November 5, 1860: The day before the election that would decide the presidency–and perhaps the future of the Union–South Carolina Governor William Henry Gist sent Thomas F. Drayton to Washington, D.C. to buy 10,000 rifles from the federal War Department.
Secretary of War John B. Floyd, a former governor of Virginia, agreed, but told Drayton that rifled muskets would take three months to manufacture and offered smoothbores instead. Floyd then referred Drayton to a sympathetic New York banker who could serve as an intermediary in the purchase so as to avoid South Carolina being directly involved. Drayton urged Governor Gist to make the purchase, noting “Better do this than be without arms at a crisis like the present.”
— Maury Klein’s Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (1999) p. 113
The breakaway candidates fared better in the Electoral College: Breckenridge and the Southern Democrats won 11 states and 72 electoral votes; Bell’s Constitutional Union Party won Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and 39 electoral votes.
81.2 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, the second-highest rate of participation in United States history, after the hotly contested 1876 election.