Abraham Lincoln, upon gaining the American presidency in 1860, eventually convinced himself that he would not get a second term.
It was a time of embittered and protracted sectional rivalries that eventually took form as the Civil War. Reminiscent of our present-day circumstances, ongoing controversies during the 1850s included virulent anti-immigrant sentiments in the guise of the so-called Know-Nothing Party; the controversial opinion rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case known as Dred Scott having to do with Scott’s status as slave or freedman; John Brown’s murderous raid at Harper’s Ferry in the name of abolition; and the fact that no American president had attained re-election since Andrew Jackson (1836).
