Civil War: New York Times 1860

Civil War: New York Times 1860

1,989 pages of the New York Times dating from January 1, 1860, to June 30, 1860, and October 1, 1860, to December 31, 1860, plus a subject index for the New York Times 1860.

The files contain a text transcript of all computer recognizable text embedded into the graphic image of each page of each document, creating a searchable finding aid. Text searches can be done across all files.

The two most important events to happen in 1860 in relation to the upcoming Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th President of the United States on November 6, 1860, without the support of any Southern state and the secession of South Carolina from the Union on December 20, 1860. The entire year finds much coverage of the Presidential election and the increasing fever of the secession crisis.

In the year, 1860 there were approximately 4 million persons enslaved in the United States. Seemingly every issue of the New York Times presented some coverage of the institution of slavery issue. A text search of all the issues in this collection for the words slave, slavery, slaveholder, or slaveholding yields 9,848 hits.

Early in 1860 the Times reports on Abraham Lincoln's speech given at Cooper Union on February 27th. Who at the time did not seem like the likely Republican Party nominee. The Times followed him from there through the nomination race and presidential campaign and his election on November 6, 1860. The State of New York voted 362,646 (53.7%) for Abraham Lincoln, with 312,510 votes (46.3%) for the Democrat Stephen Douglas.

The Times also covered other local, nation and world events it found fit to print including the beginning of The Pony Express, which made its first run in 1860 from Saint Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California.