He aligned himself politically with the American Whig party, and endorsed the Whigs' ideological suspicion of the military, a suspicion aggravated by the popularity of General Andrew Jackson, the victor of the Battle of New Orleans (1815), as the figurehead of the rival Democratic Party. When Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1847 as the only Whig in Illinois's congressional delegation, he joined with Whig representatives from other states to criticize President James K. Polk's conduct of the War with Mexico.
In 1856 Lincoln joined the then-new Republican Party and two years later he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, engaging in a series of debates on slavery that attracted wide attention. As he rose to national prominence and became president in 1860 as the Republican candidate, he was increasingly forced to confront the likelihood of conflict over the slavery issue. That likelihood became a reality after the slave-holding states of the South formed the Confederate States of America and opened fire on the United States garrison in Fort Sumter. From that point onward, the Civil War demanded that Lincoln devote his energies to precisely the military affairs he liked least.
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