For many in the South the election was the crucible event. A Lincoln victory, wrote fire-eater Edmund Ruffin in his diary, “will serve to show whether these Southern States are to remain free, or to be politically enslaved—whether the institution of negro slavery on which the social and political existence of the South rests, is to be secured by our resistance, or to be abolished in a short time.” Ruffin dearly hoped—“most earnestly and anxiously desired”—that Lincoln would win, “because I have hope that at least one state S.C. will secede, and that others will follow.” If the South did not
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