What if Abraham Lincoln was not elected President of the USA

Would that still happen even if Lincoln was not elected president.

Well we see that, otherwise there would most likely having been no civil war.

Would we see Abraham Lincoln try a second time in 1864.

Interesting side-note to this: Lincoln apparently thought about joining the Donner Party--the infamous wagon train that got trapped in a mountain pass and lost a great number of people, with survivors alleged to have resorted to cannibalism to survive. Any hint of that would have probably scuppered Lincoln's career, assuming he was one of the survivors, but it wouldn't necessarily have prevented a Republican victory under a different candidate.

How close were the votes for secession historically? That’s kind of hard to say because delegates often switched sides when it became apparent that secessionists had the votes and that negotiations for some kind of compromise at the federal level were not going to reach a conclusion acceptable to the secessionists. I’m guessing that probably five out of the initial seven states that seceded would secede

We can divide the deep south states into a wavering category and a hard core one. The wavering states might very well not secede in the absence of a Lincoln victory.

For example, in Georgia the initial votes indicated the convention of secession was initially divided about 150 to 130 between immediate secessionists and people who either wanted to stay in the union or wanted to negotiate some sort of changes to the federal government that would mollify secessionists. By the time of the final vote, the gap had increased, with only 89 delegates opposing immediate secession.

Alabama wasn’t nearly as hard-core. There was a strong Unionist element in the northern part of the state. Historically, the secession vote was 61 to 39 in favor, though many of those who voted against secession signed onto it after the vote. Without Lincoln as a lightning rod, Alabama might have gone the other way. It would probably depend on how many other states seceded and how the federal government handled secession.

Then there were the hard-core secessionist states.

South Carolina voted 189 to 0 for secession. There is a good chance they would secede or attempt to no matter what happened at the federal level. There was very little dissent there, even when the war turned against the Confederacy.

Florida was another hard-core secession state, voting for secession 62 to 7. They did have some dissent though from the beginning and it got stronger as the war progressed.

Mississippi was another hard-core secession state, with a vote of 84 to 15 for secession. It was probably going to secede under most foreseeable circumstances if any state did.

Louisiana was also pretty hard-core secessionist, with a vote of 113 to 17 in favor of secession.

Texas delayed their secession vote for quite a while because their governor, Sam Houston, was a strong unionist, but when they did vote, the vote was 166 to 8 for secession.

And those are the initial seven states that seceded. The rest didn’t secede until after the Civil War actually started and they faced the prospect of fighting on one side or the other.

None of the other states Lincoln won were very close at all. It would take a major shift to deny him an outright victory.

What if the Republicans had nominated someone other than Lincoln? The most likely candidate was Seward, who led in the first two ballots, but was opposed by the large and influential Pennsylvania and Indiana delegations. Key leaders in both states thought that Seward couldn’t carry their states for various inside baseball reasons and were looking for an alternative, which was a large part of the reason Lincoln won the nomination. If Seward won the nomination and actually did lose those states, while the Republicans didn’t win any states Lincoln lost in, that would have flipped 40 electoral votes from the Republicans to someone else, leading to an Electoral College with no majority. That’s when we get into uncharted territory. The Breckinridge people would probably not support Douglas. They might support Bell if the alternative was Seward and the Republicans.

If the Electoral College chose someone other than the Republican candidate, that president would have a very hard time of it. The Senate would, I believe, have been divided almost exactly evenly, with 30 Democrats, 29 Republicans and 1 Unionist (before the southern Democrats started resigning), but the Democrats would have been bitterly split into Northern and Southern factions.

In the House, the Republicans would have 108 seats. The Democrats would have had their 45 historic seats, plus the 43 that they vacated when the south seceded. The Constitutional Unionists would have had 30 seats. So no one would have had a majority in the House—the non-Republicans would have a combined total of 118 seats, versus 108 for the Republicans. It would have been very difficult to even organize the House with four bitterly opposed factions jockeying for power.