Fact is most of Northern society was based on slavery and the slave trade. Yankees were real keen on sailing to Africa to enslave them by the boatload. Massive yankee fortunes were made on the backs of slavery and the trade.
If that were true then how do you explain his wins in agricultural states, which would have been harmed by tariffs and corporate subsidies?
His oft asserted desire to keep the territories free from blacks, his desire to bribe voters by promises of free land? Many a yankee detested the thought of sharing the continent with blacks so a vote for Lincoln was a vote for a lily-white west..
As opposed to all of Southern society? You forget who it was buying those boatloads of slaves, and all those Southern fortunes built on their backs. Kind of hard for you to take the moral highground when your own hands are as dirty, if not dirtier.
His oft asserted desire to keep the territories free from blacks, his desire to bribe voters by promises of free land?
Oft asserted? Let me guess, you were the crowd estimator for the Million Man March a few years back, weren't you?
It's true that the South wanted tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of blacks in the territories...so long as title of ownership for all of them was in someone's pocket. Again, kind of hard to find any sort of moral high ground in your complaining under those conditions.
The why did the Homestead Act of 1862 include free blacks?