Why Was Lincoln's Election Possible To Secede?

For many white southerners, Lincoln’s triumph placed their future in the hands of a party hostile to their region’s values and interests. Those who wanted the South to secede did not believe Lincoln would interfere with slavery in the states, but worried that his election indicated that Republican administrations in the future might do so. Southerners in the Deep South, fearing they would become a permanent minority in a nation ruled by their political enemies, instead decided to secede from the Union to save slavery, the basis of their society. In the months after Lincoln’s election, seven states stretching from South Carolina to Texas seceded from the United States. These were the states of the Cotton Kingdom, in which slaves were a much larger part of the population than in the Upper South. South Carolina, long extreme in its defense of slavery and states’ rights, seceded first, claiming it was necessary to defend slavery against Lincoln and the Republicans. Secessionists equated their actions with those of the American revolutionaries, as a blow for liberty against tyranny.
President Buchanan did not confront the crisis. He denied that a state could secede, but he also declared that the federal …show more content…
When inaugurated, eight slave states of the Upper South, where slaves and slaveholders were fewer in number than in the Deep South and where fewer whites thought Lincoln’s election justified secession, were still in the Union. Southern whites were divided over secession. Lincoln believed secession might collapse from within. In his inaugural address, Lincoln tried to conciliate the South. He rejected the right of states to secede, but denied any plan to interfere with slavery in states where it existed. Although Confederate forces had already seized federal forts and arsenals in the South, Lincoln promised only to “hold” remaining federal property in the South. But he suggested that the southern states risked “civil