Editor's Note:
Manisha Sinha is the Draper Professor of American History at the University of Connecticut and the author of "The Slave Cause: A History of Abolition."
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(CNN) -
The 2020 presidential election is one of the most crucial in American history.
Political experts have dedicated themselves to discussing past presidential elections, especially those that have been politically controversial and closed, in search of a historic precedent.
The so-called Revolution of 1800 put the Jeffersonian Republicans in charge and drove the Federalist Party to extinction.
In the presidential election of 1820, supporters of Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote, claimed that John Quincy Adams became president through what many of them called a "corrupt deal" with Henry Clay, when Clay succeeded in getting him to his constituents will support Adams.
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The disputed 1876 elections marked the formal end of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy due to another shady deal that put a Republican in the White House but unleashed southern whites to install a brutal regime of racial subordination and terror.
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However, none of these elections carries the same weight as the presidential election of 1860, which decided the fate of the American republic.
And in 2020, the stakes seem almost as high.
Historical analogies rarely work in a simple parallel way.
2020 is not 1860 even though we can find some resonance of our current condition in the past.
There is no active secession movement ready to remove the states from the Union should Joe Biden be elected to the presidency.
While some may threaten or incite violence, we cannot imagine a prolonged Civil War over the results of the presidential elections.
The real fear among many Americans today is the possibility of widespread electoral fraud and interference, something that never entered the political equation in 1860.
The only underlying common ground that ties these two historic presidential elections together is the conviction that it is American democracy, rather than simply the presidential candidates, that is on the ballot.
The 1860 election that elevated Abraham Lincoln to the presidency was not an ordinary election.
For the first time, a president was elected on an anti-slavery platform, though not one calling for complete abolition.
It also marked the last time in American history that a new political party, founded in 1854, succeeded in winning the presidency.
Slavers and their political allies had dominated the federal government since the founding of the republic in large part due to the three-fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution that allowed southern states to count three-fifths of their slave population. for purposes of representation in Congress.
Most American Presidents had been slave owners, Northmen with Southern principles.
However, by the mid-1800s, slave owners were beginning to lose their control over Congress, as the population of the north increased along with the possible entry of free states into the Union.
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In 1860, four men ran for president, Republican Abraham Lincoln on the non-extension of slavery, Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas on the right of white men for or against slavery, Southern Democrat John Breckinridge pro-slavery, anti-democratic platform, and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party who simply pledged allegiance to the American Union and the Constitution.
American citizens had the option of voting for the status quo by electing Douglas or Bell, to make the American republic a perpetual slave republic, even if that involved violating democratic principles by electing Breckinridge, or voting for Lincoln and putting slavery in a course of what he called "ultimate extinction."
Democrats tried to discredit Lincoln and the Republican Party using tactics of fear and racial harassment, an art they had perfected in the years leading up to the Civil War.
They called Republicans "Black Republicans" and southern newspapers argued that Lincoln's vice presidential candidate Hannibal Hamlin, who was dark, was actually a "mulatto" or mixed race.
Recently, Donald Trump has doubled down on racist calls to galvanize his supporters and downgraded, in a haunting echo of the past, to calling Senator Kamala Harris a "monster," evoking stereotypes of black women.
In 1860, southern Democrats, like pro-slavery ideologue George Fitzhugh, even argued that the Republican Party was a front for socialism and feminism, all fearsome "isms" alongside abolitionism.
Similarly, current Republicans claim that radical socialists are holding Vice President Joe Biden hostage.
Trump insults Biden with video altered by his followers 2:09
Following Lincoln's election, conspiracies to kidnap him abounded, as did the conspiracy by right-wing national terrorists to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
The threat of violent retaliation weighed on the 1860 elections as it does today.
A younger generation of young enthusiasts organized "Wide Awakes," street demonstrations in support of Lincoln and the Republican Party, as well as the so-called "awake" generation of Americans who flooded the streets demanding racial justice in the Black Lives Matter movement.
In 1860, Lincoln received the largest number of votes, an overwhelming majority in the North with all New England counties voting for him, although he was not even on the ballot in most slave states.
This resulted in a decisive victory in the Electoral College.
Rather than accept the results of a democratic election, most of the slave South seceded from the Union and took up arms against the American republic.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently commented on the history of the presidential election: "There will be an orderly transition, just as there has been every four years since 1792."
He must have missed the presidential elections of 1860, the subsequent secession of eleven southern states, and the start of the Civil War.
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The 2020 presidential election is certainly as important as the 1860 election. It is, as Biden likes to say, a battle for the "soul of America."
The fate of the American republic is once again at stake.
Like the slaveholders of the 1850s, Trump, his supporters and enablers are in a position to pose an existential threat to American democracy.
Like many slave owners, Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.
If history appears first as a tragedy, then as a farce, the counterparts of the southern secessionists and slavery theorists today are the QAnon conspiracy theorists, the neo-Confederates, and the right-wing Boogaloo boys.
Much of the contemporary Republican Party that refuses to repudiate Trump is like those southern whites who may not have had a direct interest in slavery but left with their states, who ultimately chose slavery over the republic.
The choice, as the Lincoln Project Republicans, who have broken with their party, say, is between the United States and Trump.
Given the expanded role and importance of the United States in the world since the mid-19th century, it could be argued that the impact of the current US presidential elections could be even greater than in 1860. Lincoln's election and emancipation had international significance, strengthening the forces of democracy in Europe, abolition in Brazil and Cuba, and the anti-castes in distant India.
Trump's foreign policy of reaching out to dictators around the world and rejecting democratic allies while embracing Russia's autocrat Vladimir Putin is a singular repudiation of American democratic ideals.
Trumpism has given oxygen to far-right groups, including neo-Nazis in Europe and authoritarianism around the world.
If he loses, Trump's defeat will surely signal the renewal of democracy at home and abroad.
The American republic is at a crossroads today as it was in 1860, and the future of "the last and best hope on earth," as Lincoln put it, is in the hands of American voters.
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