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" On December 20, 1860, six weeks after voters of the United States elected Abraham Lincoln as the 16^th president, South Carolina seceded from the union. Other Southern states soon followed, leading within little over five months to the outbreak of the American Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in US history, and ultimately to the freeing of four million slaves.

The Southern slave-owning class viewed the election of an anti-slavery administration as a mortal threat. Though not an abolitionist, Lincoln was an opponent of slavery and determined to use all means at his disposal to stop its spread.

“A Party founded on the single sentiment of ...hatred of African slavery is now the controlling power,” wrote the Richmond Examiner of Lincoln’s election. The New Orleans Delta declared no one can any longer “be deluded...that the Black Republican Party is a moderate party. It is in fact essentially a revolutionary party.” (1)

In the ensuing secession crisis Lincoln played a critical role, coming to express the growing public sentiment for resistance to the ever more provocative actions of the southern slavocracy and the policy of capitulation pursued by the outgoing administration of Democrat James Buchanan.

In moving to break up the union the South carried out what noted Civil War historian James McPherson of Princeton University called a “pre-emptive counterrevolution,” using a term he borrowed from historian Arno Mayer. “Rather than trying to destroy the old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to protect the status quo before the revolutionary threat can materialize.” (2)

In other words, sensing that the tide of historical development was moving against it, the southern planter aristocracy chose to instigate civil war rather than accept any restrictions on slavery, the source of its power and wealth. It would not be the last attempt by a retrograde social order to employ violence in order to evade the verdict of history..."

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