"The Making of the President 1860"

Lecture by Dr. Gary Kornblith

Sunday, September 19
2:00 p.m.
Fort Boreman Room
Judge Donald F. Black Courthouse Annex
Parkersburg

Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 with only 40 percent of the popular vote, the second lowest proportion of any triumphant presidential candidate in American history. Professor Kornblith will explain how and why Lincoln succeeded by examining the realignment of American politics in the 1850s, the rival candidates in 1860, the dynamics of the presidential campaign, and the role of the electoral college as well as the popular vote in determining the outcome.

The talk will also explore why southern fire-eaters found Lincoln's election so disturbing that they pressed for secession and disunion even before he took office. Did they have good reasons to be alarmed? Why did most Virginians reject secession prior to Fort Sumter but then change their minds? Why did the people in the western section of the Old Dominion continue to oppose secession and eventually form their own state? What is the relevance of the 1860 election to West Virginians today?

Dr. Kornblith teaches American and Civil War history at Oberlin College in Oblerlin, Ohio. His recent published works include "Class and Politics to 1877" in The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War" in the Journal of American History and "The Dilemmas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America" in Ruling America: Power and Hierarchy in a Democracy published by Harvard University Press. He is the editor of two essay collections: The Industrial Revolution in America and, with Carol Lasser, Teaching American History: Essays Adapted from the Journal of American History, 2001-2007. Rowman & Litchfield has just published his Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776-1821, which inaugurates the press's American Controversies series.

This is a Civil War sesquicentennial program of the Humanities Council and presented in collaboration with the Wood County Historical Society.