Douglas wins election of 1860

What would happen regarding the Civil War had Douglas won the 1860 presidential election?


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Stephen A. Douglas wins the election of 1860. How could this come about and what would his presidency be like? Would the Civil War occur during his presidency? If so, how do you think it would proceed under Douglas?
 
How? It's virtually impossible for him to win in the Electoral College, and he specifically said he would not be a candidate if the race went into the House. https://books.google.com/books?id=pCzhaQTh5SEC&pg=PA802

For him to have a chance of winning in 1860 you need to prevent the split in the Democratic Party and to have Douglas as satisfactory to the South in 1860 as he would have been in, say, 1856. Which would require a POD well before 1860 and a quite different political situation.
 
Civil War occurs, but blacks are worse off.

It's very improbable that Douglas would be elected, but if he were, there would be no civil war *while he was president* (no guarantees about afterwards...). It was controversial in the South whether even the election of *Lincoln* was sufficient grounds for secession. I think it very unlikely that even South Carolina would secede over the election of Douglas--they would know they would be utterly isolated.
 
Stephen A. Douglas wins the election of 1860. How could this come about and what would his presidency be like? Would the Civil War occur during his presidency? If so, how do you think it would proceed under Douglas?

The Democratic party had split into northern & southern factions, each with their own candidate, because many southern politicians had come to hate Douglas as being soft on the slavery issue. The only way I can see Douglas winning in 1860 is if the Democrats never split, though I'm at a loss for how the party split might be avoided. In that case, there would not be secession or a Civil War.

If Douglas somehow wins the election even with the same Democratic split, then the same hotheads who refused to accept Douglas as head of the party would refuse to accept Davis as head of the country and still secede. Douglas might still be palatable enough to the Border South to prevent the second wave of seccessions, which makes for a smaller Confederacy, a shorter war, and almost no chance of Emancipation.
 
Douglas would need a whole different 1860 to win. The Southerners would not support him at all and the party was too weak in the north to win.
 
You'd need a completely different electoral system - either direct popular vote or electoral votes to be assigned proportionally. In that situation Douglas could win a runoff, or perhaps even without one if enough Breckenridge and Bell voters switched to him. '

But of course this requires such a big change that you might not even have the same candidates in 1860.
 
You'd need a completely different electoral system - either direct popular vote or electoral votes to be assigned proportionally. In that situation Douglas could win a runoff, or perhaps even without one if enough Breckenridge and Bell voters switched to him. '

But of course this requires such a big change that you might not even have the same candidates in 1860.

Alternatively, you could have a situation where Buchanan from a very early stage makes it clear he is insistent that whatever Constitution is adopted in Kansas must be submitted to the people of the Territory for acceptance or rejection. Kenneth Stampp has argued that he could have done that without any serious split in the Democratic Party: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/LRuzFWfhRic/HMFfkVWv7HsJ

It was Douglas' opposition to Lecompton (even after Buchanan had made Lecompton a test of party loyalty) which alienated southerners from Douglas, *not* the Freeport Doctrine, which was actually pretty close to what Jefferson Davis had said at Bowdoin College in Maine. ("If the inhabitants of any Territory should refuse to enact such laws and police regulations as would give security to their property . . . it would be rendered more or less valueless. . . In the case of property in the labor of man . . . the insecurity would be so great that the owner could not ordinarily retain it . . . The owner would be practically debarred . . . from taking slave property into a Territory. . . . So much for the oft-repeated
fallacy of forcing slavery upon any community . . .")

So without Lecompton, Douglas might have secured the nomination of a united Democratic Party in 1860, and in a different political atmosphere, might even have won the election...
 
"For him to have a chance of winning in 1860 you need to prevent the split in the Democratic Party and to have Douglas as satisfactory to the South in 1860 as he would have been in, say, 1856."

I'm quoting this because this is just one of those historical myths that won't die.

Lincoln won absolute majorities in all but two of the states he carried, the two exceptions being California and Oregon, and he didn't need their electoral votes. There was only one candidate opposing Lincoln anyway in three of the largest states, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The Southern Democratic candidacy created a lot of drama but has no effect on the election.

Lincoln got only 40% of tha nationwide popular vote, because he wasn't on the ballot at all in most of the slave states. He won the northern states with about the same percentages he got in 1864, and in both elections this enabled him to almost sweep the 1860 free states.

By the way, in 1856, the Republican candidate, Fremont, got 33% of the national popular vote and carried 11 of the 16 free states, among free state electoral votes he beat Buchanan 114 to 58. The free states Fremont lost that Lincoln won were Pennsylvania (Buchanan's home state), Indiana, Illinois, and California, neither carried New Jersey, the only 1860 free state the Lincoln also didn't carry in 1864.

Fremont actually came alot closer to winning outright than did Douglas. He only needed to add Pennsylvania, where he admittedly got beaten by a large margin, and either Indiana or Illinois, of which Illinois was close. So Lincoln got the Republican vote in the North up by about 10% to 15% swung these states into the Republican column. The importance of Pennsylvania in electing Lincoln explains why Cameron became Secretary of War and screwed up the federal military buildup so badly once the Civil War started.

And what swung support in the North to the Republicans was mainly Kansas and other continued fire-eater trolling, of which the Democratic split was a part. Its not clear what the Breckinridge candidacy was meant to accomplish, since he couldn't win and Douglas and Lincoln would have supported each other as President instead of dealing with the Southern hardliners, but it came at a point where it was really too late for it to do much damage.

Douglas actually would have had more of a chance of getting elected with an even worse Democratic split, to the point where northern voters would have trusted him over Lincoln to uphold their interests.

So either the Southern elites are alot less crazy in the 1850s, in which case no Civil War for that reason, or even more so, in which case you just might get the North coalescing around Douglas than around Lincoln. But either POD has alot more effects than the election of Douglas, which is still something of a long-shot. The most interesting thing about a potential Douglas administration is that the man did not live that long past the 1860 election.
 
"For him to have a chance of winning in 1860 you need to prevent the split in the Democratic Party and to have Douglas as satisfactory to the South in 1860 as he would have been in, say, 1856."

I'm quoting this because this is just one of those historical myths that won't die.

Lincoln won absolute majorities in all but two of the states he carried, the two exceptions being California and Oregon, and he didn't need their electoral votes. There was only one candidate opposing Lincoln anyway in three of the largest states, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The Southern Democratic candidacy created a lot of drama but has no effect on the election.

I said for him to have a *chance* of winning, not that a united Democratic Party would guarantee a victory for him. I am well aware that Lincoln got an absolute majority in enough states to win. But in Illinois and Indiana, that majority was quite small--50.7% in Illinois and 51.1% in Indiana. It is certainly conceivable that a united Democratic ticket could have won those states as well as Oregon, California and all the electoral votes of New Jersey , especially if, say, Seward rather than Lincoln had been the Republican candidate. And even if Lincoln had been the candidate, a single Democratic candidate might have done better in some states than the combined opposition did in OTL. For one thing, Lincoln's forces played on the fear that the race would go into the House and that a deadlock there could lead to chaos and ultimately to the Senate making Breckinridge's running mate Lane the President; hence the slogan "Lincoln or Lane." https://books.google.com/books?id=2PQqZzyw4uAC&pg=PA111

For another thing, realistically there is only one way for Douglas to be as satisfactory to the South in 1860 as he was in 1856. That is--as I said in a post earlier in this thread--for Buchanan not to have blundered into supporting Lecompton. (Of course after Buchanan came out in favor of Lecompton in OTL, Douglas could have gone along with him--but that would almost certainly guarantee his defeat in Illinois in 1858.) See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/soc.history.what-if/LRuzFWfhRic/HMFfkVWv7HsJ on why I believe (following Kenneth Stampp's analysis) that this would not have split the Democratic party seriously. With a Democratic Party not split by Lecompton you would get a different political atmosphere in both 1858 and 1860. or at least different enough to potentially change the vote in CA, OR, IL, IN, NJ and possibly other states.

(BTW, the division of the Democratic party *did* hurt the Democrats in New Jersey, even though there was an anti-Lincoln "fusion" ticket there. Just enough Douglasites refused to vote for the two pro-Bell and two pro-Breckinridge electors on the ticket to allow Lincoln to carry four of the state's electoral votes...)
 
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I am really mystified that one-fourth of the respondents to the poll think a civil war would break out *under Douglas* (not just that it would break out *eventually*). In OTL, with *Lincoln* elected, it was far from certain that even South Carolina would secede, as I noted at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ncoln-becomes-president.424396/#post-15481060 And as I pointed out in that post, even after South Carolina seceded, the "immediate secessionists" only prevailed narrowly in elections for convention delegates in Deep South state after Deep South state. Most Southerners, even though Douglas was hardly their first choice, would have thought it crazy to secede over *his* election--and South Carolinians, even radical ones, would know that secession would leave their state hopelessly isolated.

More generally, the John Brown raid, the Texas arson scare, etc. had created an atmosphere of fear, in which it was easy to demonize the "Black Republicans." It was very difficult to demonize Douglas in this way. He had never talked about an irreconcilable conflict or about seeking the extinction (ultimate or otherwise) of slavery. His party (the pro-Douglas wing of the Democracy) had no "extremists" in it like Sumner or Giddings to serve as bogeymen. Indeed, it got respectable totals even in some Deep South states (15% in Louisiana and Alabama) and might have done better in such states if Bell had not run (southern moderates feared that voting for Douglas would simply let Breckinridge defeat Bell in their state).
 
The Democratic party had split into northern & southern factions, each with their own candidate, because many southern politicians had come to hate Douglas as being soft on the slavery issue. The only way I can see Douglas winning in 1860 is if the Democrats never split, though I'm at a loss for how the party split might be avoided. In that case, there would not be secession or a Civil War.

What if Breckenridge won?
 
Breckenridge would have a similar problem to Douglas and that he would not have much support in the north thought saying that he would be the more likely of the 2 to be elected in my opinion due to have a solid base of support.
 
Breckinridge wins an outright Electoral College majority by winning Virginia, Tennessee, Oregon, California, Kentucky, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, as well as the states he won IOTL. While he came reasonably close in the first four of these, he wound up behind the winner by about 18% in Missouri and 19% in Pennsylvania. This also means Bell wins no states at all, and Breckinridge gets elected while finishing third in the national popular vote, since the only other state where he had any support at all was Connecticut.

Still, Breckinridge came closer to being elected President than did Douglas, who got just 12 of the 152 electoral votes needed to win. Winning just New York at least knocks away Lincoln's electoral college majority, and since it puts Douglas third in Electoral votes (though not if Bell gets two New Jersey electors) maybe he gets elected by the House of Representatives. To get an electoral college majority, he needs every state Lincoln carried, except for Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. This means most of the states Fremont carried in 1856.

Breckinridge winning is far fetched but sort of possible, Douglas winning is close to ASB without alot of things changing during the Buchanan administration. What the Democratic split did was to guarantee that Douglas could not become President, since it removed those EVs from him, at least not without making more concessions to the Southerners. Maybe that was the strategy. What it did not do was make Lincoln president, which was done by a combination of bleeding Kansas, the Supreme Court, ahd the determination of planters to make sure they could legally take slaves with them when they visited their bankers in New York.
 
I can see an argument that the three fusion tickets were a strategic mistake, since Pennsylvania, not New York, was the key state in the election, and even with Breckinridge also on the ballot, Douglas had a better chance of winning Pennsylvania than did Breckinridge by himself. New Jersey probably would have gone Democratic anyway. New York became the key swing state in the second half of the twentieth century due to the Democrats corralling immigrant voters, but Fremont had carried it, so a stop Lincoln in Pennsylvania strategy might well have made more sense.
 
Breckenridge would have a similar problem to Douglas and that he would not have much support in the north thought saying that he would be the more likely of the 2 to be elected in my opinion due to have a solid base of support.

Breckinridge could easily be elected *if* the race went into the House. This is because the one-delegation-one-vote rule gave disproportionate power to the southern delegations, eleven of which were dominated by Breckinridge Democrats--who also controlled the California and Oregon delegations. With thirteen delegations, all Breckinridge needs is one American/Oppositionist/Constitutional Unionist/Whig (the Bell supporters went by various labels) each in the slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, and North Carolina, and three in Tennessee. It's at least plausible that he can get them if they see that Bell can't win.

Getting the race into the House is not so easy, though, at least in OTL. CA, OR, IL, and the four pro-Lincoln votes in NJ could be switched with a relatively small number of votes, but that would still leave Lincoln with a majority in the Electoral College. IN and NY were *fairly* close, but hardly squeakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860 (IN *would* have been very close had the Democrats been united, but Senator Jesse Bright was bitterly anti-Douglas, and helped produce a 4.5 percent vote for Breckinridge--his best showing in the Old Northwest.) Perhaps with Seward as the candidate, the race would have gone into the House, but I doubt it. Maybe he wouldn't have won Indiana by 8.7 points, but he still would probably have won it. The same is true for his own state of New York--he had many enemies there, even in his own party, and might not have carried the state by 7.4 points (against a "fusion" ticket) as Lincoln did--but he still probably would have carried it.
 
I can see an argument that the three fusion tickets were a strategic mistake, since Pennsylvania, not New York, was the key state in the election, and even with Breckinridge also on the ballot, Douglas had a better chance of winning Pennsylvania than did Breckinridge by himself. New Jersey probably would have gone Democratic anyway. New York became the key swing state in the second half of the twentieth century due to the Democrats corralling immigrant voters, but Fremont had carried it, so a stop Lincoln in Pennsylvania strategy might well have made more sense.

As long as Buchanan supported Breckinridge, Douglas would have no chance of winning Pennsylvania. It was difficult enough for Buchanan Democrats in PA to swallow the idea of a fusion ticket (which a few hard-core Douglasites rejected anyway, running their own ticket). To expect them to actually support a "pure" Douglas slate is unrealistic.

In any event, it was in 1858, not 1860, that PA turned Republican, the Republicans taking 20 of the state's 25 House seats. This was partly because of Lecompton splitting the Democratic Party, but more because the depression of 1857 had revived the tariff as an issue. So by 1860 the prospects for the Democrats in Pennsylvania were not good.
 
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