THE MARKET REVOLUTION AND THE SECTIONAL CONFLICT (1812-1860)

1. A General information about the market revolution

Traditional commerce was made obsolete by improvements in transportation and communication. This change prompted the reinstatement of the mercantilist ideas that were thought to have died out. Increased industrialization was a major component of the Market Revolution as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

Northern cities started to have a more powerful economy, while most southern cities (with the marked exception of free labor metropolises like St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans) resisted the influence of market forces in favor of the region's slave system. It also was in part influenced by the need for national mobility, shown to be a problem during the War of 1812, after which the government increased production of early roads, extensive canals along navigable waterways, and later elaborate railroad networks.

Following the War of 1812, the American economy was altered from an economy dependent on imports from Europe to one that evolved greater internal production and commerce. In 1817 James Monroe replaced James Madison as president of the U.S. The Democratic-Republicans continued policies begun in Jefferson’s administration. With a new generation of leaders the Democratic-Republican Party came to embrace the principles of government activism and the development of large-scale domestic manufacturing. Despite all of the promises that characterized the United States, discrepancies loomed: the survival of slavery, treatment of the Indians, the deterioration of some urban areas, and a mania for speculation. The nation was not just growing through the addition of land, but population shifts brought about new states to the Union and when Missouri petitioned for statehood in 1819, the issue of slavery was thrust on the national agenda. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the issue awakened him "like a firebell in the night." That the Missouri question coincided with the nation’s worst financial crisis awakened anxieties in many Americans. By the 1820s Americans recognized a rough regional specialization: plantation-style export agriculture in the south, a north built on business and trade, and a frontier west. The regions were interdependent but in time their differences would become more obvious, more important, and increasingly more incompatible.

The market revolution also brought about a change in industry and agriculture. Eli Whitney perfected a system of producing muskets with interchangeable parts. Prior to Whitney’s invention, most muskets—and all other goods—had been handmade with parts especially designed for each particular musket. The trigger of one musket, for example, could not be used to replace a broken trigger on another musket. With interchangeable parts, however, all triggers fit the same model of musket, as did all ramrods, all flash pans, all hammers, and all bullets. Manufacturers in many different industries soon took advantage of Whitney’s invention to make a variety of goods with interchangeable parts.

Many new products revolutionized agriculture in the West. John Deere, for example, invented a horse-pulled steel plow to replace the difficult oxen-driven wooden plows that farmers had used for centuries. The steel plow allowed farmers to till soil faster and more cheaply without having to make repairs as often.

In the 1830s, Cyrus McCormick invented a mechanical mower-reaper that quintupled the efficiency of wheat farming. Prior to the mower-reaper, wheat farming had been too difficult, so farmers had instead produced corn, which was less profitable. As in the South after the cotton gin, farmers in the West raked in huge profits as they acquired more lands to plant more and more wheat. More important, farmers for the first time began producing more wheat than the West could consume. Rather than let it go to waste, they began to transport crop surpluses to sell in the manufacturing Northeast. The market revolution further exacerbated sectional tensions in the United States. As King Cotton became the primary crop in the South, the need for increase in labor arose; thus, the South increased its use of slaves in producing crops. The North and European countries banned slavery in their countries/regions, and attempted to push the South to abolish slavery as well. The slave trade ended, but slavery did not end. As the textile industry in the North drastically increased, changing women and children's roles and further revolutionizing family structure, the demand for raw products such as cotton increased, meaning an increase in the South's demand for more labor. Ironically, this Northern demand for more cotton for the textile industry increased the Southern demand for slavery, making it harder for the North to end slavery in the South. This increase of labor and industry brought the United States into the world picture for economy and commerce, planting the seed for the United States to increase in wealth and power. 

No visitor to the United States left a more enduring record of his trav­els and observations than the French writer and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, first published in 1835, remains one of the most trenchant and insightful analyses of Ameri­can social and political practices. Tocqueville was far too shrewd an observer to be uncritical about the United States, but his verdict was fundamentally positive.“The gov­ernment of a democracy brings the notion of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens,” he wrote, “just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all men.” Nonetheless, Tocqueville was only one in the first of a long line of thinkers to worry whether such rough equality could survive in the face of a growing fac­tory system that threatened to create divisions between industrial workers and a new business elite.

Other travelers marveled at the growth and vitality of the country, where they could see “everywhere the most unequivocal proofs of prosperity and rapid progress in ag­riculture, commerce, and great pub­lic works.” But such optimistic views of the American experiment were by no means universal. One skep­tic was the English novelist Charles Dickens, who first visited the United States in 1841-42. “This is not the Republic I came to see,” he wrote in a letter. “This is not the Republic of my imagination....The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thou­sand respects, it appears in my eyes.

In everything of which it has made a boast — excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor chil­dren — it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon.”

Dickens was not alone. America in the 19th century, as throughout its history, generated expectations and passions that often conflicted with a reality at once more mundane and more complex. The young nation’s size and diversity defied easy gener­alization and invited contradiction: America was both a freedom-loving and slave-holding society, a nation of expansive and primitive frontiers, a society with cities built on growing commerce and industrialization.

2. Lands of promise         

By 1850 the national territory stretched over forest, plain, and mountain. Within its far-flung lim­its dwelt 23 million people in a Union comprising 31 states. In the East, in­dustry boomed. In the Midwest and the South, agriculture flourished. After 1849 the gold mines of Cali­fornia poured their precious ore into the channels of trade.

New England and the Middle At­lantic states were the main centers of manufacturing, commerce, and finance. Principal products of these areas were textiles, lumber, cloth­ing, machinery, leather, and wool­en goods. The maritime trade had reached the height of its prosper­ity; vessels flying the American flag plied the oceans, distributing wares of all nations. The South, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and beyond, featured an economy centered on agriculture. Tobacco was important in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. In South Carolina, rice was an abundant crop. The climate and soil of Louisiana encouraged the cultivation of sugar. But cotton eventually became the dominant commodity and the one with which the South was identified. By 1850 the American South grew more than 80 percent of the world’s cotton. Slaves cultivated all these crops.

The Midwest, with its bound­less prairies and swiftly growing population, flourished. Europe and the older settled parts of America demanded its wheat and meat products. The introduction of la­bor-saving implements — notably the McCormick reaper (a machine to cut and harvest grain) — made possible an unparalleled increase in grain production.The nation’s wheat crops swelled from some 35 million hectoliters in 1850 to nearly 61 million in 1860, more than half grown in the Midwest.

An important stimulus to the country’s prosperity was the great improvement in transportation fa­cilities; from 1850 to 1857 the Ap­palachian Mountain barrier was pierced by five railway trunk lines linking the Midwest and the North­east. These links established the economic interests that would un­dergird the political alliance of the Union from 1861 to 1865. The South lagged behind. It was not until the late 1850s that a continuous line ran through the mountains connecting the lower Mississippi River area with the southern Atlantic seaboard.

3. Slavery and sectionalism

One overriding issue exacerbat­ed the regional and economic dif­ferences between North and South: slavery. Resenting the large profits amassed by Northern businessmen from marketing the cotton crop, many Southerners attributed the backwardness of their own section to Northern aggrandizement. Many Northerners, on the other hand, de­clared that slavery — the “peculiar institution” that the South regarded as essential to its economy — was largely responsible for the region’s relative financial and industrial backwardness.

As far back as the Missouri Compromise in 1819, sectional lines had been steadily hardening on the slavery question. In the North, sen­timent for outright abolition grew increasingly powerful. Southern­ers in general felt little guilt about slavery and defended it vehemently. In some seaboard areas, slavery by 1850 was well over 200 years old; it was an integral part of the basic economy of the region.

Although the 1860 census showed that there were nearly four million slaves out of a total population of 12.3 million in the 15 slave states, only a minority of Southern whites owned slaves. There were some 385,000 slave owners out of about 1.5 million white families. Fifty per­cent of these slave owners owned no more than five slaves. Twelve percent owned 20 or more slaves, the num­ber defined as turning a farmer into a planter. Three-quarters of South­ern white families, including the “poor whites,” those on the lowest rung of Southern society, owned no slaves.

It is easy to understand the in­terest of the planters in slave hold­ing. But the yeomen and poor whites supported the institution of slavery as well. They feared that, if freed, blacks would compete with them economically and challenge their higher social status. Southern whites defended slavery not simply on the basis of economic necessity but out of a visceral dedication to white supremacy.

As they fought the weight of Northern opinion, political lead­ers of the South, the professional classes, and most of the clergy now no longer apologized for slavery but championed it. Southern publicists insisted, for example, that the rela­tionship between capital and labor was more humane under the slavery system than under the wage system of the North.

Before 1830 the old patriarchal system of plantation government, with its personal supervision of the slaves by their owners or masters, was still characteristic. Gradually, however, with the introduction of large-scale cotton production in the lower South, the master gradu­ally ceased to exercise close personal over his slaves, and employed professional overseers charged with exacting from slaves a maximum amount of work. In such circumstances, slavery could become a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were commonplace. In other settings, however, it could be much milder.

In the end, however, the most trenchant criticism of slavery was not the behavior of individual mas­ters and overseers. Systematically treating African-American laborers as if they were domestic animals, slavery, the abolitionists pointed out, violated every human being’s in­alienable right to be free.

4. The abolitionist

In national politics, Southerners chiefly sought protection and en­largement of the interests represent­ed by the cotton/slavery system. They sought territorial expansion because the wastefulness of cultivating a sin­gle crop, cotton, rapidly exhausted the soil, increasing the need for new fertile lands. Moreover, new territory would establish a basis for additional slave states to offset the admission of new free states. Antislavery North­erners saw in the Southern view a conspiracy for proslavery aggran­dizement. In the 1830s their opposi­tion became fierce.

An earlier antislavery movement, an offshoot of the American Revo­lution, had won its last victory in 1808 when Congress abolished the slave trade with Africa. Thereafter, opposition came largely from the Quakers, who kept up a mild but ineffectual protest. Meanwhile, the cotton gin and westward expansion into the Mississippi delta region cre­ated an increasing demand for slaves.

The abolitionist movement that emerged in the early 1830s was combative, uncompromising, and insistent upon an immediate end to slavery. This approach found a leader in William Lloyd Garrison, a young man from Massachusetts, who com­bined the heroism of a martyr with the crusading zeal of a demagogue. On January 1, 1831, Garrison pro­duced the first issue of his newspa­per, The Liberator, which bore the announcement: “I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfran­chisement of our slave population....On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with mod­eration....I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.”

Garrison’s sensational methods awakened Northerners to the evil in an institution many had long come to regard as unchangeable. He sought to hold up to public gaze the most repulsive aspects of slav­ery and to castigate slave holders as torturers and traffickers in human life. He recognized no rights of the masters, acknowledged no compro­mise, tolerated no delay. Other aboli­tionists, unwilling to subscribe to his law-defying tactics, held that reform should be accomplished by legal and peaceful means. Garrison was joined by another powerful voice, that of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who galvanized Northern audiences. Theodore Dwight Weld and many other abolitionists crusaded against slavery in the states of the old North­west Territory with evangelical zeal.

One activity of the movement in­volved helping slaves escape to safe refuges in the North or over the bor­der into Canada. The “Underground Railroad,” an elaborate network of secret routes, was firmly established in the 1830s in all parts of the North. In Ohio alone, from 1830 to 1860, as many as 40,000 fugitive slaves were helped to freedom. The number of local antislavery societies increased at such a rate that by 1838 there were about 1,350 with a membership of perhaps 250,000.

Most Northerners nonetheless ei­ther held themselves aloof from the abolitionist movement or actively opposed it. In 1837, for example, a mob attacked and killed the an­tislavery editor Elijah P.Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. Still, Southern re­pression of free speech allowed the abolitionists to link the slavery issue with the cause of civil liberties for whites. In 1835 an angry mob de­stroyed abolitionist literature in the Charleston, South Carolina, post of­fice. When the postmaster-general stated he would not enforce delivery of abolitionist material, bitter de­bates ensued in Congress. Abolition­ists flooded Congress with petitions calling for action against slavery. In the House voted to table such petitions automatically, thus effec­tively killing them. Former President John Quincy Adams, elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, fought this so-called gag rule as a violation of the First Amendment, finally winning its repeal in 1844.

5. Texas and war with Mexico

Throughout the 1820s, Ameri­cans settled in the vast territory of Texas, often with land grants from the Mexican government. However, their numbers soon alarmed the au­thorities, who prohibited further im­migration in 1830. In 1834 General Antonio López de Santa Anna estab­lished a dictatorship in Mexico, and the following year Texans revolted. Santa Anna defeated the American rebels at the celebrated siege of the Alamo in early 1836, but Texans under Sam Houston destroyed the Mexican Army and captured Santa Anna a month later at the Battle of San Jacinto, ensuring Texan inde­pendence.

For almost a decade, Texas re­mained an independent republic, largely because its annexation as a huge new slave state would disrupt the increasingly precarious balance of political power in the United States. In 1845, President James K. Polk, narrowly elected on a platform of westward expansion, brought the Republic of Texas into the Union. Polk’s move was the first gambit in a larger design. Texas claimed that its border with Mexico was the Rio Grande; Mexico argued that the border stood far to the north along the Nueces River. Meanwhile, set­tlers were flooding into the territo­ries of New Mexico and California. Many Americans claimed that the United States had a “manifest des­tiny” to expand westward to the Pa­cific Ocean.

U.S. attempts to purchase from Mexico the New Mexico and Cali­fornia territories failed. In 1846, after a clash of Mexican and U.S. troops along the Rio Grande, the United States declared war. Ameri­can troops occupied the lightly populated territory of New Mexico, then supported a revolt of settlers in California. A U.S. force under Zachary Taylor invaded Mexico, winning victories at Monterrey and Buena Vista, but failing to bring the Mexicans to the negotiating table. In March 1847, a U.S.Army command­ed by Winfield Scott landed near Veracruz on Mexico’s east coast, and fought its way to Mexico City. The United States dictated the Trea­ty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in which Mexico ceded what would become the American Southwest region and California for $15 million.

The war was a training ground for American officers who would later fight on both sides in the Civil War. It was also politically divisive.Polk, in a simultaneous facedown with Great Britain, had achieved British recognition of American sov­ereignty in the Pacific Northwest to the 49th parallel. Still, antislavery forces, mainly among the Whigs, at­tacked Polk’s expansion as a proslav­ery plot.

With the conclusion of the Mexi­can War, the United States gained a vast new territory of 1.36 million square kilometers encompassing the present-day states of New Mexico, Nevada, California, Utah, most of Arizona, and portions of Colorado and Wyoming. The nation also faced a revival of the most explosive ques­tion in American politics of the time: Would the new territories be slave or free?

6. The compromise of 1850

Until 1845, it had seemed likely that slavery would be confined to the areas where it already existed. It had been given limits by the Missouri Compromise in 1820 and had no op­portunity to overstep them. The new territories made renewed expansion of slavery a real likelihood.

Many Northerners believed that if not allowed to spread, slavery would ultimately decline and die. To jus­tify their opposition to adding new slave states, they pointed to the state­ments of Washington and Jefferson, and to the Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the extension of slavery into the Northwest. Texas, which already permitted slavery, naturally entered the Union as a slave state. But the California, New Mexico, and Utah territories did not have slavery. From the beginning, there were strongly conflicting opinions on whether they should. Southerners urged that all the lands acquired from Mexico should be thrown open to slave holders. Antislavery Northerners demanded that all the new regions be closed to slavery. One group of moderates suggested that the Missouri Com­promise line be extended to the Pa­cific with free states north of it and slave states to the south. Another group proposed that the question be left to “popular sovereignty.” The government should permit settlers to enter the new territory with or with­out slaves as they pleased. When the time came to organize the region into states, the people themselves could decide.

Despite the vitality of the aboli­tionist movement, most Northerners were unwilling to challenge the exis­tence of slavery in the South. Many, however, were against its expansion. In 1848 nearly 300,000 men voted for the candidates of a new Free Soil Party, which declared that the best policy was “to limit, localize, and discourage slavery.” In the immedi­ate aftermath of the war with Mex­ico, however, popular sovereignty had considerable appeal.

In January 1848 the discovery of gold in California precipitated a headlong rush of settlers, more than 80,000 in the single year of 1849. Congress had to determine the sta­tus of this new region quickly in order to establish an organized gov­ernment. The venerable Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, who twice before in times of crisis had come forward with compromise arrange­ments, advanced a complicated and carefully balanced plan. His old Massachusetts rival, Daniel Web­ster, supported it. Illinois Demo­cratic Senator Stephen A.Douglas, the leading advocate of popular sovereignty, did much of the work in guiding it through Congress.

"The United States Senate, A.D. 1850"

The Compromise of 1850 con­tained the following provisions: (1) California was admitted to the Union as a free state; (2) the remainder of the Mexican cession was divided into the two territories of New Mexico and Utah and organized without mention of slavery; (3) the claim of Texas to a portion of New Mexico was satisfied by a payment of $10 million; (4) new legislation (the Fugitive Slave Act) was passed to apprehend runaway slaves and return them to their mas­ters; and (5) the buying and selling of slaves (but not slavery) was abolished in the District of Columbia.

The country breathed a sigh of relief. For the next three years, the compromise seemed to settle near­ly all differences. The new Fugitive Slave Law, however, was an imme­diate source of tension. It deeply offended many Northerners, who refused to have any part in catch­ing slaves. Some actively and vio­lently obstructed its enforcement. The Underground Railroad became more efficient and daring than ever.

7. A divided nation

During the 1850s, the issue of slav­ery severed the political bonds that had held the United States together. It ate away at the country’s two great political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, destroying the first and irrevocably dividing the second. It produced weak presidents whose irresolution mirrored that of their parties. It eventually discredited even the Supreme Court.

The moral fervor of abolition­ist feeling grew steadily. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel pro­voked by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. More than 300,000 cop­ies were sold the first year. Presses ran day and night to keep up with the demand. Although sentimental and full of stereotypes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrayed with undeniable force the cruelty of slavery and pos­ited a fundamental conflict between free and slave societies. It inspired widespread enthusiasm for the an­tislavery cause, appealing as it did to basic human emotions — in­dignation at injustice and pity for the helpless individuals exposed to ruthless exploitation.

In 1854 the issue of slavery in the territories was renewed and the quarrel became more bitter. The re­gion that now comprises Kansas and Nebraska was being rapidly settled, increasing pressure for the establish­ment of territorial, and eventually, state governments.

Under terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the entire re­gion was closed to slavery. Dominant slave-holding elements in Missouri objected to letting Kansas become a free territory, for their state would then have three free-soil neighbors (Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas) and might be forced to become a free state as well. Their congressional delegation, backed by Southerners, blocked all efforts to organize the region.

At this point, Stephen A. Doug­las enraged all free-soil supporters. Douglas argued that the Compro­mise of 1850, having left Utah and New Mexico free to resolve the slav­ery issue for themselves, superseded the Missouri Compromise. His plan called for two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. It permitted settlers to carry slaves into them and even­tually to determine whether they should enter the Union as free or slave states.

Douglas’s opponents accused him of currying favor with the South in order to gain the presidency in 1856. The free-soil movement, which had seemed to be in decline, reemerged with greater momentum than ever. Yet in May 1854, Douglas’s plan in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed Congress to be signed by President Franklin Pierce. Southern enthusiasts celebrated with cannon fire. But when Douglas subsequently visited Chicago to speak in his own defense, the ships in the harbor low­ered their flags to half-mast, the church bells tolled for an hour, and a crowd of 10,000 hooted so loudly that he could not make himself heard.

The immediate results of Douglas’s ill-starred measure were momen­tous. The Whig Party, which had straddled the question of slavery expansion, sank to its death, and in its stead a powerful new organization arose, the Republican Party, whose primary demand was that slavery be excluded from all the territories. In 1856, it nominated John Fremont, whose expeditions into the Far West had won him renown. Fremont lost the election, but the new party swept a great part of the North. Such free-soil leaders as Salmon P.Chase and William Seward exerted greater in­fluence than ever. Along with them appeared a tall, lanky Illinois attor­ney, Abraham Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the flow of both Southern slave holders and antislav­ery families into Kansas resulted in armed conflict. Soon the territory was being called “bleeding Kansas.” The Supreme Court made things worse with its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. Scott was a Missouri slave who, some 20 years earlier, had been tak­en by his master to live in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory; in both places, slavery was banned. Return­ing to Missouri and becoming dis­contented with his life there, Scott sued for liberation on the ground of his residence on free soil. A majority of the Supreme Court — dominated by Southerners — decided that Scott lacked standing in court because he was not a citizen; that the laws of a free state (Illinois) had no effect on his status because he was the resi­dent of a slave state (Missouri); and that slave holders had the right to take their “property” anywhere in the federal territories. Thus, Con­gress­ could not restrict the expan­sion of slavery. This last assertion invalidated former compromises on slavery and made new ones impos­sible to craft.

The Dred Scott decision stirred fierce resentment throughout the North. Never before had the Court been so bitterly condemned. For Southern Democrats, the decision was a great victory, since it gave ju­dicial sanction to their justification of slavery throughout the territories.

8. Lincoln, Douglas and Brown

Abraham Lincoln had long re­garded slavery as an evil. As ear­ly as 1854 in a widely publicized speech, he declared that all national legislation should be framed on the principle that slavery was to be re­stricted and eventually abolished. He contended also that the princi­ple of popular sovereignty was false, for slavery in the western territo­ries was the concern not only of the local inhabitants but of the United States as a whole.

In 1858 Lincoln opposed Ste­phen A.Douglas for election to the U.S.Senate from Illinois. In the first paragraph of his opening campaign speech, on June 17, Lincoln struck the keynote of American history for the seven years to follow:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

Lincoln and Douglas engaged in a series of seven debates in the ensuing months of 1858. Senator Douglas, known as the “Little Gi­ant,” had an enviable reputation as an orator, but he met his match in Lincoln, who eloquently challenged Douglas’s concept of popular sov­ereignty. In the end, Douglas won the election by a small margin, but Lincoln had achieved stature as a national figure.

By then events were spinning out of control. On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown, an antislavery fanatic who had captured and killed five proslavery settlers in Kansas three years before, led a band of fol­lowers in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (in what is now West Virginia). Brown’s goal was to use the weapons seized to lead a slave uprising. After two days of fighting, Brown and his surviving men were taken prisoner by a force of U.S. Marines commanded by Colonel Robert E.Lee.

Brown’s attempt confirmed the worst fears of many Southerners. Antislavery activists, on the other hand, generally hailed Brown as a martyr to a great cause. Virginia put Brown on trial for conspiracy, treason, and murder. On December 2, 1859, he was hanged. Although most Northerners had initially con­demned him, increasing numbers were coming to accept his view that he had been an instrument in the hand of God.

9. The 1860 election

In 1860 the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln as its candidate for president. The Repub­lican platform declared that slavery could spread no farther, promised a tariff for the protection of indus­try, and pledged the enactment of a law granting free homesteads to settlers who would help in the open­ing of the West. Southern Demo­crats, unwilling in the wake of the Dred Scott case to accept Douglas’s popular sovereignty, split from the party and nominated Vice President John C.Breckenridge of Kentucky for president. Stephen A.Douglas was the nominee of northern Dem­ocrats. Diehard Whigs from the border states, formed into the Con­stitutional Union Party, nominated John C.Bell of Tennessee.

Lincoln and Douglas compet­ed in the North, Breckenridge and Bell in the South. Lincoln won only 39 percent of the popular vote, but had a clear majority of 180 elector­al votes, carrying all 18 free states. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia; Breckenridge took the oth­er slave states except for Missouri, which was won by Douglas. Despite his poor showing, Douglas trailed only Lincoln in the popular vote.