by Jerry Curtis

Created on: November 24, 2008

The "main event" leading to the secession of the Southern states and ultimately to the US Civil War was the constitutional and lawful election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The Democrats had split along sectional lines, and the new "third party" (the Republicans) won 40 percent of the vote, enough to win an Electoral College majority and the presidency. Since Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot of many Southern states, small wonder that the South felt alienated and outside the system that had previously accommodated them and their "peculiar institution" of slavery for so many years. To make matters worse, the Republicans were a strictly Northern party that opposed the expansion of slavery to areas where it did not exist.

In the hype and hysteria leading up the 1860 election, Southern opinion leaders were adamant in their opposition to Lincoln and the "Black Republicans." Many promised secession if the Republicans won, and South Carolina led the way in December of 1860, followed by ten more states by April of 1861. Four months later, South Carolina would fire the opening shots on the federal fortress of Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, and the Civil War would begin.

Long before those opening shots, though, the events leading the Southern secession and the US Civil War were somewhat analogous to could be experienced in the break up of a shaky marriage. These events were both tensions and confrontations that led to what could only be regarded as "irreconcilable differences," except that the South wanted to depart in peace, but the North wanted to hold the relationship together by force.

The "marriage" between the North and South was shaky from the start. Founded on a compromise that allowed Southerners to count their slaves as three-fifths of a person, our constitutional government from the outset made a pact with slavery that would prove to be its undoing four score and eleven years later. The irreconcilable differences were also based on divergent economic and social development in both sections of our country, differences that were both complex and often intangible. The North was industrialized, steam-harnessed and capitalistic. The South's riches were in the land and the slaves who tilled the cotton. In fact, two-thirds of the estimated $2 billion in Southern wealth was tied up in the value of slaves.

Ultimately, it was the debate over slavery and its spread that caused the split. Northerners viewed slavery as either somewhat of a "peculiar institution," which

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