Why did the south immediately secede when Abraham Lincoln was elected president?

Answer 1

Lincoln was elected as a Republican, and the Republicans were explicitly anti-slavery. While the Republican platform did not call for the actual end of slavery, it was clearly opposed to the expansion of it. The South already felt its influence waning as the balance between slave and free areas had been slipping away (since new territories in the West were not suited to the plantation economy of which slavery was an integral part). Pro-secession leaders in the South saw the election of Lincoln as the beginning of the end of the South's way of life, so they decided to test the resolve of the Federal Government, President Lincoln, and the Free States to hold the Union together. No state had seriously attempted to secede before, and no one really knew whether or not it would be allowed.

Answer 2

Because the South knew that while President Abraham Lincoln did not want to put an end to slavery (at the beginning of his presidency), he wanted to stop it's expansion and prevent it from being a part of the new states that would eventually join the union. They saw the election of President Lincoln as being bad for their economy, cotton, which was made profitable by slavery.

Answer 3

Most of the seceding Southern states did so before Lincoln even came into office. The reason why they seceded was slavery:

Abraham Lincoln was in the Republican Party, and at that time, the Republicans were primarily known for being strongly anti-slavery. The party's platform in 1860 contained language strongly opposing allowing slavery in new states that join the Union. Pro-slavery Southerners knew that this would weaken their position in the federal government because if it came to pass, it would eventually cause Congress to have more and more anti-slavery members, which in turn could lead to more anti-slavery laws, and eventually abolition.

So as soon as it became clear that Lincoln had won the presidential election, Southern states started seceding. The last few Southern stated held out until the Civil War started, and then they too seceded.

Answer 4

They believed that Lincoln would not be sympathetic to their needs and beliefs and so decided to form their own group of states, the Confederate States of America. South Carolina was the first state to secede.