The news of Mr. Lincoln’s election overtook Douglas in Mobile.  He was in the office of the Mobile Register, one of the few newspapers which had held to him and his cause through thick and thin.  It now became a question what policy the paper should pursue.  The editor asked his associate to read aloud an article which he had just written, advocating a State convention to deliberate upon the course of Alabama in the approaching crisis.  Douglas opposed its publication; but he was assured that the only way to manage the secession movement was to appear to go with it, and by electing men opposed to disunion, to control the convention.  With his wonted sagacity, Douglas remarked that if they could not prevent the calling of a convention, they could hardly hope to control its action.  But the editors determined to publish the article, “and Douglas returned to his hotel more hopeless than I had ever seen him before,” wrote Sheridan.[887]

On his return to the North, Douglas spoke twice, at New Orleans and at Vicksburg, urging acquiescence in the result of the election.[888] He put the case most cogently in a letter to the business men of New Orleans, which was widely published.  No one deplored the election of an Abolitionist as President more than he.  Still, he could not find any just cause for dissolving the Federal Union in the mere election of any man to the presidency, in accordance with the Constitution.  Those who apprehended that the new President would carry out the aggressive policy of his party, failed to observe that his party was in a minority.  Even his appointments to office would have to be confirmed by a hostile Senate.  Any invasion of constitutional rights would be resented in the North, as well as in the South.  In short, the election of Mr. Lincoln could only serve as a pretext for those who purposed to break up the Union and to form a Southern Confederacy.[889]

On the face of the election returns, Douglas made a sorry showing; he had won the electoral vote of but a single State, Missouri, though three of the seven electoral votes of New Jersey fell to him as the result of fusion.  Yet as the popular vote in the several States was ascertained, defeat wore the guise of a great personal triumph.  Leader of a forlorn hope, he had yet received the suffrages of 1,376,957 citizens, only 489,495 less votes than Lincoln had polled.  Of these 163,525 came from the South, while Lincoln received only 26,430, all from the border slave States.  As compared with the vote of Breckinridge and Bell at the South, Douglas’s vote was insignificant; but at the North, he ran far ahead of the combined vote of both.[890] It goes without saying that had Douglas secured the full Democratic vote in the free States, he would have pressed Lincoln hard in many quarters.  From the national standpoint, the most significant aspect of the popular vote was the failure of Breckinridge to secure a majority in the slave States.[891] Union sentiment was still stronger than the secessionists had boasted.  The next most significant fact in the history of the election was this:  Abraham Lincoln had been elected to the presidency by the vote of a section which had given over a million votes to his rival, the leader of a faction of a disorganized party.