Southern Reactions to Lincoln's Election

From Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, by David Williams (New Press, 2010), Kindle pp. 9-10:

A few weeks after Abraham Lincoln’s election, in the Confederacy’s future capital city, Virginia Unionists organized a mass meeting of the “working men of Richmond” to oppose secession. At a second such meeting, they upheld the federal government’s right to suppress secession by force if necessary. Anti-secession mechanics in Frederick County, Virginia, met to denounce the “folly and sinister selfishness of the demagogues of the South.” Workers in Portsmouth were equally stirred: “We look upon any attempt to break up this Government or dissolve this Union as an attack upon the rights of the people of the whole country.”

From western Virginia came word of Union meetings in Harrison, Monongalia, Wood, Tyler, Marion, and Mason counties. Preston County residents drew up a resolution declaring that “any attempt upon the part of the state to secede will meet with the unqualified disapprobation of the people of this county.” A resolution from Wheeling insisted that “it is the sacred duty of all men in public offices and all citizens in private life to support and defend the Constitution … the election of Abraham Lincoln … does not, in our judgment, justify secession, or a dissolution of our blessed and glorious Union.”

There were similar sentiments in the Deep South. In the heart of Georgia’s cotton belt, a large crowd of local citizens gathered at Crawfordville to declare: “We do not consider the election of Lincoln and Hamlin as sufficient cause for Disunion or Secession.” A mass meeting in Walker County expressed the same sentiment: “We are not of the opinion that the election of any man in accordance with the prescribed forms of the Constitution is sufficient cause to disrupt the ties which bind us to the Union.” In Harris County, the newspaper editor stated firmly that “we are a Union loving people here, and will never forsake the old ‘Star Spangled Banner.’” To stress the point, he printed the names of 175 local men, all pledged to “preserve the honor and rights of the South in the Union.”

At Lake Jackson Church near Tallahassee, Florida, there assembled a crowd of 400 “whose heart beat time to the music of the Union.” A convention of laborers in Nashville, Tennessee, declared their “undying love for the Union” and called secessionist efforts “treason … by designing and mad politicians.” All across the South, thousands of worried southerners did their best to head off secession. While most had opposed Lincoln’s candidacy, a similar majority saw no reason to destroy the country over his election. Three-fourths of southern whites held no slaves and tended to believe that, as one Georgia man wrote, “this fuss was all for the benefit of the wealthy.”