The 1859 attack of abolitionist John Brown on Harpers Ferry gave bloody evidence for the South’s feeling of persecution by fanatics. His execution gave abolitionists a martyr. But Lincoln took a reasonable tone even at this: “Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a State,” he said. “We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right.”
During the 1860 election, Southern Democrats tried to paint Lincoln as an extremist who stood for the unconstitutional abolition of slavery through executive power. Lincoln said, and the record showed, that he only opposed the expansion of slavery as a means of keeping the nation united, though he opposed slavery personally.
Nevertheless, slave-owning Southerners threatened secession if Republicans won the election as a way to intimidate undecided voters. Lincoln mocked this threat by comparing it to a highway robber who “holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’” It was illogical but it was not a bluff. They believed the election was a matter of life or death. This set the psychological preconditions for civil war.
Within a week of Lincoln winning the presidency, South Carolina’s senators resigned their seats as their state legislature approved money to raise 10,000 soldiers. They refused to acknowledge Lincoln’s legitimacy. This was soon followed by the Georgia legislature voting to appropriate $1 million to purchase guns and artillery.
The lame-duck Democrat president James Buchanan’s response was to blame the Republicans. In his final December message to Congress, Buchanan denounced the “intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery.” His attempts at appeasement did not work.
The week before Christmas, a South Carolina secession convention unanimously voted to leave the United States. On December 30, the federal arsenal in Charleston was seized by local forces. In January, emboldened by this action, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana seceded from the Union in closed partisan conventions, refusing to put the question to a popular vote.
On February 18, Mississippi’s former U. S. senator Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama, with an alternative constitution that explicitly invoked both God and slavery. Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia frankly declared that their new government’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” In contrast to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the Confederacy was based on the idea that all men were not created equal.
Two weeks later, Lincoln gave his inaugural address in Washington under threat of assassination and insurrection. He tried to appeal to the common bonds between his dissatisfied countrymen and gave the world a glimpse of the poetry of democracy in his closing sentences: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”