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A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
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&gt; The only shred of hope for Democrats was a 'fusion' of the three opposition parties in key northern states to deny Lincoln their electoral votes and throw the election into the House. But the legacy of warfare between Douglas and Buchanan thwarted cooperation, while the Know-Nothing ancestry of the Constitutional Unionists bred distrust among foreign-born Democrats. After many meetings in smoke-filled rooms, fusion arrangements among all three parties emerged in New York and Rhode Island. Three of New Jersey's seven electors ran on fusion tickets; in Pennsylvania the Breckinridge and Douglas electors managed to fuse, but a rebellious group of Douglas Democrats refused to support the ticket. All of this effort was in vain. Lincoln won majorities over the combined opposition in New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island; the three fusion electors in New Jersey gave Douglas his only northern electoral votes. He also carried Missouri, while Bell won Virginia, Kentucky, and his native Tennessee. Breckinridge carried the rest of the South, winning 45 percent of the sectional's popular votes to Bell's 39 percent. Though Lincoln won only 40 percent of the national popular vote (54 percent in the North), his 180 electoral votes gave him a comfortable cushion over the necessary minimum of 152. Even if the opposition had combined against him in every free state he would have lost only in New Jersey, California, and Oregon, and still would have won the presidency with only 169 electoral votes.

&gt; To southerners the election's most ominous feature was the magnitude of the Republican victory north of the 41st parallel. Lincoln won more than 60 percent of the vote in that region, losing scarcely two dozen counties. Three quarters of the Republican congressmen and senators in the next Congress would represent this "Yankee" and anti-slavery portion of the free states. These facts were "full of portentous significance," declared the *New Orleans Crescent.* "The idle canvass prattle about Northern conservatism may now be dismissed," agreed the *Richmond Examiner.* "A party founded on the single sentiment... of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power." No one could any longer "be deluded... that the Black Republican party is a moderate" party, pronounced the *New Orleans Delta.* "It is, in fact, essentially a revolutionary party."

&gt; Whether or not the party was revolutionary, antislavery men concurred that a revolution had taken place. "We live in revolutionary times," wrote and Illinois free soiler, "&amp; I say God bless the revolution." Charles Francis Adams, whose grandfather and father had been defeated for re-election to the presidency had been defeated by slaveowners, wrote in his diary the day after Lincoln's victory: "The great revolution has actually taken place. . . . The country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the Slaveholders."

Text from *Battle Cry of Freedom* by James McPherson, pages 232-233 Sources: *New Orleans Daily Crescent,* Nov 13, 1860, and *Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner,* Nov 9, 1860, in Dumond, ed., *Southern Editorials on Secession,* 237, 223; *New Orleans Daily Delta,* Nov 3, 1860, quoted in Peyton McCrary, *Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment* (Princeton, 1978), 52; Horace White to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 30, 1860, in William E. Baringer, *A House Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect* (Springfield, Ill., 1945)0, 236; Adams quoted in Eric Foner, *Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War* (New York, 1970) 223.
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