2J - The 1860 election, secession and the outbreak of war
Learn how Lincoln's constitutional election led to a secession movement, why southern responses differed, and how the dispute over Union and Confederacy became a shooting war.
The four-way election of 1860
The presidential election of 1860 exposed the weakening of national political compromise. Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln rather than the more established William Seward. Lincoln could appeal to important northern states while opposing slavery's expansion. The Republican platform defended the Union and the states' control of their existing domestic institutions, but rejected extending slavery into federal territories. It also supported homesteads, a Pacific railway and policies favourable to industrial development.
The Democrats divided between Stephen Douglas, defending popular sovereignty, and John C. Breckinridge, defending federal protection of slave property in the territories. John Bell stood for the Constitutional Union Party, seeking to rally former Whigs and others around preserving the Constitution and Union while avoiding a detailed settlement of the slavery dispute. Four candidates thus offered different answers, or avoided the contested answer, rather than competing around one accepted national bargain.
Lincoln won 180 of 303 electoral votes, enough for an outright Electoral College majority. Breckinridge won 72, Bell 39 and Douglas 12. Lincoln's strength came from the free states, with no electoral votes from slave states. He did not need southern support to become president. The result was constitutionally valid, but it demonstrated that northern population and electoral strength could carry a sectional party into executive power.
The Democratic split assisted Lincoln, especially where anti-Republican votes were divided. It is too simple, however, to say that a united opposition would certainly have defeated him: electoral votes were awarded state by state, and merely adding nationwide opposition totals ignores their geographical distribution. Republican organisation and success in crucial northern states mattered in their own right.
Use the electoral evidence in steps. Observation: Lincoln won an Electoral College majority without carrying a slave state. Inference: the presidency could now be won without a southern electoral coalition, reducing slaveholders’ leverage over the executive. Limit: this does not show that every northerner supported Lincoln or that every slave state would secede. Northern voters were divided, and later southern decisions still need explaining. A precise inference is stronger than the sweeping claim that ‘the whole North voted against the whole South’.
Southern secessionists feared more than immediate abolition, which Lincoln had not promised. Containment threatened slavery's long-term security, future Senate balance and the South's influence over federal appointments and policy. His election was the immediate trigger for secession, operating on fears that had developed through territorial controversy and party change.
Secession and southern division
Southern leaders had to choose whether to accept an unwelcome election result or abandon the Union. Immediate secessionists, often called fire-eaters, argued that waiting would leave slavery at the mercy of a hostile northern majority. William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama helped make resistance to territorial restrictions a test of southern loyalty. South Carolina's convention voted to secede on 20 December 1860, before Lincoln took office.
Secession
An attempt by a state to withdraw from the United States and cease to recognise the authority of the federal Union.
South Carolina's declaration of causes described the Constitution as a compact between sovereign states and accused free states of failing to fulfil obligations concerning fugitive slaves. It also treated the election of an antislavery party as a threat to slavery's survival. States' rights supplied the constitutional argument; protection of slavery supplied the central grievance. Reducing secession to either an abstract defence of states' rights or a dispute over tariffs would obscure what the declaration itself emphasised.
The declaration complained of:
“an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery”
Authentic short excerpt: South Carolina convention, Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Secession, adopted 24 December 1860, after the secession ordinance of 20 December. Complete text, Yale Law School's Avalon Project.
The declaration is valuable evidence of the public justification the convention wanted to establish. Its authors sought to legitimate withdrawal, so their claims that northerners had broken the compact require contextual testing. Its emphasis on slavery remains evidence of the priorities they chose to defend; a persuasive purpose does not make that emphasis disappear. The passage's value for investigating stated secessionist motives is consequently greater than its value for measuring every northerner's actual intentions.
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