power.

Had Lincoln campaigned on an abolitionist platform, or made the Northern cause more explicitly an abolitionist crusade rather than an attempt to subjugate states desiring independence (albeit for nefarious reasons), or demonstrated a modicum of concern for restraint on executive power and respect for civil liberties while embarking on said crusade, then yes. However, liberation of the slaves appears to have come more as a fortunate accident of Lincoln's punitive measure against the seceding states rather than any principled belief in human freedom.

Abolition of slavery is an incontrovertible good. However, said objective should have been accomplished either through the constitutional process, or through an extraordinary measure without the pretension of setting any larger precedent regarding the relationship between the federal government and the states.  

Lincoln did campaign on an implicitly abolitionist platform. The Republicans called for the expansion of slavery to be halted. Everyone then (and everyone now) with half a brain knows that meant to strangle slavery from without; slavery, much like wage slavery in our current epoch, would not have survive if strangled from without and prevented from expanding and growing. This is why the Slave Power had designs for Kansas and Nebraska, and hell, Mexico, Cuba, and the 'Golden Circle' of nations whereby they would be able to colonize said areas, expel the natives and transform them into new slave states in order to maintain their favorable position within the federal government and continue their agricultural project.

If expansionism was essential for the survival of slavery (as I do concur that it was), then would not the whole Confederate project be doomed from the outset, lacking the access to new territory that came with leaving the Union?

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Those states did not try to take over the United States, thus I do not see how that is inconsistent with self-determination. Is any policy that secedes from a larger entity after an election expedites their realization that their interests are not being represented by the larger entity illegitimate?

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Only because the Union kept military forts on their territory. Granted, attacking Fort Sumter was a terrible move, but there is a distinction between attacking Union "territory" in South Carolina and in, say, New York.

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This is not a football game. I merely acknowledge that both sides had their faults. While chattel slavery is obviously the greater evil, one should not pretend that the erosion of checks on the power of a national executive is inconsequential or benign.

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I am fairly sure that critical Northern newspaper editors did not hold slaves.

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Hence my opposition to it. "Revolution" is usually used as a pretext for justifying horrid actions in the name of some enlightened "higher goal." The same reasoning could be used to defend the atrocities in Ireland, the Vendee, and the Ukraine, although given your sympathies I imagine you sympathize with the "revolutionaries" in those contexts as well.

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I concur. The Tories should not have had their property confiscated from them, or should have been provided appropriate restitution for their loss if returning the property became an impossibility.

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So Lincoln violated nobody's rights who did not deserve it for being slaveholders or their supporters, and anyone who was arrested by the Union without cause was thus a "Copperhead." This sounds like a circular line of reasoning. Of course, the fact that they were held without trial means that no independent judge was required to verify the claim that such an individual was committing whatever crime "not supporting the war" would constitute, so we would just have to take the executive's word for it that every person that was locked up was "guilty of something." If this "revolutionary" judicial system is so great, then why not permanently adopt a policy of capricious detention by the executive without any input from the legislative or judicial authorities?

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Such an outcome was a likely consequence of using recently freed blacks as pawns to impose kleptocratic carpetbagger governments on the conquered South. While race relations were never going to be pretty in the aftermath, such a policy could not have possibly helped matters.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #22 on: August 30, 2014, 09:18:37 AM »

If expansionism was essential for the survival of slavery (as I do concur that it was), then would not the whole Confederate project be doomed from the outset, lacking the access to new territory that came with leaving the Union?

First off, an independent Confederacy would have been free to filibuster in Mexico and Central America for new territory.  The4y might have been able to get Cuba, and northern Mexico was certainly obtainable.

But more importantly, the faster growth of the North compared to the South is what would have doomed slavery had the South remained in the Union.  But an independent Confederacy would have been much more stable with respect to slavery since the sectional pressures wouldn't have applied.  Slavery in an independent South would likely have lasted until at least when Brazil abolished it in 1889 and I could easily see it lasting until at least The Great War, assuming that the USA and CSA ended up fighting each other in it.
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Mechaman
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« Reply #23 on: August 30, 2014, 09:20:47 AM »
« Edited: August 30, 2014, 09:27:26 AM by Mechaman »

Lincoln then, Lincoln now.

I must say that I find it incredible that out of the many libertarian critiques of Lincoln's handling of the Civil War I've seen on here almost none of them mention the extremely classist draft that was implemented.  To my mind that seems about the only real moral failing of the Union North, though the Confederate South obviously did the same thing with a lot more horrendous side flavors to choose from.  Rather, we hear about "those poor northern newspaper owners!" and how the protectionist trade policy of the North was "just too mean for producers man!"

Says a lot about what they think about class.

EDIT: I predict that SPC is probably going to have a post up about how protectionism is evil.  Yes I agree, it's incredibly evil and was used more oft than not to impoverish the working class for the gains of the robber barons who robbed them.  However, that is besides the point in regards to the Civil War.  Hell, I would argue that the Slave Economy was by it's nature a protectionist economy, given that it effectively kept millions of poor farmers in extreme poverty by it's advantage of free farm/crop labor.
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Vega
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« Reply #24 on: August 30, 2014, 09:23:29 AM »

Douglas then, Lincoln now.
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