Please click to Digg our site.Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was passed telegrams shortly after midnight at an ice cream parlour in Springfield Illinois reporting his failure to win an outright majority of free states in the electoral college. The presidential election would now be determined by a states vote in the House of Representatives.

Needless to say, the result was an absolute disaster for Lincoln. Having established himself as a national figure during his debates with Stephen Douglas during the 1858 race for the Senate, he had attempted to reverse the outcome of that defeat with the obvious alternative strategy of uttering barely a word during the campaign. In fact one of his few utterances was to predict that only the Republicans could win the election.

"Probable answer is that no President is chosen and US is run by a deadlocked Congress for 4 years" - reader's commentBecause Douglas had split the Democrat vote at the national convention by committing to a free state's vote on slavery. This suggestion had antagonised abolitionists who sought to prevent the adoption of slavery in the new western states of the Union. At the same time the proposal had angered southern democrats who stormed out of the convention, and promised to back Breckinridge.

"This might have postponed the Civil War, at least long enough for the South to calm down about John Brown. " - reader's commentOf course Douglas was no fool. He had devised a winning strategy understanding fully that he could not possibly unite Northern and Southern Democrats on a common platform and therefore gain an outright majority in the electoral college. Instead he sought to limit Lincoln's majority by nurturing "fusion" candidates in key states. And the returns from Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut tipped the balance precisely as Douglas had predicted. Because a vote in the House of Representatives would be based on that institution's very different set of democratic calculations, based as there were upon an equitable vote by state where the South was more likely to gain a more positive, negotiated outcome.