The Senators Who Were Expelled After Refusing To Accept Lincoln’s Election

At least a dozen Republican senators have signed onto a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the presidential election, vowing to object to the electoral vote totals from several swing states when they are certified in a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

Among those who refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump: Ted Cruz (Tex.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), John Kennedy (La.) and James Lankford (Okla.).

That has critics accusing the lawmakers of sedition — inciting rebellion against the authority of the government — and calling for their expulsion. No senator has been expelled since the Civil War, when 14 mostly Southern senators were kicked out by their colleagues.

The fuse had been lit Nov. 6, 1860. Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election despite not being on the ballot in 10 Southern states and earning less than 40 percent of the popular vote.

As states seceded that December and January, more senators followed their states out the door. Some simply didn’t show up for the next session; others made formal resignations. Crowds lined up in the frigid dawn to hear Sen. Jefferson Davis‘s farewell address, during which he made clear he thought secession was justified because he believed Lincoln would end slavery:

“[Mississippi] has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races. That Declaration of Independence is to be construed by the circumstances and purposes for which it was made.

“...They have no reference to the slave; else, how happened it that among the items of arraignment made against George III was that he endeavored to do just what the North has been endeavoring of late to do--to stir up insurrection among our slaves? Had the Declaration announced that the negroes were free and equal, how was the Prince to be arraigned for stirring up insurrection among them?”

The audience wept openly and gave him rapturous applause. A few weeks later, he was president of the Confederacy.