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The Atlantic has endorsed only three presidential candidates in 159 years. Abraham Lincoln (1860) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1964) were the first two.
In October of 1860, James Russell Lowell, the founding editor of
The Atlantic, warned in these pages about
the perishability of the great American democratic experiment if citizens (at the time, white, male citizens)
were to cease taking seriously their franchise:
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual ... For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.
One of the animating causes of this magazine at its founding, in 1857, was the abolition of slavery, and Lowell argued that the Republican Party, and the man who was its standard-bearer in 1860, represented the only reasonable pathway out of the existential crisis then facing the country. In his
endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president, Lowell wrote, on behalf of the magazine, "It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies." He went on to declare that Abraham Lincoln "had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician."
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