Lincoln’s opponents for presidency were Senator Douglas, Vice President Breckinridge and John Bell of the "Constitutional Union" Party. When the results came in, Lincoln won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, but got 180 votes in the Electoral College.
In 1861, Lincoln became president. After Lincoln won presidency, by the time he was inaugurated, South Carolina and six other Southern states seceded from the Union (Tindall 525). In South Carolina, Fort Sumter was one of the forts not yet seized by the Confederacy, so Lincoln decided to make it a symbol of his plan to keep the Union together and ordered the military to send supplies to the fort. The Confederates took this as a declaration of war, and on April 12, 1861, began bombarding the fort. The fort surrendered and Lincoln immediately called for 75,000 volunteers to fight the rebellion.…show more content… Congress gathered in a special session on July 4, 1861, and a day later heard Lincoln's message to them: he considered the war effort mostly his domain, and that fine points of constitutional law took second place to preserving the Union. Lincoln's problems were political and military. Many of the Army and Navy's best officers chose to resign their commissions and join the Southern cause; The War Department under Secretary Simon Cameron became
