They reverberate through our nation's history, urging us to contemplate the road not taken.
Kenneth Walsh of U.S. News & World Report has begun exploring the "what-ifs" of our national political experience in weekly installments on U.S. News' web site.
Each Wednesday through September, Walsh is writing about the 10 most consequential elections in our nation's history.
The first two installments have focused on the elections that put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. In Walsh's first article, posted on July 23, he wrote about the 1860 election, in which Lincoln was first elected to the White House.
Shortly after Lincoln's election, Southern states began to secede. In what may be a classic understatement, Walsh observes, "Lincoln immediately was thrown into the cauldron of crisis."
If that is Part I of the story, Part II follows in the July 30 article, which examines Lincoln's re-election in 1864 and how it contributed to the North's successful conclusion of the Civil War.
For Lincoln, re-election was public vindication of his war policies. It's something that might not have happened if the North hadn't defeated the South at Gettysburg in 1863.
Union victories became more numerous in 1863, "and the North's military success became the most important political development of the 1864 presidential campaign," writes Walsh.
"Perhaps most gratifying to Lincoln, the soldiers doing the fighting gave [him] a huge margin ... even though they knew that re-electing Lincoln would mean continuation of the conflict and the likelihood that many of them would be killed or wounded," Walsh writes. "But they also knew that re-electing Lincoln would virtually guarantee victory, complete with the end of slavery and the preservation of the Union, and these were their top priorities."
Walsh concludes, "In the end, Lincoln's profound legacy was created and propelled by two elections — the one in 1860, which triggered the war, and the election of 1864, which enabled Lincoln to win it."
If those two elections were the bottom two on Walsh's list, I look forward to reading about the other eight.
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