Nationalism and honor

Abraham Lincoln
16th U.S. President (1861–1865)

Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire United States (called "unionists") and those loyal primarily to the southern region and then the Confederacy.^[91] C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, "A great slave society... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses... When the crisis came it chose to fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins."^[92] Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)^[93] and the actions of abolitionist John Brown in trying to incite a slave rebellion in 1859.^[94]

While the South moved toward a Southern nationalism, leaders in the North were also becoming more nationally minded, and rejected any notion of splitting the Union. The Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it: "We denounce those threats of disunion... as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence."^[95] The South ignored the warnings: Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would fight to hold the Union together.^[96]

Lincoln's election

Main article: United States presidential election, 1860

The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for secession.^[97] Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin Amendment" and the "Crittenden Compromise", failed. Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave states had declared their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.