He Has the People: Jonathan Earle on the momentous Election of 1860

YEAR of meteors! brooding year!I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds   and signs;I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;.I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,   mounted the scaffold in Virginia;(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I   watch'd;I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd   wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)That was Walt Whitman, from the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass; and the 19th Presidentiad to which he refers is the election of 1860. No election in the history of the United States can come close to being more confusing, tumultuous and consequential than the election of 1860. Now Jonathan Earle seeks to disclose its mysteries. And in fact in his new book He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, he reveals that the 1860 contest was even stranger than we might have imagined it to be.Jonathan Earle is Associate Professor of History at Louisiana State University, where he also serves as the Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the LSU Honors College.