November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what would have happened had the Electoral College not awarded Lincoln the Presidency in 1860, when the man who became our greatest President secured only around 40 percent of the popular vote but 60 percent of the electoral vote. Mr. Gordon points out that had the electoral vote for one reason or another reflected the 1860 popular vote but the Constitution’s mechanisms otherwise remained the same, the election would have been decided in the House. Mr. Gordon notes that “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).” He then asks, “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.” This is an interesting counterfactual. Had Douglas become President the South might not have seceded, but if it had, there is no good reason to assume that Douglas would not have fought to crush the rebellion; in the last months of his life, he supported the Union with great passion. On the other hand, what does seem unlikely is that Douglas would have emancipated the slaves in the states in rebellion, as Lincoln did in 1862. It took Lincoln a long time to get there, and Douglas seems unlikely to have ever made it. He was profoundly deaf, dumb, and blind to the viciousness of slavery, and as late as Christmas 1860 he sought to head off secession by proposing the invasion and annexation of Mexico, to create another and vast slave state as a bribe to the South (Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, and for my money Douglas’s proposal was on the approximate moral level of the Nazi invasion of Poland). Douglas might well have lost the war had he fought it; without Emancipation, it is possible to imagine decisive British and French intervention. Douglas might have secured the Union at the price of slavery, or at least tried, and succeeded for at least four years, maybe for eight, perhaps long enough for rebel trenches to be bolstered by barbed wire and defended with Gatling guns. The Electoral College is in some obvious respects an anti-democratic mechanism. So is the Supreme Court, at least after the innovation of judicial review of legislation, and so is the Federal Reserve system—all work to thwart the swiftest possible victory of majorities. I would not mourn the abolition of the Electoral College and the direct election of the President, but my guess is that Mr. Gordon is suggesting that people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.
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