The survival of the union

A hotly contested election, a polarized nation on the brink of civil war… sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But which election are we talking about?

By Jeffrey Cole

The future of the country — or more to the point, whether there would be a country — depended on who won the election. One candidate represented uncertainty, fragmentation, and chaos. The other offered the best hope, however unlikely, to keep the nation together. The entire American experiment rested on the election.

I am referring to 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was running against three other candidates, Stephen Douglas being the best known. Lincoln represented the recently-formed Republican party that had never won a presidential election. Douglas was the Democrat. The two big parties got just 61.2% of the vote. The other two candidates, John Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic Party, received 14.4% of the total, and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party finished with 12.6%.

It was a mess.

Lincoln won the election with only 39% of the popular vote; all his electoral votes came from what we now call blue states. It was hardly a national consensus. The red states were solidly behind Breckinridge. Although Douglas received the second highest percentage of the vote, he only won one state: Missouri.

It had been a bitter campaign. Competitors referred to Lincoln as a baboon. Lincoln supporters so feared for his safety that he had to travel to his Washington D.C. inauguration in disguise, under cover of night.

To keep the union together, Lincoln was reluctantly willing to tolerate the continuation of slavery where it already existed. But he was dead set against slavery’s expansion. The South could see the eventual end of slavery and its way of life, so refused to accept the results of the election. Lincoln was an existential threat.

As the North industrialized, it had moved in a different direction from the agrarian South. The Lincoln states were becoming urbanized; the Southern states remained rural. The two regions felt they had less and less in common, and those feelings grew from wariness toward each other into open contempt.

After Lincoln’s election, but before his inauguration, the first Southern states began seceding from the union. The Constitution did not address their right to do this, so no one was sure what it meant. As Lincoln took his oath to protect the Constitution, signs of war were on the horizon, but there was still a fragile peace.

In November of 2024, we are the victims of the Constitution’s flaws and silences as much as we were in the election of 1860. No Lincoln is on the horizon. Someday, when this fever has broken and we again want to work together to move the country forward, we may see another Constitutional Convention convened to fix the problems. That should probably occur once a generation.

A little over five weeks after Lincoln took office, the South fired on Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun. The tensions between the two regions and way of life festered from open wounds into actual warfare. The war lasted four long, miserable years and resulted in an estimated 650,000 deaths out of a population of 31 million. Put in context, with today’s population that would equate to about 7 million dead.

Even with the carnage, the nation survived. Lincoln is now almost universally revered as the best president in our history. He was the right leader at the right time. Still, the open wounds of the Civil War took twenty years to begin to heal. Many feel (correctly in my view) that the seeds of the divisions in America today are a direct result of those events 164 years ago. The divide in 2024 is still a Red and Blue one.

Mark Twain’s incisive observation that “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes” could not be more appropriate for what we face now. The election we have just survived brings the future of our 248-year old nation to a tipping point for the second time. No matter what the result (as I’m writing this, it looks like the results will take days or weeks to discern and then be disputed) something has to break.

The best result for all of us, however unlikely, is a clear winner who indisputably earns a strong majority of both the popular and electoral vote. Not only would that demonstrate the nation can agree on a direction, but it also would mean the election would end in early November, finally. We would avoid weeks or months of indecision and legal appeals as the economy and our nerves become frayed. A close election is more likely, perhaps decided by a few thousand votes (which seems to be the norm since Bush v. Gore in 2000).

As a historian, I believe our founding fathers were geniuses. They delivered to the nascent country a Constitution unlike anything the world had seen before. The creation of three equal branches of government, with an elaborate system of checks and balances, could have come from Machiavelli or Rube Goldberg. The flaw of not being able to reconcile the principle that all people are created equal with the existence of slavery left a gaping hole that took “four score and seven years” and 650,000 deaths to fill.

Only in retrospect can we see other flaws from the eighteenth century that have grown into seemingly irreconcilable differences. No one ever intended that a national election could be decided by a few thousand voters in two or three states. One candidate winning the electoral vote while another wins the popular count is just plain undemocratic. It makes a mockery of all votes being equal.

Every state being apportioned two senators didn’t seem an egregious inequity when the differences in sizes of the state’s population were small. Today, California having the same number of Senators as Wyoming—even though it has eighty times the population—is an affront to equal representation. That the Senate can appoint Justices to the Supreme Court, or make treaties, or war, while representing as little as 43% of the population is anti-democratic. The filibuster, never enshrined in the Constitution, makes it possible for a single senator from a small state to stop the government’s ability to deal with our nation’s problems.

The founders, especially James Madison, the Constitution’s principal author, would be appalled at how poorly the document serves a world with cars, airplanes, television, the internet, and AI.

In November of 2024, we are the victims of the Constitution’s flaws and silences as much as we were in the election of 1860. No Lincoln is on the horizon. Someday, when this fever has broken and we again want to work together to move the country forward, we may see another Constitutional Convention convened to fix the problems. That should probably occur once a generation.

As it stands on the precipice for the second time, the United States will survive. As is typically American, the process that brings us to resolution will be messy and perhaps violent. Democracy will continue. I don’t have to be an optimist to believe that regardless of who takes office in January of 2025 (fingers crossed that it’s that soon), there will be another election in 2028 and every four years after.

But we can do so much better. And we will.
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Jeffrey Cole is the founder and director of The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg.

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November 6, 2024