Election of 1860 and Secession

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Identify the four candidates of 1860, the parties they represented, and the position each took on slavery in the federal territories.
• Account for how Lincoln won the presidency with roughly 39.8 percent of the popular vote and a commanding electoral majority by sweeping the free states.
• Trace the order in which the seven Deep South states seceded between December 20, 1860, and February 1, 1861, and account for the formation of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery on February 4, 1861.
• Use the South Carolina Declaration of Causes to evaluate the role of slavery in the secession argument and to assess later claims that the war was about something other than slavery.
• Account for why the Crittenden Compromise failed, why Fort Sumter became a flashpoint, and how Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops moved Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina out of the Union and held Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri inside it.

The election of 1860 ended the Second Party System the Compromise of 1850 had patched together, replaced it with a sectional alignment, and produced the immediate political cause of the Civil War (KC-5.2.II.D). The Democratic Party, which had been the only national party left after the collapse of the Whigs, split in two at its Charleston convention in April 1860 over a platform demand from Southern delegates that the federal government affirmatively protect slavery in any territory where popular sovereignty had not yet decided the question. Northern delegates refused; Southern delegates walked out. The Northern Democrats reconvened at Baltimore and nominated Stephen A. Douglas on a popular sovereignty platform that left the territorial question to settler vote. The Southern Democrats met separately at Richmond and nominated John C. Breckinridge, the sitting vice president, on a platform that demanded a federal slave code for the territories. A residual coalition of former Whigs and Know-Nothings constituted itself as the Constitutional Union Party, nominated John Bell of Tennessee, and adopted a platform whose only commitment was to "the Constitution, the Union, and the laws," a deliberate refusal to take any position on slavery. The Republican Party, holding its convention at Chicago, passed over the better-known William Seward and nominated Abraham Lincoln on a platform that opposed any extension of slavery into the federal territories while explicitly disclaiming any intention to interfere with slavery where it already existed (KC-5.2.II.C, KC-5.2.II.D).

The arithmetic of November 6, 1860, was sectional rather than national. Lincoln received roughly 1,866,000 popular votes, about 39.8 percent of the total cast. He carried every free state except New Jersey, which he split with Douglas, and he received almost no votes in the slave states; ten Southern states did not even place his name on the ballot. Yet because the free states held more population and more electoral votes than the slave states, Lincoln won 180 electoral votes against 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and only 12 for Douglas, who had finished second in the popular vote. The result was a constitutional first: a president elected by an entirely Northern coalition and rejected by every state that would soon secede. White Southerners read the result as proof that the slaveholding South had been outvoted permanently and that the federal government would now be controlled by an antislavery party.

South Carolina moved first. A specially elected state convention met at Columbia and then at Charleston and on December 20, 1860, voted unanimously to dissolve the Union between the state and the United States. Four days later the convention adopted the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, the most extensive secession document of the period. The Declaration cites Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, the rise of antislavery political parties, and the election of a president "whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery" as the central justifications for secession. It uses the words "slave," "slavery," or "slaveholding" more than eighty times. It does not cite the tariff. The Mississippi declaration of January 9, 1861, was even more direct, opening with the sentence that the state's position was thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. The Texas declaration of February 2 framed the cause in terms of preserving "the servitude of the African race" as a positive good. Whatever the participants in 1860 and 1861 thought of the long-term causes of the war, the contemporary documents that explain why secession happened in the precise winter of Lincoln's election make slavery the central reason on the public record.

Six more slave states followed South Carolina between January 9 and February 1, 1861: Mississippi (Jan 9), Florida (Jan 10), Alabama (Jan 11), Georgia (Jan 19), Louisiana (Jan 26), and Texas (Feb 1). Delegates from the seven seceded states convened at Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4 and within a week had drafted a provisional Confederate Constitution, organized a provisional Congress, and chosen Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a former United States senator and secretary of war, as provisional president, with Alexander Stephens of Georgia as vice president. The Confederate States of America was sworn in on February 18 with Davis declaring that the new government would be devoted to "the cause of self-government" and the protection of property, by which he meant slavery. The Confederate Constitution copied long passages of the federal Constitution but inserted explicit protection for the right of property in slaves and forbade the Confederate Congress from passing any tariff intended to protect industry.

Inside the lame-duck session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky offered the Crittenden Compromise in December 1860 as a final attempt to hold the Union together. The proposal would have written six constitutional amendments to extend the Missouri Compromise line of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude to the Pacific, guaranteeing slavery south of the line and barring it north of the line; would have prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in any state or in the District of Columbia; and would have made these guarantees unamendable. Lincoln, then president-elect, advised Republican senators to vote against any extension of slavery into new territory, on the ground that it was the platform on which the party had just won. The Senate Committee of Thirteen rejected the package on December 28, the full Senate defeated it on March 2, and the project of saving the Union by formally writing slavery's expansion into the Constitution collapsed. The Washington Peace Conference, convened in February by former president John Tyler and the legislatures of twenty-one states, produced a similar package and met the same fate.

The opening shot followed two months later. Major Robert Anderson and his small federal garrison had transferred from the indefensible Fort Moultrie on the mainland to Fort Sumter, a brick fortification on a sand bar in Charleston Harbor, on December 26, 1860. President Buchanan refused to surrender the fort but also refused to reinforce it. Lincoln, sworn in on March 4, 1861, decided to resupply the garrison with provisions only and notified the South Carolina governor in advance, putting the question of war squarely on the Confederacy. Confederate forces under General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on the fort at 4:30 in the morning of April 12, 1861; Anderson surrendered after thirty-four hours of bombardment with no fatalities on either side. On April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling on the loyal states to provide 75,000 militia for ninety days to suppress the rebellion. The call for troops was the inflection point that converted a Deep South secession into a national war.

The four states of the Upper South — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina — had thus far refused to secede. Virginia's convention had voted decisively against secession on April 4. Lincoln's troop call changed everything: rather than send militia to coerce sister slave states, the Upper South seceded in turn. Virginia on April 17, Arkansas on May 6, Tennessee by legislative resolution on May 6 (ratified by referendum on June 8), and North Carolina on May 20 brought the Confederate total to eleven states. The new Confederate capital moved from Montgomery to Richmond in May, placing it within a hundred miles of the federal capital and giving the war in the eastern theater its decisive geographic shape.

Four slave states stayed with the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, the so-called border states. Each held a smaller enslaved population as a share of total population than the Deep South, each was tied to the free-state economy by river and rail, and each contained a substantial Unionist political constituency. Lincoln expended significant political and military capital to keep them inside, including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland to prevent the legislature from voting on secession, the dispatch of federal forces to control the Missouri arsenal at Saint Louis, and the careful neutrality offered to Kentucky until pro-Confederate forces violated it first. Holding the border states denied the Confederacy roughly 2.6 million additional people, the upper Ohio Valley, and the strategic approach to Washington, and it enabled Lincoln to argue throughout the war that the Union cause was not strictly sectional. The geography that the secession crisis produced — eleven Confederate states, four loyal slave states, the new state of West Virginia carved from Virginia in 1863, and twenty-one free states — would shape every campaign and every constitutional argument of the next four years.

Each of the four candidates of 1860 represented a different answer to the question of slavery in the federal territories that the Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska, and Dred Scott had failed to settle.

Five sources reconstruct the contest from Lincoln's New York coming-out address through the constitutional rupture and the Confederate counter-text.

Eleven slave states left the Union between December 20, 1860, and June 8, 1861. Four border slave states stayed with the Union.

1. (Causation) Account for the chain of events that converted the four-way election of November 1860 into a shooting war by April 1861. Identify the single moment at which a different decision would most plausibly have produced a different outcome, and defend the choice.
2. (Comparison) Compare the platform of the Northern Democrats (Douglas, popular sovereignty) with the platform of the Southern Democrats (Breckinridge, federal slave code). On what specific question did the Charleston convention split, and why was that question impossible to compromise on after Dred Scott?
3. (Continuity and Change) Contrast the South Carolina Declaration of Causes (December 1860) with the Lost Cause arguments that emerged after 1865 about the war being primarily about states' rights or the tariff. Which interpretation is supported by the contemporary documentary record, and what does the contrast tell you about how memory of the war was reconstructed?
4. (Causation) Account for the failure of the Crittenden Compromise. Why did the proposal collapse despite endorsements from former president Tyler and many established political figures, and what does the failure tell you about whether secession could have been averted by additional concessions on slavery?
5. (Comparison) Compare the secession decisions of the seven Deep South states (December 1860 to February 1861) with the Upper South decisions made only after Lincoln's call for troops in April 1861. What does the difference in timing tell you about the role of immediate political circumstances rather than long-term economic interests?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.