Southerners were outraged that a President could be elected with so few of their votes. They feared that the national governement had passsed completly our of their hands. Planters and others who backed slavery refused to remain in a Union run by the antislavery Republicans. Secessionists argued that since the states hade voluntarily joined the United States, they could also choose to leave it. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina voted to sucede from the Union and was soon followed by the deep south--Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. In early February, 1861, the delegates from the seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama and formed the Confederate States of America.
As Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, the attention of the nation was on Fort Sumter, a federal fort on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Cut off by Confederate forces, federal soldiers at the fort were running fast out of supplies. Initially the fort's commander refused to give up. But whenthe Confederates opened fire on April 12, 1861, he surrendered after a twenty-four-hour bombardment.
By firing on federal property, the confederate states had committed an undeniable act of open rebellion. When Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion, southerners saw his action as an act of war against them. The Upper Sough--Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas--now joined the Lower South in the Conferderacy. Eighty-four years after the Continental Congress had declared the independence of the United States of America, the nation had come apart. Union with slavery was no longer possible.....
