Sumner's activity in the canvass of 1860 was confined to Massachusetts, and he withstood solicitations to speak elsewhere.3 His thoughts were fully before the public in his speech in the Senate and his address at Cooper Institute; and, as already indicated, he had come to value far more the effect of an argument on the public mind as widely distributed in the public journals than as delivered from the platform before a limited number of people. He wrote to a friend in New York, just before delivering his address in that city, ‘My hope is through the press to speak to the whole country.’
Lincoln received in Massachusetts one hundred and six thousand votes; Douglas, thirty-four thousand; Bell, twenty-two thousand; and Breckinridge, six thousand. In the electoral colleges Lincoln received one hundred and eighty votes; Breckinridge, seventy-two; Bell, thirty-nine; and Douglas, twelve. The Unionists in the South were divided between Douglas and Bell. In the North the rump of the Whig party—those antipathetic to antislavery sentiments—supported Bell and Everett; and their leaders in Massachusetts were chiefly the old opponents of the Conscience Whigs,—Winthrop, Eliot, Stevenson, G. T. Curtis, Walley, and Hillard.4 The Whig conservatism of Boston had been broken up; but a remnant of five thousand votes was given in the city for Bell and Everett, principally cast by voters having a mercantile interest or connection, while the masses gave nearly ten thousand votes for Lincoln, and divided five thousand between the two Democratic candidates, Douglas and Breckinridge.
