A Man Who Might Have Been President

The 1860 election that made Abraham Lincoln president is sometimes recalled as the ultimate showdown between two politicians—Lincoln and Stephen Douglas—whose dueling arguments in the previous decade helped determine the course of slavery in America and the likelihood of war. What is rarely mentioned is that Douglas not only lost the 1860 election, he didn't even come in second. In the Electoral College, he came in fourth behind John Bell, the candidate for the Constitutional Union Party.