Outbreak 27to the 1860 national convention to demand
a plank calling for protection of slavery in all
national territories. Other states of the Lower
South (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) might
be expected to follow Alabama's lead.Election of Abraham Lincoln
The Democratic convention met in
Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860. A
hotbed of secessionist sentiment, Charleston
witnessed a contentious series of debates.
Northern Democrats rejected a proposed
platform that embodied Yancey's demands,
several dozen southern delegates walked out
and the convention adjourned without a
nomination. The Democrats reconvened in
Baltimore in mid-June, but failed again to
agree on a platform. The regular Democrats,
who comprised the majority of the party,
ultimately nominated Senator Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois, a supporter of popular
sovereignty, while southern rights Democrats
selected slaveholder John C. Breckinridge of
Kentucky to bear their standard. As the
election approached, the Democratic Party,
long the dominant force in American
national politics, lay in a shambles.
The Republicans had met in Chicago in
mid-May and chosen Abraham Lincoln as
their presidential candidate. A moderate,
Lincoln fully supported a platform that
would prohibit slavery in the territories but
accept the institution in states where it
already existed. The platform further called
for measures that expressed the mercantile,
pro-business, free labor sentiments of many
in the North.
A fourth candidate, nominated by voters
calling themselves the Constitutional Union
Party, also entered the field. He was John
Bell, an old Whig from the state of
Tennessee. Hoping to avoid the poisonous
influence of issues related to slavery, the
Constitutional Union Party based its
campaign strictly on support of the
Constitution, the laws of the United States
and the sacred Union.
The election broke down into a contest
between Lincoln and Douglas in the North
and Breckinridge and Bell in the South. The
Republicans did not appear on the ballot in
ten slave states, and Bell and Breckinridge
stood no chance of winning any of the free
states. During the course of the campaign,
many leaders from the Lower South
threatened secession in the event of a
Republican victory. Republicans responded
that the South had postured about secession
in the past, and they vowed not to give in to
any southern demands. Outpolled by nearly
a million popular votes, Lincoln and the
Republicans achieved a decisive victory in
the Electoral College, taking 180 votes to the
other three candidates' 123. Lincoln did
especially well in the upper sections of the
North, where anti-slavery sentiment was
strongest, polling about 60 percent of the
votes. He managed a bare majority elsewhere
in the North. Breckinridge carried the Lower
South and four states of the Upper South.
Bell won in Virginia, Kentucky and
Tennessee. Douglas showed poorly, winning
just 12 electoral votes in New Jersey and
Missouri - which showed how sectionalism
had ravaged the proud old Democratic Party.Secession begins
Contrary to those who believed they were
bluffing, secessionists in the Lower South
moved quickly after Lincoln's election. South
Carolina led the way, calling a convention
that voted unanimously on 20 December
1860 to leave the Union. Over the next
six weeks, following debates of varying
intensity between those for and against
secession, Mississippi (9 January 1861),
Florida (10 January), Alabama (11 January),
Georgia (19 January), Louisiana (26 January),
and Texas (1 February) also seceded. The
seven states created the Confederate States
of America at a convention in Montgomery,
Alabama, in February and March 1861.
Adopting a constitution much like that of
the United States but with explicit
guarantees for slavery and stronger