The Progress of Liberty

Some may dispute my earlier characterization of Abraham Lincoln as a third-party candidate in the 1860 election by claiming that the Republican Party was already a major party by that time, and had as early as 1858 achieved majority support in most Northern states.

Perhaps to better understand my claim about Lincoln and the Republican Party, it is instructive to look back four years to the election of 1856, where the Republicans still had not controlled majorities in every northern state. This election was also outside the confines of the conventional two-party system.

In 1856, the Democratic Party was the major party and was still largely unified. James Buchanan ran on the Democratic ticket and won. But he ran against two “third parties,” the Republicans and the Know Nothings. The Republicans had been formed two years earlier, and this was the first presidential election involving their party. Their candidate, John C. Fremont, won 33.1 percent of the popular vote and carried 11 states. The nativist, anti-immigration Know Nothing Party was formed at about the same time as the Republican Party (circa 1854) and largely died out after the defeat of its candidate, Millard Fillmore, in the 1856 election. The Know Nothing Party got about 21.6 percent of the popular vote and is universally recognized as a third party – even though its candidate was a former President of the United States.

If the Know Nothings constituted a third party, then the Republican Party in 1856 was most certainly a third party as well. It was just as new, and its candidate was not even a former President (unlike Fillmore), and, moreover, he was the first candidate to openly proclaim anti-slavery views. For a politician to run for the presidency under an anti-slavery platform was surely radical at the time. Admittedly, abolitionist sentiment was growing, and Fremont was able to persuade many people of the correctness of this sentiment – an accomplishment on which Lincoln later capitalized.

The Republicans’ effectiveness in gaining large majorities in the North does not disqualify them from being a third party. Rather, it is testimony to how successful some third parties can be at convincing people to support them within a short period of time. The Republican Party rose at an astounding pace from insignificance to political dominance during the Civil War era.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about third parties as pertains to the 1860 election. (This page also contains a comprehensive list detailing the performance of third-party candidates in American elections since 1832.)

”By 1860 the two-party system had fallen apart. The election featured four candidates, including the breakaway Southern Democratic Party, which nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge as its candidate, and the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated John Bell. Republican Abraham Lincoln did not appear on the ballot in any of the 11 states that seceded after the election to form the Confederacy. Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, carried most of the slave states, but had little support in the North outside of Pennsylvania. Bell and the Constitutional Union party, neutral on the slavery issue, drew most of their support from the southern former Whigs that had voted for Fillmore four years before. Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate, had the broadest support geographically but lost most of the Democratic votes in the South to Breckenridge.”

“Lincoln won the election with 39.8% of the overall popular vote but 180 electoral votes due to his votes being concentrated in the northern free states. Douglas finished second in the popular vote with 29.5%, but, with his votes scattered all over the country, carried only Missouri and New Jersey and won 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge, the quasi-”third party” candidate of southern Democrats, got 18.2% but won 72 electoral votes due to most of his votes being concentrated in the South. Bell, a true “third party” candidate, finished last in the popular vote with 12.6% but carried Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to win 39 electoral votes, due to the Democratic vote in those states being split between Douglas and Breckenridge.”

“After this election, the two-party system coalesced around the Democratic and Republican parties.”

In a way, every candidate in the 1860 election was a “third-party” candidate, simply because both of the previously dominant two parties (the Whigs and the Democrats) had splintered, and the two-party system simply broke down. Every one of the candidates was severely handicapped by some disadvantage in the election, but Lincoln was in the best position to overcome his handicaps because of the activism of the Republican party during and since the election of 1856 and the effectiveness of this activism in convincing millions of people in the Northern states to adopt anti-slavery views.

So while the facts of the 1860 election are generally well-established, I can understand that there may exist differences of interpretation regarding who was or was not a third-party candidate then. However, there does exist considerable support for my position.

An article on PBS’s Online NewsHour states the following: “American voters have not elected a third party president since Abraham Lincoln when the then-minority Republican Party beat the Whigs and the Democrats in 1860 on the anti-slavery platform.“

Moreover, Thom Holmes of the Constitution Party of Oklahoma has a similar account: “Many people aren’t aware that the Republican party began as a new party in 1856 and only 4 years later, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a 4 way race. Back in 1860 the two major parties of the day were the Whigs and the Democrats. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote and his name did not even appear on the ballot in 9 states, including Texas.” (I think Holmes attributes the first major election in which the Republicans participated as the time of the Republican Party’s true beginning – a difference of interpretation rather than an inaccuracy.)

The reason I bring up these two sources is that they come from representatives of organizations with extremely divergent views – PBS and the Constitution Party – and yet seem to agree on this evaluation of the Lincoln’s status as a third-party candidate.

Sincerely,

Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

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