The 1860 Presidential Election Caused the South to Seceded

The 1860 Presidential Election Caused the South to Secede

Thomas Allen, editor

In The United States Unmasked: A Search into the Causes of the Rise and Progress of These States, and an Exposure Of Their Present Material and Moral Condition (London, Ontario: J. H. Vivian, 1878), pages 92–94, G. Manigault explains how the 1860 presidential election led to the South seceding. He writes:

An election of President of the United States was to come on late in 1860, and the whole Union was greatly agitated by the canvass. The anti-slavery party chose for their candidate [Abraham Lincoln] an until lately obscure man — of little capacity or attainments, except as what is called a stump orator. He had a genius for diverting a rude Western crowd with funny stories and coarse witticisms. Some able speeches were delivered by him, but they were prepared by another man. His own serious efforts only proved his ignorance and shallowness. But he was popular in the great North-west, and was a man whom the party knew how to use for their purposes. Another party which expressly disclaimed for the Federal government any right to interfere with slavery in the States, but claimed for it the right to prohibit it in the common territories, nominated for their candidate an eminent Northwestern politician [Stephen A. Douglas], the zealous expounder of “Squatter Sovereignty.” A third party of no definite views, except peace at any price, brought out their candidate [John Bell]. And a fourth, consisting of the people of the Southern States and such people in the North as maintained the permanence and sanctity of the terms, on which the Union had been formed, and the limitations on the powers of the Federal government, nominated their candidate [John C. Breckinridge]. The result was that the anti-slavery party carried every Northern State, and the election — the fourth party carried every Southern State, and the other parties were nowhere.  

The people of the Southern States now found that they were living under a government completely in the hands of their enemies, utterly hostile to their rights and interests, and claiming a right not only to surround and hedge them out from all right in the common territories, and reduce them to complete and hopeless subjection, but to revolutionize their internal political and social organization. This was not the confederation into which they had entered; this was not the government which they had joined in creating. Unless they could submit to be revolutionized by external enemies, and become mere tributary provinces to them, it was high time to break off all connection with utterly faithless confederates, whom the most solemn treaty could not bind. The Southern States began to secede from the Union in rapid succession, and war was made upon the South to force them back into it.

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