1. secession

2. leaving
•With the election of
Lincoln, many white
Southerners remembered
his words from the 1858
Illinois Senate race:

3. leaving
• “A house divided against
itself cannot stand…this
government cannot endure
half slave and half free…It
will become all one thing, or
all the other.”

4. leaving
• They believed that now was
the time to follow through on
their threat to leave the
Union and set up their own
nation, arguing that the
Northern states had already
broken the Constitution.

5. leaving
•23 days after Lincoln’s
election, South Carolina
led a parade of 7
states, the “Lower
South” in seceding from
the Union.

6. Why was South Carolina justified
in leaving?

7. leaving
•In addition to South
Carolina, the “Lower
South” included Texas,
Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama, Florida and
Georgia.

8. Return?
• Before he left office,
President Buchanan argued
that states did not have the
right to secede from the
Union, but that the national
government could do nothing
to stop them from going.

9. Return?
• When South Carolina fired on
an unarmed ship trying to re-
supply Fort Sumter in
Charleston Harbor (eager to
provoke war), Buchanan
recalled the ship, hoping to
avoid war.

10. Return?
•In his Inaugural Address
on March 4, 1861,
Lincoln held open the
possibility that
conciliation might be
necessary.

11. Return?
• However, this conciliation
would be done on Union
terms and Lincoln added that
he would protect all Union
holdings in the now called
Confederate States of
America.

12. Return?
• Lincoln made it clear that if
force were necessary to
preserve the Union, then he
intended to use it and then
sent a re-supply ship to Fort
Sumter and told South
Carolina that he was doing it.

13. The Battle Begins
•When Jefferson Davis,
the President of the
Confederacy, received
Lincoln’s message, he
saw an opportunity to test
Lincoln.

14. The Battle Begins
• The Confederates were not
going to rejoin the Union and
decided to see just how far
Lincoln was willing to go
and vowed to take Fort
Sumter before it could be re-
supplied.

15. The Battle Begins
• When the Union garrison at
Fort Sumter refused to
surrender to Confederate
forces, the Confederates
opened fire on the morning
of April 12, 1861.

16. The Battle Begins
• Two days later, the
commander of the fort,
Major Robert Anderson,
surrendered the fort to the
Confederacy.

17. The Battle Begins
• Lincoln immediately called
for 75,000 volunteers to serve
for 90 days to put down the
insurrection and convinced by
political maneuvering and
military force, four border
slave states from seceding.

18. The Battle Begins
• Those border states were
Maryland, Delaware,
Kentucky, and Missouri and
were joined by the mountain
counties of Virginia, which
became the state of West
Virginia in 1863.

19. The Battle Begins
• When Lincoln called for
volunteers, four states from
the “Upper South,”
Virginia, Arkansas,
Tennessee, and North
Carolina, joined the
Confederacy.

20. The Battle Begins
• What would quickly become
apparent was the request for
90-day volunteers would not
nearly be enough to last a 4-
year war that would be
known be many different
names.

21. The Battle Begins
•The Civil War, The War
Between the States, The
Great Rebellion (North),
The War of Northern
Aggression (South)