Election of 1860

The controversial election of 1860 showed the deep divide in America as the Civil war was brewing.  The essential question presented to us was: How were the results of the  Election of 1860 representative of the deep divisions  over slavery? In class, we watched a Crash Course video regarding the Election of 1860, and briefly studied the outcome. In this diagram, we see the outcome of the election based on votes from each state.

As you can see, the northern and western states electorally voted for Abraham Lincoln, an abolitionist, while the south's electoral votes went to Breckenridge, who favored slavery. Stephen Douglas, who won the electoral college only in Missouri, was a proponent of popular sovereignty, which encouraged the citizens of a state to decide whether or not it would be a free state or a slave state. While it makes sense that each candidate would win in the states that they did, the south thought it was unfair that Lincoln won the elections, as he wasn't even on their ballots. How could a man that they didn't know existed become president of the United States? More information about the election and surrounding events can be found in the video below. We then looked at The Civil War in Art to provide images of art from that time period to put into our mini-documentary, below. The art work ranges from portraits to abstract images of the sky, and all fo ti helped to show how the election of 1860 showed the deep divisions slavery had cut into the nation, splitting it into Civil War.