440 Election of President Lincoln. [i860 and they nominated, not Mr Seward, the chief figure of their party, for many felt a distrust of him as a sort of philosophical radical, but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, the shrewd, persuasive, courageous, capable man who had loomed so big in the memorable debates with Douglas three years before. Their convention had sat at Chicago, in Mr Lincoln's own State. The cheers of the galleries and the astute combi- nations and diplomacy of his friends in their work among the delegates had played as great a part as his own gifts and popularity in obtaining for him the nomination. But when once he had been named the whole country began to see how wise the choice had been. Eastern men for a little while looked askance upon this raw western lawyer and new states- man: but not after they had heard him. And when the votes were counted it was found that he had been elected President of the United States. One hundred and eighty of the electoral votes went to him; only one hundred and three to his three opponents combined. It was a singular result, when analysed. The electoral votes of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky had gone to John Bell, the nominee of the "Constitutional Union" party; the rest of the southern votes had gone to Breckinridge ; Douglas had received only the votes of Missouri and three of the nine votes of New Jersey. And yet, although these amounted to but one hundred and three votes altogether in the electoral college, the total popular vote at the back of them was 2,823,741, as against a popular vote for Lincoln of only 1,866,452, a popular majority of almost a million votes against the Republicans, so large was the aggregate minority in the States whose electoral votes the Republicans had won. It was a narrow victory, no popular triumph ; and Lincoln, like the other leaders of his party, was disposed to use it with the utmost good temper and moderation. But southern men took no comfort from the figures and did not listen to protestations of just purpose. They looked only at the result, saw only that the government was to be in the hands of the Republicans, regarded the defeat as final and irreparable. Their pride was stung to the quick by the unqualified moral censures put upon them by those who were now to be in power. "The whole course of the South had been described as one of systematic iniquity." Mrs Stowed striking and pathetic picture of what slavery sometimes led to, in her Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), had been accepted in the North and by the English- speaking world at large as a picture of what it usually led to. " Southern society had been represented as built upon a wilful sin ; the southern people had been held up to the world as those who deliberately despised the most righteous commands of religion. They knew that they did not deserve such reprobation. They knew that their lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote"; and that now those who had most bitterly and unjustly accused them were to become their
