Election of 1860
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50 free Election of 1860 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The presidential election of 1860 ranks among the most consequential in American history. Four major candidates split the country along sectional lines, the Democratic Party broke in two, and the winner took office with less than forty percent of the popular vote. Within months the United States was at war with itself. This quiz covers the whole story: the candidates and their running mates, the stormy nominating conventions, the nicknames, marching clubs and speeches of the campaign, the state-by-state results, and the scramble for compromise during the secession winter that followed. It is written for students reviewing the causes of the Civil War, for teachers who want a ready-made classroom quiz, and for history fans who think they know how Abraham Lincoln reached the presidency. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did 11-year-old Grace Bedell urge Abraham Lincoln to do in a letter sent weeks before the 1860 election?
Grow a beard
Grow a beard, she wrote, promising to win over her brothers' votes; Lincoln became the first bearded president and met her on his train trip to Washington.
Q 02Which frontier nickname, recalling Abraham Lincoln's youth of manual labor, became his 1860 campaign image?
The Rail Splitter
The Rail Splitter image took off when a young politician paraded old fence rails into the Illinois state convention, a week before the national one.
Q 03Which state, whose legislature still chose its electors, was first to secede after Abraham Lincoln's 1860 win?
South Carolina
South Carolina voted to leave on December 20, 1860, about six weeks after the election; its electors, picked without any popular vote, had gone to Breckinridge.
Q 04Which federal outpost did Confederate guns shell in April 1861, opening the Civil War weeks into Lincoln's term?
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter's 85 defenders gave up after 34 hours of shelling that killed no one on either side; Lincoln's call for troops then pushed four more states to secede.
Q 05Which Mississippi senator, who drew votes at the 1860 Democratic convention, became the Confederacy's president?
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis was elected on February 9, 1861, by delegates of the seceded states, nearly a month before Lincoln took the oath in Washington.
Q 06Which outgoing president kept a one-term pledge in 1860 and backed John C. Breckinridge against Stephen Douglas?
James Buchanan
James Buchanan put his administration behind Breckinridge, his own vice president, which made Breckinridge the main Democratic choice in Pennsylvania.
Q 07Who was the next sitting vice president nominated for president after John C. Breckinridge, exactly a century later?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon ended the hundred-year gap in 1960 and, like Breckinridge, lost the general election.
Q 08Which Illinois city, Abraham Lincoln's home in 1860, lies in the county he narrowly lost to Stephen Douglas?
Springfield
Springfield is the seat of Sangamon County, which Douglas carried by just 42 votes even as Lincoln won Illinois and the presidency.
Q 09Which Great Lakes city hosted the 1860 Republican convention, where a friendly crowd cheered on Abraham Lincoln?
Chicago
Chicago put the convention on Lincoln's home ground, and his managers printed counterfeit tickets to pack the hall with his supporters.
Q 10Why did Abraham Lincoln receive no recorded votes at all in ten Southern states in the 1860 election?
No Republican ballots were distributed
No Republican ballots were distributed there because parties, not states, printed ballots in 1860, and the party had no organization in those states.
Q 11Which Maine senator, a New Englander picked to balance the ticket, was Abraham Lincoln's running mate in 1860?
Hannibal Hamlin
Hannibal Hamlin said he was astonished by a nomination he had neither expected nor wanted; in 1864 the party replaced him with Andrew Johnson.
Q 12Which New York senator led the first ballot at the 1860 Republican convention but lost to Abraham Lincoln?
William H. Seward
William H. Seward led Lincoln 173½ to 102 on the first ballot, but his talk of inevitable conflict over slavery spooked moderates; he later negotiated the Alaska purchase.
Q 13Which doctrine did Stephen Douglas champion in 1860, leaving each territory's settlers to decide on slavery themselves?
Q 21Which state, home to John C. Breckinridge and birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, voted for neither man in 1860?
Kentucky
Kentucky went to John Bell, so Breckinridge lost his own home state, while native son Lincoln finished fourth of four there.
Q 22Before 1860, Abraham Lincoln's only elected federal office had been a single 1840s term in which body?
House of Representatives
The House of Representatives seated Lincoln for one term in the 1840s; his 1858 Senate race against Douglas ended in defeat, yet their debates made him nationally known.
Q 23Which huge building project did the 1860 Republican platform promise, tying the Mississippi valley to the West Coast?
A Pacific railroad
Popular sovereignty
Popular sovereignty was not Douglas's coinage: Lewis Cass first applied the term to slavery in 1847, and by 1860 it had turned pro-slavery Southern Democrats against Douglas.
Q 14Which running mate of John Bell in 1860 later spoke for two hours just before Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?
Edward Everett
Edward Everett, then rated the finest orator in the country, wrote to Lincoln afterward that the president had come nearer the point in two minutes than he had in two hours.
Q 15Which town's federal armory did John Brown raid in October 1859, a shock that hung over the 1860 election?
Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry haunted the campaign: Southern Democrats blamed Republicans for the raid, and Lincoln answered that John Brown was no Republican.
Q 16Which enslaved man's 1857 Supreme Court case, attacked by Abraham Lincoln, denied citizenship to Black Americans?
Dred Scott
Dred Scott lost 7–2, and the justices added that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, the very policy at the heart of the 1860 Republican platform.
Q 17Abraham Lincoln's 1860 states mostly lay north of the Ohio River and above which colonial-era boundary?
Mason–Dixon line
The Mason–Dixon line was surveyed in the 1760s to settle a border conflict involving Pennsylvania and Maryland; it came to stand for the divide between free and slave states, and Lincoln carried no slave state.
Q 18Which Cabinet post did Abraham Lincoln give the New York senator he had beaten for the 1860 Republican nomination?
Secretary of State
Secretary of State was the senior Cabinet seat, and Lincoln filled three more departments with men who had sought the same nomination.
Q 19Which Texas governor, the victor of San Jacinto, lost the 1860 Constitutional Union nomination to John Bell?
Sam Houston
Sam Houston fought secession to the end: in 1861 he refused an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy and was forced out of the governor's office.
Q 20Which nickname did the 5-foot-4 Stephen Douglas carry into the 1860 campaign as a forceful Illinois senator?
The Little Giant
The Little Giant finished second in the popular vote but last of the four candidates in electoral votes, with just 12.
A Pacific railroad sat in the platform beside free Western homesteads and a protective tariff, giving the party an economic pitch beyond the slavery question.
Q 24Which 2005 history of Abraham Lincoln's 1860 nomination and presidency inspired Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln?
Team of Rivals
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, tells how Lincoln beat better-known men for the nomination and then handed them the top seats in his government.
Q 25The 1860 election began six straight Republican presidential wins; which Democrat finally ended the run in 1884?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland was the first Democrat elected president in 28 years, and no other Democrat won the office until Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
Q 26Which defunct party, once home to both Abraham Lincoln and John Bell, fed the new Constitutional Union ticket?
The Whigs
The Whigs had dissolved by 1860, and their Northern voters mostly followed Lincoln into the Republican fold, leaving Bell scant support in the free states.
Q 27How did Stephen Douglas break with precedent for presidential candidates during the 1860 campaign?
He gave speeches around the country
He gave speeches around the country, carrying his case from the Northeast into the South, while Lincoln stayed home in Illinois and made none at all.
Q 28At which New York institution did Abraham Lincoln give the February 1860 speech that made him a real contender?
Cooper Union
Cooper Union heard Lincoln argue that the Founding Fathers would have opposed slavery's spread, and newspapers and pamphlets carried the speech to tens of thousands of voters.
Q 29Which Republican marching clubs of young men paraded by torchlight in black capes for Abraham Lincoln in 1860?
Wide Awakes
The Wide Awakes began in Hartford, Connecticut, where the capes were first worn to keep dripping torch oil off the marchers' clothes.
Q 30Which border slave state was the only state Stephen Douglas carried outright in the 1860 election?
Missouri
Missouri gave Douglas nine of his 12 electoral votes; the other three came from a split in one free state, making him the only candidate to win electors in both sections.