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For Southern radicals, a correspondent for the Charleston Courier observed, Lincoln’s victory opened the door to the goal “desired by all true hearted Southerners, viz: a Southern Confederacy.” The night after the election, the citizens of Charleston had turned out in droves for a torchlight parade featuring an effigy of Lincoln, with a placard in its hand reading: “Abe Lincoln, First President Northern Confederacy.” Two slaves hoisted the figure to a scaffold, where it was set afire and “speedily consumed amid the cheers of the multitude.”

As the various secession ordinances made clear, the election of a “Black Republican” was merely the final injury in a long list of grievances against the North. These documents cited attempts to exclude slaveholders from the new territories; failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; continued agitation of the slavery question that held Southerners up to contempt and mockery; and the fear of insurrection provoked by the John Brown raid.

Though Southern newspapers had long threatened that secession would follow fast upon a Lincoln victory, the rapidity and vehemence of the secession movement took many in the North, including President Buchanan, by surprise. The bachelor president was attending a young friend’s wedding reception when he heard news of South Carolina’s secession. A sudden disturbance heralded the entrance of South Carolina congressman Lawrence Keitt. Flourishing his state’s session ordinance over his head, he shouted: “Thank God! Oh, thank God!…I feel like a boy let out from school.” When Buchanan absorbed the news, he “looked stunned, fell back, and grasped the arms of his chair.” No longer able to enjoy the festivities, he left immediately.

For Lincoln, who would not take office until March 4, it was a time of mounting anxiety and frustration. He strongly believed, he told John Nicolay, that the government possessed “both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity,” but there was little he could do until he held the reins of power. While he was “indefatigable in his efforts to arrive at the fullest comprehension of the present situation of public affairs,” relying not simply on the newspapers he devoured but on “faithful researches for precedents, analogies, authorities, etc.,” it was hard to stand by while his country was disintegrating. He declared at one point that he would be willing to reduce his own life span by “a period of years” equal to the anxious months separating his election and the inauguration.

Besieged with requests to say something conciliatory, Lincoln refused to take “a position towards the South which might be considered a sort of an apology for his election.” He was determined to stand behind the Republican platform, believing that any attempt to soften his position would dishearten his supporters in the North without producing any beneficial impact on the South. When asked by the editor of a Democratic paper in Missouri to make a soothing public statement that would keep Missouri in the Union, Lincoln replied: “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and accessible to the public. Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers, like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers, there can be no further misunderstanding…. I am not at liberty to shift my ground—that is out of the question…. The secessionists, per se believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.”

As panic began to affect the stock market and the business community in the North, Lincoln reluctantly agreed to insert an authorized passage in a speech Trumbull was scheduled to make in Chicago. He simply repeated that once he assumed power, “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace