YEAR OF METEORS

A specialist in African-American history examines the tumultuous 1860 presidential election, perhaps the most consequential in American history.

In the immediate wake of his election, even the shrewd Lincoln didn’t quite believe the South meant its drive for secession, maybe even war. His longtime adversary Stephen A. Douglas knew better. Douglas emerged from the long campaign with his Democratic Party broken by the machinations of fire-eaters like Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey and South Carolina’s Robert Rhett, who were deeply committed to slaveholding interests. They had already prompted a walkout of Southern delegates to the Democratic Convention in Charleston, S.C. and masterminded the nomination of John C. Breckinridge, effectively extinguishing Douglas’s electoral chances. With the Democrats divided, border states coalescing around the third-party candidacy of Tennessee’s John Bell and militant abolitionists supporting reformer and philanthropist Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party, the path was clear for the Republicans, who declined to nominate their controversial frontrunner William Seward, to win the White House. Making liberal use of contemporary accounts by intrepid Cincinnati journalist Murat Halstead, Egerton (History/Le Moyne College; Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America, 2009, etc.) captures the dynamics of the caucuses and conventions—including the later Confederate gathering in Montgomery that nominated Jefferson Davis and the D.C. peace conference prior to Lincoln’s inauguration—neatly summarizes the distinctions among the parties, shrewdly assesses the various candidates’ assets and liabilities and demonstrates that the year’s political fireworks centered on “the accursed institution,” specifically slavery in the territories, the single issue no longer susceptible to compromise. From the outset, the fire-eaters intended to disrupt the Union, dismissing the Republicans as a merely “sectional party.” They sought to establish a separate, slaveholding republic they believed the north too greedy and cowardly to recapture.

A lively, expertly rendered narrative of politics as a prelude to war.