1860. Abraham Lincoln elected President. Secession of South Carolina. Kansas prohibits slavery within its boundaries. Lewis Cass, Secretary of State, resigns because President Buchanan refused to reinforce Major Anderson at Fort Moultrie, S. C.
1861. Secession of Mississippi, January 9th, followed by Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana. Admission of Kansas into the Union. Jefferson Davis elected president of the Confederate States of America on February 7th. Bombardment of Fort Sumter.
DRIFT TOWARD SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION (1850–1860)
Seventy-two years after the adoption of the Constitution, called into being to form “a more perfect union,” and eighty-five years after the declaration of independence (a space completely covered by the lives of men still living), a new confederacy of seven Southern states was formed, and the great political fabric, the exemplar and hope of every lover of freedom throughout the world, was apparently hopelessly rent. Of these seven states but two were of the original thirteen--Louisiana and Florida had been purchased by the government of the Union; a war had been fought in behalf of Texas; two states, Alabama and Mississippi, lay within original claims of Georgia, but had been ceded to the Union and organized as Federal territories.
April 11, 1861, found a fully organized separate government established for these seven states, with a determination to form a separate nation, most forcibly expressed by the presence of an army at Charleston, South Carolina, which next day was to open fire upon a feebly manned fort, and thus to begin a terrible civil war. The eight other slave states were in a turmoil of anxiety, leaning toward their sisters of the farther South through the common sympathy which came of slavery, but drawn also to the Union through tradition and appreciation of benefits, and through a realization by a great number of persons that their interests in slavery were much less than those of the states which had already seceded.
The North, in the middle of April, was only emerging from a condition of stupefied amazement at a condition which scarcely any of its statesmen, and practically none of the men of every-day life, had thought possible. It was to this crisis that the country had been brought by the conflicting views of the two great and strongly divided sections of the Union respecting slavery, and by the national aspirations which, however little recognized, were working surely in each section, but upon divergent lines.