The South Secedes

The South’s answer was secession. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina announced its withdrawal from the Union. Mississippi took the same course on January 9, 1861. Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas swiftly followed.

Delegates from those states assembled in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4, 1861, and adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis, born in Kentucky, not far from the birthplace of Lincoln, was made President of the Confederacy, and Alexander H. Stephens its vice-President.

So, when Lincoln took the oath of office, March 4, 1861, he looked out on a nation already divided, with seven states organized into a government which questioned the authority of his own. The secession that New England had threatened years before was made a grave fact by the South.

Yet, in both South and North, a great many men hoped for a peaceful solution of the dark predicament. A vast, electric attention gripped the country, as Lincoln gave his inaugural address. Everyone knew that the nation’s destiny hung upon what he would say.

Lincoln appealed for the preservation of the Union.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists….I hold that in contemplation of universal law and the Constitution of the Union of the States is perpetual…and….I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states….In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it is forced on the national authority….My dissatisfied fellow-countrymen…you can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”

Lincoln spoke the sentiment of the Middle West from which he came. This section, firmly set against making war on slavery was at the same time resolutely opposed to a break-up of the Union. But the situation had reached too fateful an intensity for conflict to be avoided. New England had a powerful abolitionist element. And under all the clashes over the slavery question, there was an antagonism between the East and the South growing out of the economic and social differences of the two sections, and the desire of each to control the political power of the national government. Thus far, the South had won in that contest, It had directed affairs at Washington, and directed them well. There was a genius for statesmanship in that planter regime of the Old South.

The final stroke which brought war came through what looked to the South like a violation of a promise by the federal government.