November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:05 PM EST Julie Fenster’s post is very interesting. I had no idea that Lincoln invented political junk mail. But I can’t help wondering if Lincoln, four years later, changed his opinion regarding the Electoral College. In 1860 he won only 39.89 percent of the popular vote but carried 18 states and won 180 electoral votes, 59.4 percent of the total, making him the undisputed President. Had the Founding Fathers been “outwitted,” and electoral votes allocated according to the popular vote, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. There Lincoln would have had to battle it out with Senator Stephen Douglas, who had the second highest popular vote total (but, curiously, the lowest electoral vote total). With each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether). So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely. So would there now be a Johnson Memorial? My guess is no. He opposed Georgia’s secession but acquiesced in it and served in the Confederate senate. After the war he was disbarred from sitting in the U.S. Senate. So in at least one instance it is surely a good thing that the Founding Fathers weren’t “outwitted.” This seems to me a good example of why we should be careful what we wish for.
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