“The Cannon Salvo that thundered over Springfield, Illinois, to greet the sunrise on November 6, 1860, signaled not the start of a battle, but the end of one…Election Day was finally dawning.” – Historian Harold Holzer

Abraham Lincoln, however, was not one to rush and vote right after the polling places opened in the morning. He apparently waited until 3:30pm when, as the New York Tribune explained, “the multitude…[had] diminished sufficiently to allow tolerably free passage.” The Tribune’s correspondent described what happened once the crowd realized that Lincoln had arrived:

“at that moment he was suddenly saluted with the wildest outbursts of enthusiasm every yielded by a popular assemblage. All party feelings seemed to be forgotten and even the distributors of opposition tickets joined in the overwhelming demonstrations of greeting…there was only one sentiment expressed – that of the heartiest and most undivided delight at his appearance. Mr. Lincoln advanced as rapidly as possible to the voting table and handed in his ticket, upon which, it is hardly necessary to say, all the names were sound republicans. The only alteration he made was the cutting off of his own name from the top where it had been printed.”

As Holzer explains, “Lincoln modestly cut his own name..from his ticket” and “vot[ed] only for his party’s candidates for state and local office.” Later that evening Lincoln went to the local telegraph office, where he waited for reports on election returns from across the country. “All safe in this state,” as Thurlow Weed explained from Albany, New York. Simon Cameron sent word from Philadelphia, Pennsylvanian, while a report from Alton, Illinois, noted that “[Republicans] have checkmated [Democrats’] scheme of fraud.” “Those who saw [Lincoln] at the time,” as the New York Times observed, “say it would have been impossible for a bystander to tell that that tall, lean, wiry, good-natured, easy-going gentleman…was the choice of the people to fill the most important office in the nation.”

After the Republican National Convention selected Abraham Lincoln in May 1860 as their candidate for the 1860 election, some Republican newspaper editors noted that Lincoln was a moderate politician. Lincoln opposed the further extension of slave territory, but he did not call for the end of slavery in the South. Yet some southern editors were quick to characterize him as a dangerous radical who would destroy slavery and the Union. The Fayetteville (NC) Observer, which supported the Constitutional Union party, called Lincoln an “ultra abolitionist.” Republicans “[had]… selected [him] to split the Union,” as the Democratic Charleston (SC) Courier explained. Other editors focused on the threat from the Republican party’s “objects” rather than a specific candidate. The (Jackson) Mississippian, a Democratic paper, observed that the “Black Republican’s” overall objective “[was] to degrade the southern States from their positions of equality in the Union and to destroy their social and political institutions.” One might assume that these editors would support secession after Lincoln’s victory. While that was true for the Charleston (SC) Courier and the The (Jackson) Mississippian, the Fayetteville (NC) Observer supported unionists until President Lincoln called for volunteers after Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in April 1861.

The most popular American play of the antebellum period was the historical melodrama The Gladiator (1831), by the Philadelphia physician-turned-playwright Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854).  Bird wrote the play, but actor Edwin Forrest owned it—literally.  Bird sold Forrest (1806-1872) the rights to the play for $100, and Forrest performed the title role of Spartacus to sold-out houses at least a thousand times between 1831 the end of his career four decades later.

When he saw Forrest in the role of Spartacus in 1846, Walt Whitman wrote that the play was “as full of ‘Abolitionism’ as an egg is of meat.”  Whitman continued: “It is founded on that passage of Roman history where the slaves—Gallic, Spanish, Thracian and African—rose against their masters, and formed themselves into a military organization, and for a time successfully resisted the forces sent to quell them. Running o’er with sentiments of liberty—with eloquent disclaimers of the right of the Romans to hold human beings in bondage—it is a play, this ‘Gladiator,’ calculated to make the hearts of the masses swell responsively to all those nobler manlier aspirations in behalf of mortal freedom!”

But Bird, the playwright, was no abolitionist.  He was afraid of the violence abolitionism would bring down upon the nation.  In his 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, for example, he portrays the institution of slavery as essentially benign, and his fictional slaves as content with their servitude until stirred to insurrection by an abolitionist pamphlet.  The spectre of a slave uprising haunted him. 

The Gladiator was first performed in April 1831, five months before an actual slave rebellion, under the leadership of Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia.  As the news of the rebellion reached Bird, he wrote in his diary: “At this present moment there are 6[00] or 800 armed negroes marching through Southampton County, Va. murdering, ravishing & burning those whom the Grace of God has made their owners—70 killed, principally women & children. If they had but a Spartacus among them—to organize the half million of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of the other States and to lead them on in the Crusade of Massacre, what a blessed example might they not give to the world of the excellence of slavery! What a field of interest to the playwrites of posterity! Someday we shall have it; and future generations will perhaps remember the horrors of Hayti as a farce compared with the tragedies of our own unhappy land! The vis et amor sceleratus habendi [force and criminal love of gain] will be repaid, violence with violence, & avarice with blood…”

Meanwhile, Edwin Forrest continued to pack houses with his portrayal of Spartacus.  And in 1860, Matthew Brady produced a series of photographs of Forrest in costume for his most popular roles, including Spartacus.  The National Portrait Gallery has a web exhibit of Brady’s photographs of Forrest.  Fellow photographer Marcus Aurelius Root called them Brady’s “most remarkable productions…for artistic effect.”

“An Heir to the Throne, or the Next Republican Candidate” satirizes the Republican Party’s stand on slavery in the 1860 presidential election.  Democrats attacked  Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party for rejecting the expansion of slavery into new territories.  Louis Maurer, the artist of this 1860 Currier & Ives cartoon, depicted the ultimate allegiance between the Republicans and African-Americans, as Horace Greeley (on the left) introduced the black man in the center of the cartoon as the Republican Party’s “next Candidate for the Presidency.” Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, came out in favor of Lincoln during the May 1860 Democratic convention in Chicago and used his position in the press to advocate for Lincoln leading up to the election.  In the cartoon, Lincoln’s response flouted any convention of race at the time, by declaring that his party’s new candidate will “prove to the world the superiority of the Colored over the Anglo Saxon race.”

Though the caricature of Lincoln made what would have been, an outrageous statement on the hierarchy of the races, the subject of his assertion—the black man—was still labeled as a “creature.” Maurer actually borrowed this image of a black man from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum exhibit “What is it?” Barnum advertised the exhibit, which ran in New York in 1860, as the link between human beings and monkeys.  An announcement that ran in the March 1, 1860 edition of the New York Tribune attempted to draw in spectators with the attention-grabbing questions: “Is it a lower order of man? or is it a higher development of the monkey? or Is it both in combination?”  The question of race, and of slavery, was on the forefront of Americans’ minds in 1860, adding to the relevance of Barnum’s exhibit.  In addition, Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking scientific work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, only months before on November 24, 1859 in London.

“We must for the last time warn all republican voters to look to it that they have the real republican ticket.” – Boston (MA) Advertiser, November 6, 1860

Ballots for the election of 1860 were not printed or approved by any government office or nonpartisan group. Instead, political parties were responsible for producing and distributing their own ballots for election day. As a result, voters had to be careful to ensure that they received a legitimate ballot. One only has to read some of the editorials published before election day to see that fraud was a serious concerns in some parts of the country. If a voter failed to closely examine their ballot, they could end up voting for a different party than they intended.
The Raleigh (NC) Register, a Democratic newspaper, revealed one such “scheme:” “tickets [would have] the caption on them of Douglas and Johnson, but following that will be the Breckinridge and Lane electors.” Political operatives who became involved in these plans only had to find a printer who was willing to create the ballots. “Bribing engravers to engrave the Republican ticket, to violate their pledge of private and professional honor, and make a counterfeit of it, [was] one of their devices,” as the Republican Chicago (IL) Tribune explained. While “read[ing] your ballot before…deposit[ing] it in the box” remained important, one editor also noted that the best way for voters to avoid any problems was simply to not take a ballot from someone they did not know. “The only way to be entirely secure is to take no ballot except from one whom you know to be a regular republican distributor,” as the Boston (MA) Advertiser observed.

Louis Maurer mocked presidential candidate Stephen Douglas in the cartoon “Stephen Finding His Mother.” Through the months leading up to the election in late 1860, Douglas engaged in an unprecedented national campaign tour. In response to critics of his new vote-gathering methods, he falsely claimed to visit his mother when he lead his tour through New York and New England. Using this story as the basis for the cartoon, Maurer shows Columbia as Douglas’ “mother” who, at the urging of Uncle Sam, punishes him for dividing Democrats and bringing scorn from Republicans. She uses a branch labeled the “Maine Law,” a possible reference to Maine’s 1851 temperance law, to “give him the Stripes till he sees Stars.”

By 1860 Stephen Douglas had encountered criticism despite his great achievements in Congress. Maurer’s cartoon, though immediately drawing from Douglas’ “mother” story, connected with other issues. Douglas had begun alienating himself from Southern Democrats as an opponent to the extension of slavery. Critics also cited his close association with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which determined the extension of slavery based on a state’s majority vote. Though the Act promised the success of this “popular sovereignty” within Kansas and Nebraska, it soon backfired and brought even more tension and violence to the states.

Robert W. Johannsen wrote a leading biography entitled Stephen A. Douglas. The book, available for partial view on Google Books, provides closer analyses of Douglas through the campaign of 1860.

Republicans selected Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the 1860 at their convention in Chicago, Illinois, but few newspaper editors had predicted that outcome in the months before the convention. One of the other prominent Republican politicians, such as New York Senator William Seward, seemed to be the more likely choice. While the Republican Milwaukee (WI) Sentinel admitted that “it was not yet clear who the Chicago nominee may be,” they believed that “the chances [were] decidedly in favor of Senator Seward.” The San Francisco (CA) Evening Bulletin had a similar opinion. “We have on previous occasions stated our well-settled conviction that Mr. Seward would certainly be the candidate,” as the Evening Bulletin concluded. The Democratic Raleigh (NC) Standard went so far as to explain that “Seward has in all probability been nominated” several days after the convention had actually selected Lincoln. Yet some editors had warned that selecting someone like Senator Seward would be a mistake.“The nomination of a Radical Republican for President may result in the loss of even the New England States,” as the Republican Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune observed. Seward was one of the radicals that the Press and Tribune was referring to. While Seward was a prominent politician, some Republicans considered him a liability. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison publicly supported Seward, which only reinforced the idea that Seward was a radical. If Republican wanted to win in November 1860, it seemed that a moderate had the best chance of getting enough votes. As the Democratic Newark (OH) Advocate concluded explained, Republicans selected Lincoln “with the sole aim of getting the votes of men who could never have been brought to the support of [radicals like] Chase, Seward, or Giddings.”

The German artist, Louis Maurer, drew upon an American sport—baseball—for this pro-Lincoln political cartoon, which Currier & Ives published in September 1860, only two months before the presidential election of 1860. Maurer created a parody of the four main presidential candidates (from left to right): Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell, Northern Democratic Party candidate Stephen A. Douglas, Southern Democratic Party candidate John C. Breckinridge, and Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln, who stands on the home plate, reminds his opponents that they need a “good bat” to hit a home run.   Each baseball player’s bat represents the platform they are running on.  The artist suggests that Lincoln’s bat of “equal rights and free territory” is more powerful than Breckinridge’s Southern “slavery extension” bat, Douglas’ pro-states’ rights bat of “non intervention” or Bell’s bat “fusion,” which the cartoon of Douglas refers to as a strategy to defeat Lincoln. All of the candidates also wear belts that either reflect a personal or party characteristic.  For example, Douglas’ belt reads “Little Giant,” a nickname that became popular during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates for Illinois senator. On the other hand, Lincoln’s “Wide Awake Club” belt eludes to the group of young, Republican men of the same name who marched in Northern cities to gain support for Lincoln.  To learn more about the “Wide Awakes” and their influence as a grassroots political group, read this article from the Journal of American History.

In the end, Breckinridge admits defeat, holding his nose as he moves away from the skunk in the foreground. At the time, “skunk’d” was used as a baseball term to describe a shutout or a large margin of victory.  The baseball context of “The national game. Three ‘outs’ and one ‘run’” presents an engaging way to introduce this political cartoon to the classroom.   The first chapter of Jules Tygiel’s book Past Time: Baseball as History (2001) explains this cartoon’s political references within the framework of the history of baseball as an American sport.

“The irrepressible conflict has rent the Democratic party asunder, and it has ceased to exist as a national organization.” – Chicago (IL) Democrat, May 1, 1860

When the Democratic National Convention opened on April 23, 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, the delegates’ objectives were to set the platform and select candidates for the 1860 election. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was one of the politicians who hoped to receive the nomination. While some Democratic newspaper editors considered him as the best hope for victory in November 1860, others argued that he exemplified the sectional divisions within the party. Douglas, as the New York Herald explained, was not “a moderate man who can unite the whole party.” The divide within the Democratic party became clear when the convention ended on May 1 without delegates selecting any candidates. Instead, Democrats would reconvene in Baltimore, Maryland on June 18. Republican newspapers like the Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune were quick to use the Charleston convention to characterize the Democrats as “an intensely sectional organization.” Abraham Lincoln, as the Press and Tribune noted, had predicted such a development during his debate with Senator Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois on October 7, 1858: “I see the day rapidly approaching when [Douglas’] pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be [crowded?] down his own throat.” While Northern Democrats eventually selected Douglas as their candidate, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge.

When he was fifteen years old—before his right arm was shattered at Fair Oaks, before he saw action at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and Chattanooga, before he marched to the sea with Sherman—General Oliver Otis Howard faced the the trial of his life: the entrance examination for Bowdoin College.  “I have passed though many ordeals since then,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but I do not think that any of them impressed me more than that preliminary examination.”

Howard passed the examination, on the condition that he work on his scansion of Greek and Latin poetry—that is, his ability to read the poetry aloud in the proper meter.

Like most college-bound boys in the nineteenth century, Howard had attended a private academy offering a college preparatory course that emphasized Greek, Latin, and mathematics.  Until late in the nineteenth century, proficiency in Greek and Latin was a requirement for admission to college.  The Dickinson College statutes for 1830, for example, specified that “applicants for admission into the Freshman class, must be approved by the Faculty, on an examination in Latin, in Caesar’s Commentaries, the Orations of Cicero against Catiline, and the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid: in Greek, on the Gospel of John, and Dalzell’s Collectanea Minora [an anthology]: and in Arithmetic as far as the Double Rule of Three.”

O. O. Howard was prepared for Bowdoin at the North Yarmouth Classical Academy, where the headmaster was Allen H. Weld, author of the popular Latin textbook Latin Lessons and Reader (1845).  Weld’s career in many ways illustrates the evolution of education in America in the nineteenth century from predominantly private to predominantly public education.  Born in Braintree, Vermont, in 1809, Weld graduated from Yale and began his career teaching in private academies like North Yarmouth, where he served as headmaster from 1837 to 1848. It was during this period that the common school movement—the movement toward universal public education—began to gain traction under the leadership of Horace Mann.  In 1858, Weld moved west, to Wisconsin, where he became the superintendent of the public schools in St. Croix County, and in 1874 was intrumental in establishing  the state normal school, or public school teacher’s college, in River Falls (now the University of Wisconsin—River Falls).