old antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas, representing the northern or moderate element of the party, and John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky, representing the southern, or extreme pro-slavery element.  And this was just the corner into which Lincoln had hoped, all along, to drive his opponents.  Had the party been united, he would have been hopelessly defeated, for in the election which followed, he received only a little more than one third of the popular vote; but this was sufficient to give him the northern states, with 180 electoral votes.  But let us remember that, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the choice for President of very much less than half the people of the country.

The succeeding four months witnessed the peculiar spectacle of the South leisurely completing its arrangements for secession, and perfecting its civil and military organization, while the North, under a discredited ruler of whom it could not rid itself until March 4th, was unable to make any counter-preparation or to do anything to prevent the diversion of a large portion of the arms and munitions of the country into the southern states.  It gave the southern leaders, too, opportunity to work upon the feelings of their people, more than half of whom, in the fall of 1860, were opposed to disunion.  It should not be forgotten that, however fully the South came afterwards to acquiesce in the policy of secession, it was, in its inception, a plan of the politicians, undertaken, to a great extent, for purposes of self-aggrandizement.  They controlled the conventions which, in every case except that of Texas, decided whether or not the state should secede.  “We can make better terms out of the Union than in it,” was a favorite argument, and many of them dreamed of the establishment of a great slave empire, in which they would play the leading parts.

To the southern leaders, then, the election of Lincoln was the striking of the appointed hour for rebellion.  South Carolina led the way, declaring, on December 17, 1860, that the “Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.”  Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed.  Opinion at the North was divided as to the proper course to follow.  Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, said that the South had as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain, and, as Greeley afterwards observed, the Tribune had plenty of company in these sentiments.  Meanwhile the Southern Confederacy had been formed, Jefferson Davis elected President, and steps taken at once for the organization of an army.

Everyone was waiting anxiously for the inauguration of the new President—­waiting to see what his course would be.  They were not left long in doubt.  His inaugural address was earnest and direct.  He said, “The union of these States is perpetual.  No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.  I shall take care that the laws of the Union are faithfully executed in all the States.”  It was, in effect, a declaration of war, and was so received by the South.  Whether or not it was the constitutional attitude need not concern us now.