Why wasn't Lincoln on more Southern states' ballots in 1860?

Factual Questions
1

According to historian Harold Holzer in his interesting article, “Election Day 1860” in the current issue of Smithsonian, Abraham Lincoln, the endorsed Republican candidate for President, didn’t even appear on ten Deep South states’ ballots in 1860. What gives? Was he excluded because…

  1. Antipathy towards him as a (perceived) foe of slavery led state officials to illegally exclude him;
  2. He didn’t qualify for a line on the ballot for some actually legal and proper reason;
  3. Something else?

And did John C. Fremont, the GOP standard-bearer in 1856, have the same problem?

I’ve always wondered about this.

2

Can’t answer the rest of your question, but Fremont doesn’t seem to have appeared on Southern ballots either.

3

Getting on the ballot is a state issue. Obviously some slaveholding states had legislatures that weren’t interested in putting an antislavery candidate on the ballot. Who was going to organize the Republican Party in South Carolina in 1856 or 1860?

4

The Republican Party was brand new at that time, so probably had some difficulty getting on the ballot. In Northern states, it was pretty popular, so finding enough people to sign petitions to get on the ballot wouldn’t be so hard. But in the Slave States, it was likely a lot harder. Just going around asking people to sign a petition to get an Abolutionist Party on the ballot might have got you in trouble down South.

5

I want you to see how Lincoln got nominated in this article. How Lincoln Won the 1860 Republican Nomination.

6

Thanks, everyone. Discord, American Heritage had a good article about a decade ago, “How We Got Lincoln,” about all the wheeling and dealing at the GOP convention in Chicago that year. Very interesting stuff.

7

Underlining added: I think this does not mean what you think it means.

8

Just to nitpick, but no presidential candidate was on the ballot in South Carolina in 1856 or 1860, because in South Carolina at the time, presidential electors were picked by the state legislature.

9

That is so cool to know!

10

Was Fremont (the Republican candidate in 1856) on the ballots in the South when he ran?

11

I don’t think the Republican Party even made a pretense of trying to get anything out of the South, back then. Kind of ironic now, considering that the Republican parties strongest regional support is the South.

12

The only slave states that reported vote totals for Fremont were Delaware and Maryland, and in both cases, Freemont only got about 300 votes. Buchanan’s major competition in the south came from Filmore (who won Maryland, but nowhere else).