Top Republicans Should Say They'll Accept the Result

In the final presidential debate, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton responded with outrage when Republican opponent Donald Trump refused to pledge to accept the results of the upcoming election.  

Appealing to a long American history of peaceful transitions of power, Clinton remarked, “We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them.”  

Of course, there is at least one exception Clinton overlooked.

In 1860, a great many Americans did not accept an outcome they did not like. Their response produced the greatest crisis in our nation’s history.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected as the first Republican president on a platform opposing slavery’s westward expansion, seven Deep South states renounced the union even before Lincoln entered the White House, and four other slaveholding states soon followed. ...