The delegates gathered twelve hours later at Charleston’s Institute Hall, the largest such hall in the city, with capacity for three thousand people. Something about the place seemed to foster divisiveness. The proslavery Democratic Party had met there the previous April and blew apart, leaving a Northern and a Southern variant, virtually assuring Lincoln’s election—exactly the outcome that pro-secession radicals had hoped for in the belief that his election would cause every slave state to flee the Union.
