On Nov 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.
And the rest is history.
History:
Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.
Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig representative to Congress, first gained national stature during his campaign against Stephen Douglas of Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the slavery issue, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery, while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, Lincoln won the party’s presidential nomination.
Republicans always try to pin today’s Democratic party with the slavery loving South of the 1800s, but that all changed after Brown vs. The Board of Education and was topped off with LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act. That turned Southern Dixiecrats into Republicans, who were then targeted by Nixon and Reagan and Lee Atwood’s racist campaigns, not to mention George Wallace. Remember that Wallace CARRIED five southern states in the 1968 presidential election.
Open Thread…
