Abraham Lincoln was elected president, hastening the Civil War
On this day · 6 November 1860
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the White House with about 40% of the vote—and the Deep South began planning to leave.
The 1860 ballot split four ways, and that splintering made all the difference. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican elected to the presidency, defeated Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, Southern Democrat John Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell.
Lincoln won with only about 40% of the popular vote—the first president ever elected with less than half—yet swept the North to take roughly 180 electoral votes. In much of the South his name did not even appear on the ballot.
To slaveholding states, a President pledged to halt slavery’s spread was intolerable.
Secession came fast. Before Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven Deep South states had already declared they were leaving the Union to form the Confederacy. Lincoln had not yet governed a single day, but his election had lit the fuse of the American Civil War.
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