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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.

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17y ago

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