Only one presidential election has provoked civil war somehow so far

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Before Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, there was only one presidential election that resulted in massive violence against the federal government. Of course that was the election in 1860, which split like any other in history and plunged the United States into the Civil War. Thisalone made it difficult to claim a parallel in the 2020 election, despite Donald Trump’s repeated false statements that he actually won. At this point, there are no signs of a bloody internecine conflict ending in at least 620,000 deaths.

So in some ways, Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election isn’t as bad as the lies caused by the Civil War. In other very important ways, however, even worse.

First, though, one must understand an election in 1860, which came at a political moment full of danger. Americans were divided on whether any slavery should be allowed in the newly acquired territories in the west. Extremists in the South, who feel an opportunity to profit from human slavery in nascentindustries, have no limit to when, where and how slavery can be extended. While there are certainly some abolitionists who want to completely abolish slavery, the main “anti-slavery” forces mostly seek a compromise, which does not allow slavery to spread outside the state where it is legal.

Even that was too much for the pro-slave forces, who worried that anti-slavery states in Congress could overthrow slave owners and force them to remove their “strange institutions.” When the Whig Party split because it did not take a firm stand on the issue of slavery, and the Republican Party rose from its asheson a platform of blocking slavery in the West, the Southerners made clearthey ready to take away if a Republican becomes president. The first time they made this threat, in the election of 1856, proved unnecessary; Republican nominee John C. Frmont was decisively defeated by Democrat James Buchanan, even with former president Millard Fillmorepotentially pulling votes on the xenophobic Know Nothing ticket. (Similarly Trump described his actions in 2020 by refusing to say whether he would accept defeat to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, even though his victory posed that threat and Clinton immediately admitted it.)

But the crisis came four years later, in 1860. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican nominee, got under 40 percent of the popular vote, but that was enough to win against the opposition split in three ways. Democrats broke down after appointing Stephen Douglas, who distanced himself from both the pro-slavery and anti-slavery force by arguing that individual states should be allowed to decide the issue on their own. Democrats who opposed slavery of and large fled Lincoln, while pro-slavery Democrats appointed John Breckinridge as a third-party alternative. Further complicated matters, the former Whigs who wanted to avoid the issue of slavery completely put up their own candidate, John Bell.

Lincoln’s name did not appear on the ballot in 10 Southern states, but he won major ballots across the North and won 18 states and 180 election votes. Breckinridge was a distant second in electoral counts, carrying 11 states but only 72 electoral votes, while Douglas finished second to Lincoln in the popular vote but won only one state. So Lincoln was the clear winner and 11 Southern states were the last to abide by their pledge to secedefrom the Union.

I previously wrote about Buchanan, a reasonable contender for the title of worst president. He was president throughout the election in 1860 but was not yet ready for re -election after Democrats refused to nominate him. Buchanan openly sympathized with the pro-slave faction, blamed the abolitionists for the alleged uprising in the South and believed that those states had the right to stay away. Instead of working with President -elect Lincoln to try to stop the wave of secession of the South, and perhaps stop civil war, Buchanan made the point of doing nothing. His bitterness is somewhat similar to Trump’s behavior after losing the 2020 election but he has yet to try to stay in power himself. His actions were different and unwise, but not literally dictatorial, and he did not try to gaslight the public with many false claims that the election was illegal.

Another important difference lies in the strong possibility that the 2020 election marks a direct hurdle for American democracy. When the fall from the election in 1860 was said and over, after a bloody four -year conflict, the franchise actually expanded. The 15th Amendment clearly expanded the right to vote Black men, including former slaves, and although it was not widely or generally implemented for another entire century, that was the smallest step in the right direction. Trump’s Big Lie, in contrast, has been used to justify a wave of voter restraint laws across the country, which are largely aimed at reducing ballot access for Black voters and other such community.

The United States has had 10 previous incumbent presidents who have lost elections, from John Adams to George HW Bush. None of them were happy about it, but all of them accepted the legitimacy of their defeat. By breaking this precedent and forcing his supporters to pass voter restraint laws that make Republican victory more likely in the future, Trump’s example has put democracy in jeopardy. That could be the chief legacy of the 2020 election.

There is an important way in which comparisons between the 1860 and2020 elections are not yet clear. Lincoln is a moderate on the issue of slavery who, in rough parallel to Biden, is portrayed as a fire-respiratoryradical by his opponents. He eventually decided that the abolition of slavery was a just and necessary expense and took on that historic obligation, even if it meant “proving correctly” his critics of slavery. (That decision likely cost him his life.) Lincoln also expanded the federal government’s power to control the economy and vigorously denounced the war, even in the face of widespread protests by sympathetic Confederates in Northern cities. If your critics accuse you of being harsh no matter what you do, he argues, there is no longer any reason not to do the right thing.

It took Lincoln rather than a tool, so to speak, to learn that lesson, and Biden also calmed it down gently, allowing his more ambitious programs to be watered down or removed altogether by the opposition of “moderate” Democrats. like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Cinema.

None of these arguments cancels out the obvious ways in which the election in 1860 had more serious consequences at least at this point in 2020. Trump’s Big Lie seems unlikely to fill hundreds of thousands. died, and try if possible, Republicans can’t literally turn the clock back to a time when women and people of color couldn’t really vote, and when many of them were viewed as belonging. Although, the fact that the comparison is not ridiculous is very disturbing. We had other controversial elections, from the troubled mess of 1876 to the Kennedy-Nixon nail-biter of 1960 to the “hanging chad” election of 2000, fixed by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. The election in 2020, in The Contrast, should not be isolated, and the cult of human personality has become so strong that its delusions have created a malignant normality. Which of these two elections will ultimately be more destructive? It’s too early to know for sure; history is supposed to be the judge.

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