Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 19.djvu/843

UNITED STATES. parties, especially powerful in the South, nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, and Edward Everett, of Massachusetts; while the Republicans (see ) nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, and Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine. The Republican platform declared in favor of freedom in the Territories, a protective tariff, internal improvements, and a Pacific railway. In the ensuing election Lincoln received 180 electoral votes and was elected. He received every Northern vote in the electoral college, excepting three out of the seven cast by New Jersey. Breckenridge received 72 electoral votes of the South. Bell received the votes of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, 39 altogether. Douglas received only the nine votes of Missouri and three of the votes of New Jersey. The North and South were arrayed against each other, and the South was beaten. Of the popular vote, Lincoln received 1,866,452; Douglas, 1,375,157; Breckenridge, 847,953; Bell, 590,631. Thus while Lincoln gained an overwhelming majority of the electoral votes, the combined Democratic votes exceeded his by 356,658, and the popular votes against him all together exceeded his own by 947,289. In the Southern States alone, the combined vote of two of the ‘Union’ candidates, Douglas and Bell, exceeded the vote of the disunion candidate, Breckenridge.

There was some ground for the claim that Lincoln was a ‘minority President,’ but the true significance of the election was the fact that political power had finally departed from the South. The slave States were at last confronted by an overwhelming opposition. The following figures from the census of each decade up to 1860 show the gradual growth of the power of the free States, the figures given for the slave States including the slaves:

The South lost no time in acting upon what many of her leaders had declared would be the signal of her withdrawal from the Union. President Buchanan's administration witnessed the culmination of the conflict that had for years been waged between the Free States and the Slave States. It was during this administration that the leaders of the South appear to have definitely decided that the welfare of their section could not be satisfactorily conserved while the Southern States remained a part of the Federal Union. Ever since the foundation of the Government, the statesmen of the South had for the most part maintained that theory of the Federal Constitution which regarded the ultimate sovereignty as residing not in the nation as a whole, but rather in the individual States themselves, which this theory—the theory of Calhoun and Hayne—held to be supreme and independent commonwealths. According to the view prevalent at the South, these sovereign States had entered into a league of union with the other States for purposes of mutual advantage; and this partnership,

like others, was to endure only as long as its original purpose was maintained with regard to all the members. Events seemed now to indicate that the time for the dissolution of the compact had arrived. In the first place, the balance of political power was passing rapidly into the hands of a party inimical to the interests of the South, a party pledged to the ultimate abolition of slavery and to a commercial system of protection which was peculiarly unfavorable to an agricultural community such as the South then was. The greatest statesmen of the South had often deplored the presence of the slaves as an economic and social evil; yet, inasmuch as slavery actually existed, the question appeared to them a practical one rather than a matter of speculative interest. The Abolitionists of the North had begun a crusade which, conducted with extreme bitterness and violence of denunciation, exasperated the South beyond measure. Men who believed thoroughly in the abstract wrongfulness of slavery indignantly took up its defense. The continual threats of the Southerners to destroy the Union, the violence to which so many of them were so ready to resort, as in the case of the assault upon Senator Sumner, and the high-handed proceedings that had marked the civil war in Kansas, all served to embitter and intensify the opposition at the North.

As soon as the result of the Presidential election was known, the Legislature of South Carolina ordered a State convention, which on December 20th unanimously declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the United States, is hereby dissolved.” The example of South Carolina was followed by Mississippi, January 9, 1861; Florida, January 10; Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; and later by Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Kentucky and Missouri were divided.

On February 4, 1861, delegates from seven seceding States met at Montgomery, Ala., and formed a provisional government, under the title of the (q.v.). A provisional constitution was adopted similar in most respects to that of the United States, and the Government formally inaugurated, February 18, 1861, with Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, as President, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, as Vice-President, and on May 24th, the seat of government was established at Richmond, Va. On the same day on which the Confederate delegates met at Montgomery a Peace Congress, in which twenty-one States were represented, assembled at Washington, but accomplished nothing. (See .) As State after State withdrew from the Union, its Senators and Representatives in Congress resigned their seats; and a large proportion of the officers of the army and navy of Southern birth, believing that their first and final allegiance was due to their State, and that the action of each State carried with it all its citizens, also resigned their commissions.

President Buchanan, denying his constitutional power to compel the seceding States to return to the Union, though he believed that secession was unconstitutional, made a feeble and ineffectual attempt to relieve the garrison at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, closely besieged by the forces