What Happened On November 6?

1860: Washington, D.C.

It is voting day, and Americans will flock by the millions to the voting booths.  The choice that the people make will change the country.  Abraham Lincoln wins the Republican party nomination, and hopes to keep slavery from spreading out West.  Lincoln doesn’t even appear on many Southern ballots, but is strongly favored in the north.  On the border of the south(Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee), John Bell from the Constitutional Union Party is the local favorite, while in deeper South, John Breckinridge is the chosen nominee (despite the common misconception that Stephen Douglas was the main democratic party nominee).  The Constitutional Union Party was a combined group of Southern Democrats who opposed secession, and former conservative Whigs who didn’t think that abolition was worth letting the Southern states secede.  Supposedly, Breckinridge believed that the Constitution gave states the right to secession. While Breckinridge has no hope of winning the popular vote, he hopes to make it so that the election is thrown to the House of Representatives, where Breckinridge hopes that he might have enough support (if he manages to get Douglas behind him) to win the presidency.

81.2 percent of people able to vote will come to the polls on November 6, compared to only 54.87 percent in 2012, but not a big leap from 78.9 percent in 1856. While 81.2 percent is one of the highest turnouts among registered voters, it also doesn’t account for women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other racial minorities prevented from voting.  Many people would rather stay home during the 2016 election than cast their vote for any of the candidates.  Some voters remain undecided just days before the election.  Perhaps once our choice is made, Americans will look back at this election the same way that we look back at the election of 1860, as if it couldn’t have gone any other way.  Maybe, in the way that we often incorrectly say that Douglas was Lincoln’s main opposition, instead of Breckinridge, people in the future will mistake Gary Johnson or Jill Stein for one of the main two candidates.

The impact of the choice that voters made back then influenced American history so strongly that we cannot imagine history any other way. What will be the impact of America’s choice on November 8, 2016? Lincoln’s words to our country in his inaugural address, in the aftermath of the election, were wise then, and perhaps if we had listened to them, there would have been no Civil War, and maybe if we listen to them now, our country can achieve anything we want to.  “We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies,” Lincoln warned, and had we listened, our country today would be very different.

 *A “This Day In History” article is an article written about an important event that occurred on the date that the article was written, but many, many years prior.  It helps to look back at how the past has affected and is similar to, events today.