Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. We’ve been going through Unit 5 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and we’ve been tracing the growing tension in the United States concerning the question of slavery. In the last video we talked about the failure of compromise on that issue and how even with all the failure, disunion was not yet a foregone conclusion. Well in this video we’re going to look at the election of 1860 which is the event that precipitated secession and Civil War. So if you’re ready to get them brain cows milked, I stand at the ready, let’s get to it. So the basic question we’re trying to answer in this video is as follows: what were the effects of the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860? So as I mentioned in the last video, the newly formed Republican party did pretty well in the midterm congressional elections, and that made the opposing southern Democrats pretty twitchy about the presidential election of 1860. And so for this election the Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, of Kansas-Nebraska Act fame, as their candidate. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln who ran on a free soil platform. Now, in case you don’t remember, the Free Soil Movement sought to keep slavery from expanding into any newly acquired territories. And it’ll be important for you to know that this platform was concerned with curtailing the SPREAD of slavery, not the abolition of slavery where it already existed. Now there were certainly some abolitionist Republicans who did want to abolish slavery in the South, but that was not the official platform, nor was it Lincoln’s stated goal. He was pretty emphatic in his debates with Stephen Douglas that he had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed—if he were elected, the Southerners could breathe easy. Okay, that’s the basic outline of the presidential contest of that year, but here’s where I tell you it’s a little more complicated than that. The Democratic party was actually divided between a northern faction and a southern faction. And there was actually a third division, but let’s not get too complicated: the point is, the party was not unified going into the election of 1860. So the northern faction of the Democrats, represented by Douglas, wanted the slavery question answered by popular sovereignty, which by way of review, means that the people living in the territory can decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. The southern faction of the Democrats, represented by John Breckinridge, wanted slavery in the new territories protected by a federal slave code and once they became states, THEN they could decide by popular sovereignty. And if you’re listening closely,the rival positions in the Democratic party are pretty similar. But as we’ve seen before in our study of American history, when a party is divided like this and puts forward rival candidates, they are unlikely to win. And when it came time to vote, here’s how things shook out. Lincoln won 40% of the popular vote but carried the electoral vote. And look at this electoral map. Like, let this sink in for a moment. Lincoln won the presidency without a single electoral vote from southern states. And that was an ominous sign for the Southerners. Now remember, Lincoln was clear that he wouldn’t mess with slavery where it already existed. But that didn’t matter to the citizens in the Southern states. All they could see was that even if they deployed all their political power in a high stakes decision like this election, they still didn’t have enough power to prevail, and that was deeply threatening to them. Sure, Lincoln promised not to abolish slavery, but he DID promise that the expansion of slavery was effectively over. And how long could the South endure the growing political dominance of the North, who, according to the recent events of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, only wanted to destroy them? And so the Southern answer to that question was plain: how much long can we survive in this Union? No longer. And so in December of 1860, even before Lincoln was inaugurated, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and within six weeks six more states had followed the cascade of secession including, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Later Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina all seceded as well, and together all these states became the Confederate States of America. The new confederacy created a Constitution which was similar in form and language to the United States Constitution but with severely limited federal power, and more to the point, provisions that enshrined slavery as a perpetual institution never to be abolished. Now, this secession, of course, would cause the American Civil War, and we’ll get to that in the next few videos. But for now, it’ll be important to ask and answer a perennial question of the study of the secession crisis, namely: for what reason did the Southern states secede? Now when you ask this question today, you’ll hear basically two competing answers. One group says the south seceded to protect slavery. The other group says the South seceded on the grounds of states’ rights. And the thing is, the answer to this question is not actually a mystery. And we’re going to allow the Confederate states themselves to answer the question for us. So when the secession question arose, each state that would later make up the Confederacy held secession conferences. And as a result of these conferences, each state drafted articles of secession that explained their reason for leaving the Union. Now, I’m not going to go through all of them, but I’m just going to give you a taste, and I think this will answer the question clearly, not with 21st century speculation, but with declarations that they themselves penned. Let’s start with Texas, whose reasoning went like this. With the election of Lincoln, they argued, the country had become controlled by “a great sectional party...proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race and color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.” They further charged the Republicans with the nefarious agenda of “the abolition of negro slavery” and “the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races.” Or how about South Carolina? If you wanted a real contender for the states’ rights argument, South Carolina’s articles of secession is a very complex argument about the violation of their constitutional rights. However, those arguments are focused like a laser on the northern sympathies with antislavery principles and the oppressive designs of the newly ascendant Republican Party. South Carolina’s charge against the Republicans was that “this party will take possession of the government…, the South shall be excluded from the common territory…, and a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.” Let’s move on to Mississippi where the cause of secession could not be plainer. In the articles of secession they said, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” Now, as with everything we could complicate this argument endlessly. The first and only president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis said precisely nothing about slavery in his inauguration speech when he cast a vision for the founding principles of the Confederacy. But his vice president Alexander Stephens gave his famous Cornerstone Speech just a month later in which he argued in no uncertain terms that the foundation of the Confederacy lay in the triumph of the white race over the black race and that such a triumph would always be perpetuated in the everlasting institution of slavery. But all the complication aside, if you look at the words spoken by the states themselves, and you ask them, “Why did you secede from the Union,” their own answer is plain: slavery must be protected world without end. Thanks for watching. There are more videos right here on Unit 5, so give that a click and keep studying. If you want help getting an A in your class and a five on your exam in May, making these videos for you, then let me know by subscribing. Heimler out.