Textbook
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, eds., America: A Narrative History, 5th ed. (2 vols., New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 1: 715-716.
Of the four candidates, not one was able to command a national following, and the campaign evolved into a choice between Lincoln and Douglas in the North, Breckenridge and Bell in the South. Once consequence of these separate campaigns was that each section gained a false impression of one another. The South never learned to distinguish Lincoln from the radicals; the North failed to gauge the force of southern intransigence--and in this Lincoln was among the worst. He stubbornly refused to offer the South assurances or to amplify his position, which he said was a matter of public record.
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Depicted ContentElection of 1860