I discovered an erroneous detail in my 5/16 Huffington Post piece, "HRC's Choice: Seward or Chase?"
Rather than simply revise the post and pretend (absurdly) to be infallible, it feels more honest and accountable to call attention to the detail I got wrong. I'll try on HuffPost itself and also here.
In Lincoln's era, the same convention delegates who picked the presidential nominee also picked the vice presidential nominee. So parsing Lincoln's choice of VP is pointless because Lincoln didn't pick his own VP.
It remains true that there's no Honest Abe Seal of Approval for an Obama-Clinton ticket. But it's also true, I now realize, that there's no obvious Seal of Disapproval.
Meanwhile, in trying to track down accurate details, I found this ...
http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsofrep00repuiala
It's a digitized copy of the proceedings of the Republicans' 1860 convention. Very cool that such a thing even exists on the web. It shows us, among other things, that the delegates did not nominate Seward or Chase for the vice presidency. The tally of the first vice presidential ballot (see page 128) also suggests that the states which backed Lincoln most strongly did not get their first choice for VP.
Please post a comment here or on HuffPost if you think I have any other details wrong. Sorry for my mistake. Thanks for reading.
