Decision Of The Southern States From 1860 To 1860

The Southern states were still strongly in support of slavery in the 1860s, while the North was strongly against it. The North was almost completely free states, and had new states entering as free, while the South was still fighting to keep slavery. The fight between the North and the South continued to progress, until the South felt that they no other option, so they decided to secede. They seceded one by one, each state persuading another. There were many issues, complaints, and fears that eventually led drastic decision of the South to secede.. . The Southern states believed that if they stayed in the Union, under the government controlled by the North, that the Northers would win their fight to abolish slavery. Henry Benning, during

They were fearful of what might happen if they stayed in the Union once Lincoln was elected. Henry Benning summed up the Southerner states fears when he said, “[i]f things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished except in Georgia and the other cotton States, and I doubt, ultimately in these States also” (35). The South was truly scared that they were going to have their slaves taken, and economically they needed slaves. The South produced a lot of crops per year and they needed the slaves to harvest it because they did not have the time to harvest it themselves, or the money to pay others to harvest it for them. The white Southerners truly believed that a “blow at slavery [was] a blow at commerce and civilization” and that without slaves they would not commerce

He ran on a campaign of the containment of slavery, he wanted to keep slavery contained in the states that were already considered slave states and stop the spread of slave states. The Southern states feared that if he was elected that he might would try and abolish slavery all together. In his lobbying speech to Virginia, Henry Benning quoted a statement from a speech of Abraham Lincoln in 1858, “I have always hated slavery as much as any abolitionist; I have always been an old line Whig; I have always hated it and I always believed it in the course of ultimate extinction, and if I were in Congress and a vote should come up on the question, whether slavery should be excluded from the territory, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, I would say it should” (32-33). Henry used this quote in hopes to persuade Virginia to join the secession, and in to show the Southerners what they had to fear once Lincoln won the