The World Health Organization has made a list of the most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

For the first time ever, the World Health Organization has drawn up a list of the highest priority needs for new antibiotics — marching orders, it hopes, for the pharmaceutical industry.

The list, which was released Monday, enumerates 12 bacterial threats, grouping them into three categories: critical, high, and medium.

"Antibiotic resistance is growing and we are running out of treatment options. If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we most urgently need are not going to be developed in time," said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO's assistant director-general for health systems and innovation.

"The pipeline is practically dry."

Three bacteria were listed as critical:

• Acinetobacter baumannii bacteria that are resistant to important antibiotics called carbapenems. These are highly drug resistant bacteria that can cause a range of infections for hospitalized patients, including pneumonia, wound, or blood infections.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which are resistant to carbapenems. These bacteria can cause skin rashes and ear infectious in healthy people but also severe blood infections and pneumonia when contracted by sick people in the hospital.

• Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to both carbepenems and another class of antibiotics, cephalosporins. This family of bacteria live in the human gut and includes bugs such as E. coli and Salmonella.

Notably missing from the list is the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. That was not included, Kieny said, because the need for new antibiotics to treat it has already been designated the highest priority.

Although mounting concerns about the worsening problem of antibiotic resistance have reinvigorated research efforts, producing new antibiotics is an expensive and challenging task.

The international team of experts who drew up the new list urged researchers and pharmaceutical companies to focus their efforts on a type of bacteria known as Gram negatives. (The terminology relates to how the bacteria respond to a stain — developed by Hans Christian Gram — used to make them easier to see under a microscope.)

Dr. Nicola Magrini, a scientist with the WHO's department of innovation, access and use of essential medicines, said pharmaceutical companies have recently spent more efforts trying to find antibiotics for Gram positive bacteria, perhaps because they are easier and less costly to develop.

Microscopic image of gram-negative Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria (pink-red rods) Credit: wikipedia

Gram negative bacteria typically live in the human gut, which means when they cause illness it can be serious bloodstream infections or urinary tract infections. Gram positive bacteria are generally found outside the body, on the skin or in the nostrils.

Kieny said the 12 bacteria featured on the priority list were chosen based on the level of drug resistance that already exists for each, the numbers of deaths they cause, the frequency with which people become infected with them outside of hospitals, and the burden these infections place on health care systems.

Paradoxically, though, she and colleagues from the WHO could not provide an estimate of the annual number of deaths attributable to antibiotic-resistant infections. The international disease code system does not currently include a code for antibiotic-resistant infections; it is being amended to include one.

The critical pathogens are ones that cause severe infections and high mortality in hospital patients, Kieny said. While they are not as common as other drug-resistant infections, they are costly in terms of health care resources needed to treat infected patients and in lives lost.

Six others were listed as high priority for new antibiotics. That grouping represents bacteria that cause a large number of infections in otherwise healthy people. Included there is the bacteria that causes gonorrhea, for which there are almost no remaining effective treatments.

Three other bacteria were listed as being of medium priority, because they are becoming increasingly resistant to available drugs. This group includes Streptococcus pneumoniae that is not susceptible to penicillin. This bacterium causes pneumonia, ear and sinus infections, as well as meningitis and blood infections.

The creation of the list was applauded by others working to combat the rise of antibiotic resistance.

"This priority pathogens list, developed with input from across our community, is important to steer research in the race against drug resistant infection — one of the greatest threats to modern health," said Tim Jinks, head of drug-resistant infections for the British medical charity Wellcome Trust.

"Within a generation, without new antibiotics, deaths from drug-resistant infection could reach 10 million a year. Without new medicines to treat deadly infection, lifesaving treatments like chemotherapy and organ transplant, and routine operations like caesareans and hip replacements, will be potentially fatal."

The full list is:

Priority 1: Critical

1. Acinetobacter baumannii, carbapenem-resistant

2. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, carbapenem-resistant

3. Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant, ESBL-producing

Priority 2: High

4. Enterococcus faecium, vancomycin-resistant

5. Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant, vancomycin-intermediate and resistant

6. Helicobacter pylori, clarithromycin-resistant

7. Campylobacter spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant

8. Salmonellae, fluoroquinolone-resistant

9. Neisseria gonorrhoeae, cephalosporin-resistant, fluoroquinolone-resistant

Priority 3: Medium

10. Streptococcus pneumoniae, penicillin-non-susceptible

11. Haemophilus influenzae, ampicillin-resistant

12. Shigella spp., fluoroquinolone-resistant

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Businessinsider . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Mayan Civilization History could be Rewritten. Researchers have learned important details on discovery of a Giant Jade Pendant.

G. Braswell/UC San Diego

Researchers have just published a paper on one of the most fascinating and mysterious Maya discoveries in recent years - a huge jade pendant that has a detailed story about the king it was made for etched into its back.

First uncovered back in 2015, researchers have now tentatively translated the inscriptions, and it turns out it's even more unusual than originally thought, and could rewrite our current understanding of Maya history.

This type of T-shaped jade plate was worn on a king's chest during Maya religious ceremonies. At 19 cm (7.4 inches) wide, 10 cm (4.1 inches) high, and 0.8 cm (0.3 inches) thick, this is the second largest Maya jade ever found in Belize.

But it's also the first known to be inscribed with historical text - on the pendant's back, around 30 carved hieroglyphs reveal details about its first owner.

That's odd in itself, but the fact that such a huge and important pendant was discovered where it was is also unusual - the artefact was found in Nim Li Punit in southern Belize, a relatively isolated region at the time.

"It was like finding the Hope Diamond in Peoria instead of New York," said lead researcher Geoffrey Braswell from the University of California, San Diego.

"We would expect something like it in one of the big cities of the Maya world. Instead, here it was, far from the centre."

Nim Li Punit is a small site that sits near the modern-day town of Indian Creek, on a ridge in the Maya Mountains at the southeastern edge of the ancient Maya zone - it's more than 402 km (250 miles) south of Chichen Itza in Mexico, where similar but smaller breast pieces have been found.

It's believed that the village was inhabited by the Maya civilisation between 150 and 850 CE, and researchers have found several important remains in the site since it was rediscovered in the 1970s.

This pendant was discovered in the remains of a palace built around 400 CE, buried inside a collapsed tomb.

The tomb dates back to around 800 CE - towards the end of Maya civilisation in the village - and was surrounded by other artefacts, such as pottery vessels and a large stone that had been carved into the shape of a deity.

UC San Diego

 You can see the full inscription of 30 glyphs below:

UC San Diego

So what does the pendant tell us? The text is still in the process of being translated - something that's complicated by the fact that Mayan script hasn't been fully deciphered or agreed upon.

But according to the team's tentative translation so far, the artefact was made for the king Janaab' Ohl K'inich, and was first used in 672 CE as part of an incense-scattering ceremony.


The text then goes on to describe the king's parentage and accession rites - and ends with a passage that links the king to the powerful and immense Maya city of Caracol, which is located to the northeast of Nim Li Punit in modern-day Belize.

Google Maps

Even today, it's more than a 5-hour drive between the two sites, which are separated by a mountain range and dense forest, so past research hadn't considered a link between the sites.

"We didn't think we'd find royal, political connections to the north and the west of Nim Li Punit," said Braswell. "We thought if there were any at all that they'd be to the south and east."

Braswell thinks the pendant indicates that royalty arrived at Nim Li Punit around the time the pendant was used, founding a new dynasty.

This hypothesis is backed up by the fact that it's only after the pendant's arrival in the region that other hieroglyphs and images of royalty begin to show up around the site.

Still, this one pendant is far from conclusive evidence, and it's something Braswell and his team will now be investigating further.


There's a lot of research to be done to understand how this jade pendant fits in with Maya history, and what it can tell us about the final years before the fall of Nim Li Punit, but it's a fascinating mystery to explore further.

Other articles on the same theme:

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• The Mysterious Manuscript: Book of Soyga Translated by Archangel Uriel on March 10, 1582

• Deciphering the past - 8 writings still unknown

• Mysterious inscriptions reveals a Dark Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses I

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A bizarre event in the Pacific Ocean can have devastating effects on the climate: ''The strangest meteorological event in decades'

American Geophysical Union

A vast patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean - nicknamed the blob - resulted in increased levels of ozone above the Western US, researchers have found.

The blob - which at its peak covered roughly 9 million square kilometres (3.5 million square miles) from Mexico to Alaska - was assumed to be mainly messing with conditions in the ocean, but a new study has shown that it had a lasting affect on air quality too.

Ultimately, it all links back to the blob, which was the most unusual meteorological event we've had in decades," says one of the team, Dan Jaffe from the University of Washington Bothell.

The blob of warm water in the Pacific was first detected back in 2013, and it continued to spread throughout 2014 and 2015. While it was less obvious in 2016, there were some indications that it persisted well into last year too.


The vast, warm patch has been linked to several mass die-offs in the ocean during 2015, including thousands of California sea lions starving to death in waters more than 3 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) above average, and an "unprecedented" mass death of seabirds in the Western US. 

In April 2015, the effects could also be seen on land, with a bout of strange weather in the US being linked to the higher ocean temperatures, and the increased temperatures saw a massive toxic algal bloom stretch along the entire US West Coast. 


"I can't truly give an explanation of what is going on right now," marine ecologist Jaime Jahncke from conservation group, Point Blue, said in late 2015.

Jaffe and his team have been monitoring ozone levels over the US since 2004, and happened to noticed a bizarre spike in 2015. They wondered if the crazy events linked to the blob that year could also have been driving this massive boost in ozone.

"At first we were like 'Whoa, maybe we made a mistake.' We looked at our sensors to see if we made an error in the calibration. But we couldn't find any mistakes," Jaffe says in a press statement.


"Then I looked at other ozone data from around the Pacific Northwest, and everybody was high that year."

To see if there was a connection, the team mapped the lifespan of the blob in unprecedented detail, using multiple satellites positioned all over the globe to track temperature fluctuations on the Pacific Ocean's surface between 2014 and 2016.

American Geophysical Union

They then went back and compared the events to sea-surface temperature records dating back to 1910, and what they found was unlike any natural phenomenon ever seen in recorded history.

"This phenomenon is something new," one of the team, Chelle Gentemann from Earth and Space Research in Seattle, told National Geographic. 

"From that entire record, this event is unprecedented in magnitude and duration. There's just nothing like it in our historical record."

They found that the effects of the blob on land - warmer temperatures, low cloud cover, and calmer air - actually combined to produce extra ozone, and by June 2015, this had pushed ozone levels to between 3 and 13 parts per billion higher than average over the northwestern US.

Certain areas with already high ozone levels, such as Salt Lake City and Sacramento, saw their ozone pushed above federally allowed limits.

"Washington and Oregon was really the bullseye for the whole thing, because of the location of the winds," Jaffe explains.

"Salt Lake City and Sacramento were on the edge of this event, but because their ozone is typically higher, those cities felt some of the more acute effects."

So how does something in the ocean affect our ozone levels?  

Under normal conditions, winds along the West Coast run along the surface of the ocean, and push the top layer away from the coast. This allows the colder water below to take its place, bringing vital nutrients with it, and balancing out the temperature.

But the team found that during the blob's peak, the increased temperatures on the surface of the ocean had caused the air above heat up and stagnate. This weakened the coastal winds so much, they were no longer able to push the warm top layer of the Pacific away from the shoreline.

And with no upwelling of cool water, the high temperatures remained, and together with a lack of clouds, this allowed the chemical reaction that produces ozone - solar ultraviolet radiation (sunlight) breaking down oxygen molecules - to kick things up a notch.

"Temperatures were high, and it was much less cloudy than normal, both of which trigger ozone production," says Jaffe.

"And because of that high-pressure system off the coast, the winds were much lower than normal. Winds blow pollution away, but when they don't blow, you get stagnation and the pollution is higher."

While the ozone spike was only temporary, the team says we should take this as a warning for the future - researchers already knew there was a connection between higher atmospheric temperatures and ozone production, but now we know that sea-surface temperatures can affect it too.


And with ozone pollution known to cause serious respiratory dysfunction, including aggravating pneumonia, asthma, and bronchitis, we'd better be prepared for when something like the blob rears its head once more.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Bizarre phenomenon in California ! 'Giant Rivers' in the sky causing chaos among residents

Credit : NASA

This month, the percentage of California still stuck in a drought dropped by 22 percent in a single week, as the wettest winter in decades saw an onslaught of storms deliver record-breaking rains across the state.

Now, researchers have connected the chaos to a strange phenomenon known as atmospheric rivers - narrow corridors of concentrated moisture suspended in the atmosphere, which can hold up to 15 times more water than the amount that flows through the Mississippi River.

If you're unfamiliar with atmospheric rivers, or are wondering if that's just a fancy name for "rain", they're actually a unique movement of moisture through Earth's atmosphere, responsible for most of the horizontal transport of water vapour outside the tropics.

Credit: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory

These suspended moisture plumes, which can stretch 400 to 600 km wide (250 to 370 miles), have been linked to all seven floods on California's Russian River between 1996 and 2007, and likely played a role in the 'Snowmageddon' event that blanketed the East Coast in 2010.

All 10 of Britain's largest floods since the 1970s have also been attributed to atmospheric rivers, and late last year, researchers linked them to their first ever mass die-off event, when nearly 100 percent of wild oysters in northern San Francisco Bay mysteriously disappeared in 2011.


Now, scientists led by Duane Waliser, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, have found that massive atmospheric rivers are responsible for up to 75 percent of all extreme wind and rainfall events on the world's coasts, and half of the strongest wind gusts recorded in nearly two decades.

Credit: Scientific American Blogs

The team also linked them to up to 65 percent of the extreme rain and snow events in the Western United States - such as the storm that hit Northern California on Monday - and say they could also be the cause of 80 percent of major floods in the state.


Last month, a state of emergency was called in various California countries due to devastating storms linked to atmospheric rivers, and just recently, the five-year drought dropped to less than a quarter of the state in a single week, with rainfall hitting almost 200 percent above average in certain parts of the Bay Area.

And the phenomenon is showing no signs of slowing down, with a flood warning affecting 14 million people in California to remain in place until at least Thursday.

The US National Weather Service (NWS) is now saying that storms to come could cause floods in areas that have not been flooded in decades, and are warning locals in Northern California to be ready to evacuate at 15 minutes notice.


"This has been a very active winter, atmospheric river-wise," Jeff Zimmerman from the NWS, who wasn't involved in the study, told NPR. "We've probably had 10 or more ... this winter."

To put that into perspective, an average year will usually only have five to seven atmospheric rivers.


Waliser and his team measured the influence of atmospheric rivers by analysing data from storms around the globe in regions outside the tropics from 1997 to 2014.

Credit: Curbed SF

When they focussed on the top 2 percent windiest storms, they found that "atmospheric rivers are typically associated with 30, and even up to 50 percent, of those very extreme cases", and almost the same amount of the wettest storms, Christopher Joyce reports for NPR.


And perhaps even more worrying, winds associated with atmospheric rivers were found to be twice the speed of the average storm - strong enough to topple even the great Pioneer Cabin Tree - a 1,000-year-old Californian sequoia that finally fell last month.

"Not only do [atmospheric rivers] come with this potential for flooding hazards," Waliser told NPR, "they also come with potential for high impact winds and extremes that can produce hazardous conditions."


While atmospheric rivers are naturally occurring phenomena, climate change is expected to intensify the severe precipitation events caused by atmospheric rivers in the future, because of increased evaporation rates and greater atmospheric water-holding capacity.

So as the state recovers from fighting a five-year drought - that's still not over, despite the record rains - it now has to deal with oppressive storms, and scientists are saying this crazy winter is likely a sign of things to come.


"The current situation in California - specifically, the dramatic swing from extreme drought to water overabundance and flooding - is indeed a preview of California's likely climate future," one of the team, climate scientist Daniel Swain from UCLA, told Mashable.

"There is now quite a bit of evidence that future droughts here will be warmer and more intense, yet will be interrupted by increasingly powerful 'atmospheric river' storms capable of causing destructive flooding.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A country at the crossroads: how Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War

An 1860 presidential election campaign banner for Abraham Lincoln and his running partner, Hannibal Hamlin. (Library of Congress)

What was the political prelude to the 1860 election?

Ever since the drafting of America’s federal constitution of 1787, the question of slavery had given rise to political contention and compromise. In the early years of the new American nation, several northern states adopted statutes of emancipation, while new technology and the international demand for cotton gave slave labour deep roots in the south. Plantation agriculture spread from the Atlantic states into the Gulf region. As a result, slave numbers would grow to four million by 1860.

Most Americans deemed that the constitution gave individual slave states alone the right to determine the future of their ‘peculiar institution’. However, the westward movement of settlers and the extension of the nation’s boundaries – through the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, and the wresting of California and other parts of Mexico by force – prompted periodic crises over the status of slaveholding in the territories and the new states carved out of them. 

In 1820 and again in 1850 threats of civil war between North and South prompted compromise, while the Democrats and Whigs – the dominant national parties during the 1830s and 1840s – worked in the main to keep the issue at bay. But in the 1850s it arose again. By then growing intransigence, and each faction’s sense of its moral and social superiority, put political compromise beyond easy reach.

Why does the presidential election of 1860 matter?

Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 as the Republican candidate for the White House forever changed the relationship between the American government and the institution of slavery. 

It wasn’t that Lincoln was the first nominee for the presidency to run on an antislavery platform. Minority parties, alarmed by the increasing entrenchment of plantation slavery, had fielded emancipationists in every presidential election since 1840, and in 1856 the newly formed Republican Party had celebrated a powerful showing on a manifesto committed to containing slavery – a “relic of barbarism” – within existing limits. But the real turning-point came four years later when, for the first time in the history of the American republic, an antislavery candidate committed to putting slavery in the way of ultimate extinction triumphed in the electoral college.


Lincoln’s success prompted South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union. At a special secession convention on 20 December the state declared she had taken her place “once again amongst the nations of the world”. Within two months, six other states of the lower South had joined her in forming an independent confederacy. The US constitution dictated that the outgoing president, the Democrat James Buchanan, remain in office between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th president on 4 March 1861. ‘Old Buck’ lacked both the authority and will to defuse the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. Its resolution would depend on the wisdom and courage of his successor.

Abraham Lincoln. The election of a candidate committed to ending a “relic of barbarism” incensed the slave-holding South. (Library of Congress)

Who were the 
Republicans?

Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska 
Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level ‘anti-Nebraska’ coalitions of 
disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent ‘free-soilers’, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many 
of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties. 
 

This 1856 map shows slave states (gray), free states (pink), U.S. territories (green), and Kansas in center (white). Credit: wikipedia

The emergent Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound 
its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters – the so-called ‘Slave Power’ that had allegedly hijacked the federal government. 

By 1860 the party of ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ had broadened its platform to embrace homesteads for western settlers, a protective tariff and 
a Pacific railroad. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located its strength in “the great middling-interest class”, men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom”. Republicans made much of their role as the party 
of conscience, and as such appealed successfully to ‘nativist’ anti-Catholics, while also winning support within influential communities of Protestant and radical immigrants, above all 
the Germans.

Why did the Republican Party choose Lincoln as 
its candidate?

Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. 

Portrait of William H. Seward, Secretary of State 1861-69 Credit: wikipedia

But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an “irrepressible conflict”, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North (Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois) who had previously blocked the party’s route to power?

Seward’s supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention and, by holding his own against the Democratic ‘Little Giant’, the respect of antislavery voters. More recently, his well-crafted Cooper Union speech in New York City alerted easterners to the intellectual sophistication and moral backbone of a westerner they had not before encountered in the flesh. “He’s the greatest man since St Paul,” a newspaperman declared. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” 

Adamant that to restrict slavery was to sustain the purposes of the nation’s founders and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but insistent on the constitutional rights of the southern states to the protection of their “domestic institutions”, and personally untainted by nativism, Lincoln offered a blend of moral radicalism and legal conservatism that allowed his managers at Chicago to present him as the party’s most reliable hope in the doubtful states. Rational political logic, not luck, secured his nomination.

Why did the Democratic Party split?

Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglas’s formula of ‘popular sovereignty’ – leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote – kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in ‘bleeding’ Kansas or President Buchanan’s feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglas’s political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration. 


Even so, as the country’s leading Democrat he expected to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dred Scott case (which declared slave-owners’ property rights sacrosanct), had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The party’s fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way. 

The leading Democrat, Stephen A Douglas. He failed to prevent his party splitting over the issue of slavery. (Library of Congress)

Why didn’t Lincoln run in the South?

Southern nervousness over the rise of an antislavery party boiled over in the fall of 1859 following the misbegotten attempt of the abolitionist John Brown to spur a slave uprising by seizing the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horrified southern leaders denounced the ‘Black Republicans’ as fomenters of racial revolution. But the Republicans cast themselves as the genuinely national party, loyal to the intentions of the nation’s founders and true to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. This was a self-perception reinforced by the polemical writings of a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South attributed the condition of impoverished southern whites and the backwardness of their economy to slavery’s corrosive effect on enterprise and opportunity. 


The book became a mainstay of Republican propagandists in 1860. Southern authorities banned it, while vigilantes murdered or drove out those who preached its doctrines. Lincoln’s party put up candidates in some of the states of the slave border region, and Lincoln himself earned several thousand votes in border slave states such as Missouri and Delaware, but did not risk life and limb in the lower South, where no Republicans appeared on the ballot.

Slaves in a cotton field near Savannah, Georgia in the c1860s. (Corbis)

Did the Democrats’ schism hand the election to the Republicans?

Lincoln won the presidency with a mere 40 per cent of the popular vote, seven per cent less than the combined ballots of his two Democrat rivals. But the split in the Democratic Party did not itself deliver the Republican victory, for Lincoln secured clear majorities in almost every free state, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts and the other populous states where the presidential electors were concentrated. Even as a combined force, the opposition parties would not have won. 

Lincoln easily dominated the electoral college, with 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72 and Douglas’s 12. 
A fourth candidate for the presidency, John Bell, appealing to conservative voters who had lost their political home with the death of the old Whig party, won just 39. More significant than the Democrats’ schism in opening the door to Lincoln’s victory was the Republicans’ success in putting a squeeze on Bell’s Constitutional Union party in the lower North. 

Did Lincoln’s election warrant the secession of southern states?

Southern nationalist ‘fire-eaters’ moved quickly to mobilise support for secession from a Union that had elected a ‘Black Republican’ on a purely sectional vote. Jumpy southern whites believed that an abolitionist in the White House would use the levers of government to bring about the revolution that had eluded John Brown. For their part, southern conservatives cautioned against hasty action that smacked of both panic and hubris. 
As South Carolina led the charge towards separation, a dyspeptic realist, James Pettigru, remarked that the state was too small for a republic, yet too large for a lunatic asylum. 


Prudent slave-owners pointed out that the Republicans were no immediate menace to the South: the party controlled neither Congress nor the Supreme Court, and Lincoln was anyway no radical abolitionist. They were correct in judging immediate secession a far riskier course than waiting for an overt act of aggression from the new administration in Washington. Southern radicals, however, confident in the Cotton Kingdom’s capacity to sustain itself at home and abroad, exploited the fevered times and carried the day. Above all, they played on fears that the new president would stock the slave-states with federal post-holders – a nucleus of antislavery fifth-columnists dedicated to effecting a political and racial revolution throughout the region. 

A contemporary oil painting of a US slave market in 1852. By this time, the issue of slavery had already driven America to the brink of civil war on two occasions. (Bridgeman Art Library)

What part did the election outcome play in the coming of civil war?

War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a ‘perpetual’ Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.”

The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institution’s future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican cession (1848) had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860. 

Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 1861–65 was not about ‘state’s rights’ in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their ‘domestic institutions’. 


No one explained this better than Lincoln himself, a month before his assassination. The slaves, he said, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” The election of 1860 was at the heart of this story.  

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• An alternate History: If Martin Luther King had not been killed?

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Historyextra . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.