Overview
Following the election of 1860, a great amount of southern states seceded from the Union leaving the United States split into two.
Southern Secession
"It would be as reasonable to expect the steamship to make a successful voyage across the Atlantic with crazy men for engineers, as to hope for a prosperous future for the South under Black Republican rule. . . . Can the lives, liberty and property of the people of Mississippi be safely entrusted to the keeping of that sectional minority which must hereafter administer the Federal Government?. . . Our deliverance from this great danger, in my opinion, is to be found in the reserved right of the States to withdraw from injury and oppression."
---John J. Pettus, Governor of Mississippi, November 26, 1860 (page 22 in Apostles of Disunion)
Beginning of the End..
South Carolina, Ordinance of Succession, 1860
- South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union following Lincoln’s election
- Soon after, five more states followed
- Within six months, a total of eleven states had seceded from the Union
[State, Date Seceded from the Union]
- South Carolina, Dec. 20th, 1860
- Mississippi, Jan. 9th, 1861
- Florida, Jan. 10th, 1861
- Alabama, Jan. 11th, 1861
- Georgia, Jan 19th, 1861
- Louisiana, Jan. 26th, 1861
- Texas, March 2nd, 1861
- Virginia, April 17th, 1861
- Arkansas, May 6th, 1861
- North Carolina, May 20th, 1861
- Tennessee, June 8th, 1861
“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction…"
---Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
In 1860-1861, eleven of the fifteen southern states where slavery was legal declared their secession from the United States and joined together as the Confederate States of America
Union Dissolved
Now the United States was no longer united...
It had been divided into two nations:
the United States of America and the Confederate States of America
It had been divided into two nations:
the United States of America and the Confederate States of America