1860 United States presidential election

President of the United States

**November 6, 1860**

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## Overview

**Nominee**
**Abraham Lincoln**
John C. Breckinridge

**Political party**
Republican
Democratic

**State**
Illinois
Kentucky

**Running mate**
**Hannibal Hamlin**
Joseph Lane

**Electoral vote**
**180**
71

**Popular vote**
**1,865,908**
848,019

**Percentage**
**39.8%**
18.1%

**Nominee**
John Bell
Stephen A. Douglas

**Political party**
Constitutional Union
Democratic

**State**
Tennessee
Illinois

**Running mate**
Edward Everett
Herschel Vespasian Johnson

**Electoral vote**
39
12

**Popular vote**
590,901
1,380,202

**Percentage**
12.6%
29.5%

## Results

Red denotes states won by Lincoln/Hamlin, green denotes those won by Breckinridge/Lane, orange denotes those won by Bell/Everett, and blue denotes those won by Douglas/Johnson

### Elected President

James Buchanan
Democratic
Abraham Lincoln
Republican

The **1860 United States presidential election** was the 19th quadrennial presidential election, held on November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, absent from the ballot in ten slave states, won a national popular plurality, a popular majority in the North where states already had abolished slavery, and a national electoral majority comprising only Northern electoral votes. Lincoln's election thus served as the main catalyst of the American Civil War.

## Results

Voter turnout was 81.2%, the highest in American history up to that time. Lincoln won the Electoral College with less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide by carrying states above the Mason–Dixon line and north of the Ohio River, plus the states of California and Oregon. Unlike every preceding president-elect, Lincoln did not carry one slave state.

There were no ballots distributed for Lincoln in ten of the Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Lincoln was therefore the second president-elect to poll no votes in some states which had a popular vote (the first was John Quincy Adams, who polled no ballots in the popular votes of two states in the election of 1824, the only other election in which there were four major candidates, none of whom distributed ballots in every state).

Lincoln won the second-lowest share of the popular vote among all winning presidential candidates in U.S. history. Lincoln's share of the popular vote would likely have been even lower if there had been a popular vote in South Carolina, though conversely it would likely have been marginally higher had he been on the ballot in all of the Southern states. The Republican victory resulted from the concentration of votes in the free states, which together controlled a majority of the presidential electors. The split in the Democratic Party is sometimes held responsible for Lincoln's victory despite the fact that Lincoln won the election with less than 40% of the popular vote, as much of the anti-Republican vote was "wasted" in Southern states in which no ballots for Lincoln were circulated. Lincoln also won outright majorities in enough states, that if he lost all states that he took with pluralities, he would still have enough electoral votes to win.

The 1860 Republican ticket was the first successful national ticket that did not feature a Southerner, and the election marked the end of Southern political dominance in the United States. Between 1789 and 1860, Southerners had been president for two-thirds of the era, and had held the offices of Speaker of the House and President pro tem of the Senate during much of that time. Moreover, since 1791, Southerners had comprised a majority of the Supreme Court.