The Election of 1860: “A Campaign Fraught with Consequences.”

A leading historian of antebellum politics, Holt pulls no punches in his concise study of the election of 1860. So far as he is concerned, it was “the most consequential presidential contest in all of American history” (xi). Ironically, most voters opposed the victorious (Republican) party and simultaneously desired to “throw the Democratic rascals out” in a fit of “national, not…sectional, passion” (xiii). The book is of greatest service to historians and other scholars by de-centering Abraham Lincoln and the Republican victors. The increasing division in the Democratic Party between Stephen Douglas’ supporters and James Buchanan’s loyalists about popular sovereignty and slavery extension was crucial to Lincoln’s chances, as were Republican efforts to win over northern nativists. Southern Whig and northern conservative anger at Democratic corruption—including alleged bribery and fraud crucial to Buchanan’s 1856 victory in several northern states—was decisive in convincing many white southerners in the border states to...