PARKERSBURG - An Oberlin (Ohio) College professor will present a program on President Lincoln at 2 p.m. Sept. 19 in the Fort Boreman Room of the Wood County Courthouse Annex in Parkersburg.
Sponsored by the West Virginia Humanities Council, Professor Gary Kornblith in "The Making of the President, 1860" will discuss circumstances around Lincoln's election.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is in 2011. West Virginia became the 35th state in 1863 during the war by a proclamation by Lincoln.
"The Humanities Council considers this one of our early Civil War sesquicentennial programs and thinks Parkersburg a most appropriate location for the event," said Mark Payne, program officer for the Humanities Council. "Bob Enoch of the Wood County Historical Society has been extremely helpful with making this program a reality."
Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 with only 40 percent of the popular vote, the second lowest proportion in American history. Kornblith will explain how and why Lincoln succeeded by examining the realignment of American politics in the 1850s, the dynamics of the presidential campaign and the roles of the Electoral College and popular vote in determining the outcome.
The discussion will talk about why southern fire-eaters found Lincoln's election so disturbing that they pressed for secession and disunion before he took office, such as why most Virginians rejected secession prior to Fort Sumterm but then change their minds, why did western Virginians continue to oppose secession and eventually form a new state and what is the relevance of the 1860 election to West Virginians today.
Kornblith teaches American and Civil War history. His recent published works include "Class and Politics to 1877" in The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, "Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War" in the Journal of American History and "The Dilemmas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America" in Ruling America: Power and Hierarchy in a Democracy published by Harvard University Press.