He felt it was the dissolution of the United States. He believed that states were not allowed to simply leave the Union just because there was a law or policy that they didn't like; if you can just leave on a whim, then it makes the whole thing meaningless. His views are neatly summed up in one of his most Famous Speeches, the Gettysburg Address, which was delivered a few months after the major Battle of Gettysburg:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The upper southern states seceded when Lincoln was elected president of the United States.
Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States. When some southern states decided to secede, they elected their own "president" Jefferson Davis. Lincoln remained President of the United States - all the United States - he just wasn't recognized as such by the southern states that seceded. He was not "President of the North".
The election of Lincoln caused the southern states to hold their own independent election. This was done in opposition of Abraham Lincoln being the president of the United States.
No. Lincoln was the newly-elected President that the Southern states were rebelling against.
secede
The southern states.
Abraham Lincoln
president lincoln
Fairly
Lincoln
when Lincoln was elected president
The Confederacy