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.
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