With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the Republican Southerners were convinced that Lincoln and the Republicans were going to go after slavery. They were going to work to abolish slavery in the South, despite the fact that Lincoln had never mentioned that or even come close to it. Unsurprisingly, the state making the most noise about all of this was South Carolina, and they were discussing behind closed doors with other states to try to convince them to secede with them.
They were done. They had had enough. They were ready to leave, but no other state would join them. Now, when we've mentioned this previously, South Carolina did not secede because they wanted more states to go with them. This time, South Carolina basically said, screw you guys, we'll do it ourselves.
On December 20th, 1860, South Carolina secedes from the Union with it. without any guarantees of another state following them. Pretty bold on their part.
Stupid, but bold. Again, they decided to secede alone based on Lincoln's election, once it was made official. They will be followed by six more states.
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The states here on this map in red, or pink, or lightish red, whatever you want to call it. This left eight remaining slave states in the Union, and they waited to see what Lincoln would do once he took office.
Essentially, the Deep South left, and the border states waited. Lincoln's election was not enough for them. They wanted to see what he would do and or how he would react to secession itself. Again, compromises would be tried, but Clay was long dead, and this was past the point of no return. So if they're waiting to see how Lincoln's going to react to it, there's going to have to be something for him more specific to have a reaction to.
And that brings us to Fort Sumter. After South Carolina secession, the U.S. government still held Fort Sumter here in South Carolina and Charleston Harbor. I'll flip map so you can see that closer.
So you see Fort Sumter down here in the bottom right. And then... Charleston Harbor. There's the city of Charleston, a major port for the U.S.
And there's Fort Sumter. Military bases are federal property. They're not state-owned or controlled. So if a state secedes, they don't automatically take control of those military bases.
If Texas were to ever idiotically and unconstitutionally secede, hey, secession is actually treason, then all of the military bases here in Texas wouldn't become controlled by the state. or I guess now the second Republic of Texas. Fort Hood in the middle of the state, that massive fort there, still US property.
Fort Bliss out in El Paso, Shepard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls and everything in between would still be federal property. This was no different. The Confederate government, South Carolina government in particular, demanded that the US forces withdraw and turn over the fort.
Now, Lincoln has a very crucial decision here. He has two options. Should he resupply the fort, basically hold the ground, or should he abandon it, give in? If he evacuates, if he abandons the fort, orders the retreat immediately, then secession will be seen as a success because Lincoln basically accepted it. So it's not as simple as stay or go, right?
It's further complicated because whatever side he decides is also a statement on secession. So if he orders the evacuation, secession would be seen as a success. If he orders them to stay and resupplies the fort, then secession would be seen as a failure or at least challenged by the U.S. government.
Furthermore, there's one other layer to this. If he orders the retreat, or rather if he orders them to stay and resupply the fort, he's also putting American lives in danger because South Carolina had said, if you don't evacuate, we will fire upon the fort. So he's also putting American lives in danger. And any good military commander should always try to minimize that as much as possible.
Sometimes it's not possible, but you should try to do everything you can. So if he orders the evacuation, he'll be guaranteeing the safety of those American lives. So his options are evacuate, give in on secession, but protect American lives, or resupply. Stand firm against secession basically condemning Americans to injury or possibly death. He decided to resupply.
And this, once South Carolina opens fire on the fort here starting the 12th of April, 1861, this is the opening of the Civil War. Not because Lincoln ordered the resupply, but because South Carolina fired on the fort. People have tried to say that Lincoln started this war by not giving up Fort Sumter. No, the South started it. By firing on the fort.
He could have ordered the fort to be resupplied and South Carolina could have not fired a shot. It's on them. They seceded.
They fired. It's their fault. The bombardment began on the 12th of April, 1861. Each of these little red lines or staples on the map is a battery. You see the term here.
That's not one cannon. That's a multitude of cannons, usually between 10 and 30 during this point in time. Sometimes a little less, but these coastal batteries like this are going to have higher, you know, towards the higher end of that. And they're all going to open fire on Fort Sumter. Starting on the 12th, going into the 13th, when Lincoln finally orders the surrender and retreat.
But the point was already made, right? Lincoln was already standing firm against secession, saying we weren't going to give in, or rather the U.S. is not going to give in. And thus, this is the opening conflict and battle of the Civil War. Well, now everybody has seen what Lincoln's reaction to secession was. And this will lead to a second round of secession.
Four more states in April and May of 1861 will secede. Virginia, Tennessee, sorry, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. So it started and ended with the Carolinas.
That makes 11 total. But there are still four slave states remaining in the Union. Why didn't they secede?
I bet you may not have known that there were slave states in the United States during the Civil War who were sending troops and fighting battles against the South. It happened. This wasn't...
While slavery was the cause, right? Obviously, it's the top five causes of all of this. The fighting wasn't restricted to North and South.
It was, or even pro-slave and anti-slavery. It was really those who seceded and those who didn't. But again, it was all about slavery.
So why did those four slave states remain? Well, first of all, those four slave states that stayed in the Union, the four Union slave states were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky. and Missouri.
And we're going to talk about why all four of them stayed in the Union. We're also going to talk about that new thing on the map with the asterisk by it, West Virginia, but that's separate. Two of these explanations are very simple and easy.
One of them is complicated, and one of them is an absolute mess. We'll start with Delaware. We'll just go in the order they're listed here.
Delaware was a small... Low population state that was easily and quickly secured by U.S. troops. The army showed up.
Lincoln said, what are you going to do? They said, nothing. We're Delaware. There.
That explains why Delaware didn't secede. The army basically occupied the state. Maryland. Maryland was of major concern to Lincoln because right in between Maryland and Virginia, which had already seceded, this little strip of land right here is Washington, D.C. If Maryland seceded, Washington would be surrounded by hostile territory.
The debate over secession in the state was very heated and very close. So wanting to preserve the Union, but also save the Capitol from being surrounded, Lincoln will revoke the right of habeas corpus. You see in the bottom left of the slide, the right of habeas corpus, the Latin phrase. Literally translating to body of laws, but that's not what it actually is. That's just the literal translation from the Latin.
The right of habeas corpus is the right to contest the reason or condition of your detainment and or imprisonment. Basically, if you're being held without charges for too long, if you're being mistreated while you're being detained or imprisoned. Your habeas corpus is your right to fight back against those things.
If you've ever watched a cop show and they say, well, we either have to charge them or let them go within 48 hours. If they keep you beyond that 48 hours, you use your right of habeas corpus. obviously through a lawyer and through the law, to fight back against that.
It's your ability to fight back against being forever thrown into prison without being charged or whatever, anything like that. So what is revoking habeas corpus, which I believe is part of the Sixth Amendment? It might be the Seventh.
I never remember. I should jot it down, but oh well. What did revoking the right of habeas corpus?
one of your most important rights, do here? Well, Confederate sympathizers, pro-secessionists were arrested, especially as plans were revealed within the state to harm the Union war effort. So basically, Lincoln is revoking some basic civil rights here, essentially imposing martial law on the state. People were imprisoned without any possibility of being let go or fighting back against it because they no longer had the right of habeas corpus.
The goal was to preserve the Union at any cost, a goal that Lincoln considered more important than these rights. This was a temporary measure meant to keep Maryland in the Union, and it worked, but it was a major criticism of Lincoln at the time, and it is a major stain on his legacy. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
It's not a justification, but it's one of the more severe... violations of American rights that's happened in this country's history, right? Obviously, slavery is up at the top. You can throw trail of tears up there and the treatment of the Native Nations, Jim Crow laws.
Once you start getting it down to not the big sweeping things and the more individual things, this is up there. It's bad, but it worked. Again, ends and means, hard to rectify those together sometimes. Kentucky. Third state here, Kentucky was a slave state, but the sentiment there favored remaining in the Union.
Lincoln assured the state he had no plans to attack them or take their property, take their slaves. And Kentucky was more, as I said, more pro-Union than they were pro-slavery, so they voted to remain. Though the Confederacy did claim them, say that, no, they're actually part of the Confederacy, but Kentucky itself held a vote, and it wasn't super-duper close. They voted to stay in the union. So there's Kentucky.
Pretty simple. Missouri is the fourth one. This is the messy one. There was an intense debate in the state over whether or not to secede.
And that debate got so intense, it resulted in a guerrilla war. The other term at the bottom left of the slide. Not like guerrilla like the animal, but guerrilla.
As in like hit and run tactics. You know, not trained armies. Not...
You know, not even necessarily trained militia, but basically groups of people making attacks, attacking supplies, ambushes, stuff like that. Like the Viet Cong and the Vietnam War. Any paramilitary group usually uses guerrilla warfare, stuff like that.
So yes, Missouri had a civil war to decide which side it would join in the civil war. In the end, however, Missouri remained part of the Union, obviously, because they're in this discussion. They never seceded.
However. The Confederacy also claimed Missouri as part of their country and as part of the general idiocy that was the Confederacy. One last thing here to wrap up the secession crisis, because there's a bit of an odd thing that happens, and that is the creation of West Virginia.
The northwest part of Virginia was virtually free of slaves and almost entirely against secession. When Virginia held their convention to decide on whether or not to secede, the counties in the northwest, up here, all almost entirely voted against joining, against secession. And this map shows, I've showed versions of it before, but the darker the green, the higher the percentage of the entire population in the county, each county that was slaved. So in those dark green areas, there was...
Over 50% of the people who lived there were slaves. Drives home a little bit more the fear that Southerners had of slave rebellions, because in big swaths of the South, the white free population was outnumbered. But in West Virginia, that wasn't the case.
There was virtually no slaves. So after Virginia seceded, the leaders of these counties in the West or Northwest of Virginia met. and voted to secede from Virginia.
The vote passed and they immediately turned around and applied. to rejoin the United States. And it took some time.
They were first admitted as a territory, the territory of West Virginia, and then in June of 1863, they'll become an official state on their own. So West Virginia came to existence when they seceded from secession. So the secession crisis was now completed.
Now... We'll look at what those seceded states actually created, the Confederacy.