![]() As the Republican candidate, he received 1,887 votes in Virginia and did not appear on the ballot in any other state which eventually joined the Confederacy. However, Lincoln's victory in 1860 was far from dominant. Lincoln's election fed the perception that Southern interests were losing control of the federal government, and that this government would eventually suppress the institution of slavery or outlaw it altogether. However, in and of itself, secession was a major overreaction to this political setback. The proximate cause of the South's secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln with a Republican majority in 1860. Because of that the people responsible for it presented the issue later as a question of whether the Union should have intervened and fought the Civil War - avoiding the question of whether secession was wise in the first place. It is the contention here that secession was an utter disaster for the South. Would these scenarios have represented an improvement (for the elite planter class) over the devastation of the Civil War, followed by the total abolition of slavery?.What would have happened had South Carolina (and the other Confederate states thereafter) not seceded after Lincoln's election in 1860?.In that case, this essay aims to examine two things: If that was the point of secession, then the strategy was an obvious disaster. For the purposes of this article, let's stipulate that the preservation of slavery and the plantation economy was the primary objective in seceding from the United States. ![]() Secession was driven by the Southern planter class. There have been at least a few discussions on whether Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans should have prosecuted the Civil War, but surprisingly very little analysis on whether South Carolina's secession in 1860 was a strategically wise move in the context of the American debate on slavery and states' rights. The Civil War was by far the most catastrophic event to ever happen in the American South. The Secession Convention in South Carolina, 1860 ![]()
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