[Abraham Lincoln's] resiliency now came to his aid in the cave of defeat. Returning home the night of the election, “the path” he walked on his way back to the clapboard house at Eighth and Jackson streets “had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself ‘It's a slip and not a fall.'" A slip and not a fall. By any other standards for measuring political shelf life, Lincoln's would, by this point, have been close to expiration.

Though Republicans won in the popular vote (and elected their candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education), they did not gain control of the state legislature, which would choose the next senator. In the state senate, thirteen members were holdovers (the terms of senators were staggered), and eight of these were Democrats. That meant that, in order to have a majority in a joint session of the two houses, the Republicans needed to have more than half the members in the new house or representatives.