Election of Abraham Lincoln

​Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates in 1860 to become president. Lincoln won 180 of 183 electoral votes in free states. Douglas had the second-highest number of popular votes, but he won only one state. He earned just 12 electoral votes. Breckinridge and Bell split electoral votes in other slave states.

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The election results angered southerners. Lincoln did not campaign in their region and did not carry any southern states, but he became the next president. The election signaled that the South was losing its national political power.

​Lincoln insisted that he would not change slavery in the South. However, he said that slavery could not expand and thus would eventually die out completely. That idea angered many southerners.

People in the South believed their economy and way of life would be destroyed without slave labor. They reacted immediately. Within a week of Lincoln’s election, South Carolina’s legislature called for a special convention. The delegates considered secession. Southern secessionists believed that they had a right to leave the Union.​

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​Critics of secession thought this argument was ridiculous. President Buchanan said the Union was not “a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties.” President-elect Abraham Lincoln agreed, saying, “No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” Lincoln added, “They can only do so against [the] law, and by revolution.”

​President Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. In writing his inaugural address, Lincoln looked to many of the nation’s founding documents. Referring to the idea that governments receive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” a line from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln stated, “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember [take apart] or overthrow it.

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While he believed that U.S. citizens had the power to change their government through majority consent, he opposed the idea that southern states could leave the Union because they were unhappy with the government’s position on slavery.​

​Lincoln announced in his inaugural address that he would keep all government property in the seceding states. However, he also tried to convince southerners that his government would not provoke a war. He hoped that, given time, southern states would return to the Union.