Photo of the Day

November 6, 1860

It is election day.

Left: Lincoln campaign button. Right: political cartoon depicting Lincoln jumping over a rail fence while his main opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, struggles to keep up the race.

Lincoln leaves his office in Springfield at 3:00 PM and walks to the polling place in the courthouse where he votes a straight Republican ticket.

August 1860.

He spends the evening in the Springfield telegraph office monitoring election returns from across the nation.

Lincoln stands in his front yard with sons Willie and Tad, while a neighbor-boy walks on the sidewalk, 1860.

Shortly after midnight, Lincoln joins his wife for a late supper.

He’s been elected the sixteenth President of the United States.

Jefferson Davis inauguration in Montgomery, Alabama, Feb. 18, 1861; Abraham Lincoln inauguration at the Capitol, March 4, 1861.

The New York Times describes the election result as “[t]he North Rising in Indignation at the Menaces of the South.”

It was a day like none other, casting the nation irretrievably down the path of fratricide over fundamental questions of civil rights left unanswered in the Constitution.

Right: Bill of Sale for the purchase of an enslaved woman.

For those, like Lincoln, who were morally opposed to slavery, November 6, 1860, was the first step in achieving freedom for the nation’s enslaved people.

“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” — Lincoln, April 4, 1864.

For the others, including Lincoln’s main electoral opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, the day was a defeat for ‘states’ rights.’

“If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments, it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law, and to manage and regulate their own internal affairs and domestic institutions.” — Douglas, July 9, 1858.

Howell Cobb, secessionist leader, presides over the Confederate congress at the Capitol at Montgomery, Alabama in February 1861. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

South Carolina and Mississippi, where more than half the population is enslaved, will be the first and second states to secede.

Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas will soon follow.

Left: the swampy Mall and the west front of the Capitol, 1860. Center: scaffolding for Capitol reconstruction. Right: job site construction tents.

For workers then laboring on the extensive Capitol building expansion — immigrants, enslaved men and free men — election day in 1860 called for a commemoration, even if done informally.

Left: the marble fabrication shop. Right: hauling a column to the building site.

So, they carved the date onto a stone slab laying in the Capitol yard.

And christened the tall column which was hoisted into position that day the “Lincoln Column.”

Workers haul the Lincoln Column to its position on the left upper pedestal.

The Lincoln Column, along with the others installed during the 1860 Capitol renovation, was taken down during renovation work in the Eisenhower Administration.

The columns were reinstalled, but not in the same order.

So, no one knows which one is the Lincoln Column.

But it’s there, toiling in anonymity to hold up and strengthen the heart of the America’s democracy.

[crglenn photo]

And asking all of us to do the same.

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I’ll see you on Monday.

— Brenda