History of the United States I / Unit 14 USH1 2012 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Forty Percent
The idea
Lincoln took forty percent of the popular vote in eighteen sixty. He won every northern state except New Jersey. His name was blocked from southern ballots entirely, and he still carried a majority in the Electoral College. Fire-Eaters refused the result and South Carolina led the formal withdrawals beginning that year. Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina wrote that now the Black radical Republicans have the power, fearing more mayhem like the John Brown raid.
In practice
A president elected by a section, whose name a southern voter could not have marked on a ballot even in order to reject it.
Where people slip
The arithmetic is the argument. Secession followed from a demographic fact as much as a political one, because the North alone was now enough to elect a president over the united opposition of the South. Every compromise since eighteen twenty had assumed a sectional balance that could be maintained by admitting states in pairs, and the census had ended that.
Your place on the trail
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