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Six weeks after Lincoln's election, a Charleston convention voted 169 to 0 to leave the Union, and six more states followed within seven weeks.
Where this fits on the timeline. Six weeks after Lincoln's election, South Carolina became the first state to leave the United States. On December 20, 1860, a convention in Charleston voted 169 to 0 for secession, and church bells, cannon, and fireworks celebrated across the city. Within seven weeks six more states had followed, and together they formed the Confederacy. This is the moment the sectional crisis became a national breakup, the opening of the Civil War journey.
The state that had threatened it longest. South Carolina had nearly left the Union in 1832 over a tariff, and its planters, who held more than half the state's people in slavery, had been talking about secession for a generation. Its legislature called the convention before Lincoln's election was even certain. The delegates met in Columbia, moved to Charleston to escape a smallpox outbreak, and on December 20 signed an Ordinance of Secession declaring the union between South Carolina and the other states dissolved.
The delegates wrote them down. Four days later the convention adopted a Declaration of the Immediate Causes that explained the decision. It complained that Northern states had refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, that they had allowed abolitionist societies to flourish, and that the nation had now elected a president whose opinions and purposes were hostile to slavery. The word slavery appears throughout the document; tariffs and other grievances are barely mentioned. When later generations argued that the South seceded over states' rights in general, the states' own declarations pointed back to the right they had in mind.
A domino line through the Deep South. Mississippi left on January 9, 1861, Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, and Texas on February 1. State troops seized federal forts, arsenals, and customs houses, usually without a shot. Only the forts in Charleston Harbor, where Major Robert Anderson had moved his garrison to Fort Sumter, held out. Outgoing president James Buchanan told Congress that secession was unconstitutional but that the Constitution gave him no power to stop it, and did little. The upper South, including Virginia, waited to see what Lincoln would do.
Secession made the war possible, and it settled nothing. Southern leaders expected the North to let them go or to negotiate; instead the question of whether a state could leave the Union went to the battlefield. Four years later, with 750,000 dead, the answer was no, and the Supreme Court would later rule that the Union was perpetual. Jefferson Davis, who resigned from the Senate when his own state left, became the Confederacy's president two months after South Carolina's vote. Follow the road from Charleston to Sumter on the timeline.
Read what the secessionists said. Yale's Avalon Project has South Carolina's full Declaration of Causes, and the American Battlefield Trust lays out the chain of events. Charles B. Dew's Apostles of Disunion follows the commissioners the seceding states sent to persuade the others.
Recommended, age-appropriate books to explore this further. Links open a library catalog search.
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War
by Charles B. Dew
Uses the secessionists' own speeches to show what they said they were leaving for; short and clear, for grades 10 to 12.
Fields of Fury: The American Civil War
by James M. McPherson
Opens with the election and secession; ideal for grades 6 to 9.
First state to secede, by a unanimous 169 to 0 convention vote on December 20, 1860
Its Declaration of Causes named the election of a president hostile to slavery and Northern refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed by February 1, 1861
President Buchanan called secession illegal but did nothing; the question went to the battlefield at Fort Sumter