Just as today’s secessionist murmurings are dismissed, Southerners’ threats in 1860 to leave the Union should Lincoln win the presidency were similarly downplayed as bluster. As today, commentators ridiculed Southern secession threats as the “old Mumbo-Jumbo,” so much “windy bombast.” Since Republicans couldn’t safely campaign in much of the South, antislavery Northerners had little understanding of how intense support for disunion had grown.
The two sides existed in their own information bubbles, with little communication across the divide. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune scornfully predicted that “the South could no more unite upon a scheme of secession than a company of lunatics could conspire to break out of bedlam.” A journalist who visited him in Springfield, Illinois, just after the 1860 election later wrote that Lincoln considered Southern secession talk “a political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant sorely to frighten the North.” He said he trusted the “many assurances” he had received from Southern correspondents that “in no probable event will there be any very formidable effort to break up the Union.” A few months later, the president-elect faced a formidable effort to do just that.
Just as critics today point to the Confederacy’s defeat as proof that secession can go nowhere in American politics, pro-Union Southerners warned that any effort to break up the country would consign the region’s political leaders to the same “scorn and ignominy” that had attached to New England’s flirtation with secession during the War of 1812. They had, of course, other sober-minded objections—to the economic viability of a new Southern nation, the necessity of immediate action, the constitutionality of secession. Ultimately, none of it mattered. What unionists deemed irrefutable arguments against disunion the secessionists considered mere obstacles, regrettable complications.
Empowered by state-level gerrymandering that insulated an aristocratic minority of wealthy slave owners from the non-slaveholding white majority, Southern radicals made their move before moderates and unionists knew what was happening. Overnight, the very fact that the Union seemed on the brink of destruction forced them to choose sides and converted even the fiercest opponents of secession to the cause of Southern independence. One Georgia newspaper commented that the “hopelessness of preserving the Union has made disunionists, since the election, of thousands of Conservative and Union men.” As the long-threatened secession finally took shape, events gathered a momentum that became impossible to stop.
*
There is no reason to believe something similar couldn’t happen today, if not in precisely the same way. Just because there are valid objections to secession without satisfying rebuttals does not mean they cannot be overcome by skillful maneuvering and sheer force, especially in a moment of pitched crisis. People marched on the Capitol last week who, only a few years or even weeks earlier, would never have imagined themselves doing such a thing. Skeptics of the seriousness of secession talk observe that even solidly blue or red states contain sizable populations favoring the minority side. Yet neither the North nor the South was fully united in the 1860s; the lines had to be drawn somewhere.