1860 United States presidential election

A United States presidential election that was held on November 6, 1860. The Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin emerged victorious.

In 1860, the United States was divided over the issue of slavery, and four major political parties had nominated candidates in the 1860 presidential election. Incumbent president James Buchanan, a Democrat, did not seek re-election. The anti-slavery Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term Whig Representative from Illinois, for president. Its platform promised not to interfere with slavery in the South, but opposed extension of slavery into the territories. A group of former Whigs and Know Nothings formed the Constitutional Union Party, which sought to avoid disunion by resolving divisions over slavery with some new compromise. The 1860 Constitutional Union Convention put forward former Tennessee Senator John Bell for president. After the 1860 Democratic National Convention adjourned without agreeing on a nominee, a second convention nominated Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas as the Northern Democratic presidential candidate. Douglas's support for the concept of popular sovereignty, which called for each territory's settlers to decide locally on the status of slavery, alienated many radical pro-slavery Southern Democrats. With President Buchanan's support, Southern Democrats held their own convention, nominating Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for president.

Lincoln received a majority in the Electoral College, with all his Electoral College votes coming from Northern states. He prevailed in 18 states, won 180 electoral votes, and received 39.7% of the popular vote. Douglas won the second-highest popular vote total, but won only the state of Missouri; he was the only candidate in the 1860 election to win electoral votes in both free and slave states. Breckinridge won 11 states, finishing third in the popular vote, while Bell finished fourth in the popular vote and won the electoral votes of the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. In the last presidential election in which it appointed its presidential electors at the discretion of the state legislature rather than by popular vote (and was the only state to do so), the presidential electors of South Carolina cast their ballots for Breckinridge. The 1860 election was the first of six consecutive Republican presidential victories.

Lincoln's election as the first Republican president served as the main catalyst for Southern secession and the American Civil War. His election motivated seven Southern states, all having voted for Breckinridge, to secede from the United States before Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. The Civil War began less than two months after the inauguration with the Battle of Fort Sumter, after which four more slave states seceded.