Brian Schoen, chairman of the Department of History at Ohio University, has submitted the following description of his upcoming talk: “Today we hear lots of talk suggesting Presidential elections provide existential threats to the Republic. Yet despite close calls in 1800, 1876 and 2020, only in 1860 has a presidential election triggered a constitutional crisis that eventually led to war. Before 1860, the gravest threats to the Union–the Hartford Convention, Nullification, and the 1850s sectional crisis–had emerged from war or Congressional action. What made 1860 different? Ardently pro-southern slaveowners refusal to tolerate the victory of a regional Free-Soil party, determined to stop slavery’s expansion was key. This talk will show how that was intertwined with the feared expansion of executive power in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Though small compared to the power of modern Presidents, the occupant of the mid-19th century White House had the ability to shape federal action in ways that Americans knew would be consequential. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln might have agreed on little else, but they agreed on that and in ways that shaped the presidential election and the crisis that followed.”
Meetings starts at 7:00 in the large conference room in the Athens County Library at the Corner of Home and Lincoln streets in the City of Athens.
