Walter Russell Mead: Lincoln ... The Weakest President Yet?
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to begin in March of 1861. 152 of the 303 electoral votes were needed; although West Coast results will not be known until the Pony Express brings the news across the western deserts, the Illinois rail-splitter appears to have won 173 even without California and Oregon.
Second, as southern critics immediately and vociferously pointed out, Lincoln’s victory was entirely regional. He failed to carry a single state or even a congressional district south of the Mason Dixon line. Of the 16 free states reporting in he carried all except New Jersey (which split its electoral votes); of the 15 slave states he carried not a one.
Not only did he fail to carry any of the slave states. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, the President-elect of the United States failed to receive one single popular vote. In nine states of the Union, not one citizen could be found willing to stand up and vote for the Republican candidate. (In South Carolina, no popular poll was held; had one been, it seems certain that Lincoln would have failed to receive any support there.)
The third fact is also of the discouraging kind likely to temper the celebrations in Springfield. Abraham Lincoln was elected by only 39.8% of the popular vote. This is the weakest mandate that any American president has had since the election of 1824 when the popular vote was first counted. Had the Democrats not split, Lincoln would have lost the popular vote in a landslide: 2,823,965 for the Democrats versus 1,865,593 for the Republican. The sixteenth president of the United States will take the oath of office knowing that almost two thirds of his fellow citizens voted against him.
When Lincoln’s southern opponents denounce him as a minority president who owes power more to a flawed electoral system than to the will of the people, they will not just be whistling Dixie. Should talk of secession escalate into civil war, Lincoln will have to persuade voters who wanted another candidate elected to fight and die for his right to be President.
Paradoxically, Lincoln would have won the presidency even if the Democrats had united. If the popular votes against Lincoln are combined, with the possible exceptions of late-reporting Oregon and California, no states shift out of the Republican column.
But his weak — or, more candidly, his non-existent — popular mandate is not the only grave weakness with which the new administration must cope...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
As election returns drifted in from the nation’s far-flung precincts on November 6 and 7 of 1860, three solid, inescapable facts were clear. First, according to the law of the land, Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States, with a term to begin in March of 1861. 152 of the 303 electoral votes were needed; although West Coast results will not be known until the Pony Express brings the news across the western deserts, the Illinois rail-splitter appears to have won 173 even without California and Oregon.
Second, as southern critics immediately and vociferously pointed out, Lincoln’s victory was entirely regional. He failed to carry a single state or even a congressional district south of the Mason Dixon line. Of the 16 free states reporting in he carried all except New Jersey (which split its electoral votes); of the 15 slave states he carried not a one.
Not only did he fail to carry any of the slave states. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, the President-elect of the United States failed to receive one single popular vote. In nine states of the Union, not one citizen could be found willing to stand up and vote for the Republican candidate. (In South Carolina, no popular poll was held; had one been, it seems certain that Lincoln would have failed to receive any support there.)
The third fact is also of the discouraging kind likely to temper the celebrations in Springfield. Abraham Lincoln was elected by only 39.8% of the popular vote. This is the weakest mandate that any American president has had since the election of 1824 when the popular vote was first counted. Had the Democrats not split, Lincoln would have lost the popular vote in a landslide: 2,823,965 for the Democrats versus 1,865,593 for the Republican. The sixteenth president of the United States will take the oath of office knowing that almost two thirds of his fellow citizens voted against him.
When Lincoln’s southern opponents denounce him as a minority president who owes power more to a flawed electoral system than to the will of the people, they will not just be whistling Dixie. Should talk of secession escalate into civil war, Lincoln will have to persuade voters who wanted another candidate elected to fight and die for his right to be President.
Paradoxically, Lincoln would have won the presidency even if the Democrats had united. If the popular votes against Lincoln are combined, with the possible exceptions of late-reporting Oregon and California, no states shift out of the Republican column.
But his weak — or, more candidly, his non-existent — popular mandate is not the only grave weakness with which the new administration must cope...