These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Many in the South pressed for secession. Others urged patience. Two days after the election, the New Orleans Bee printed a one-word response to Lincoln’s victory: “WAIT.”47 They did not wait for long. Six weeks after the election, South Carolinians held a convention in which they voted to repeal the state’s ratification of the Constitution, declaring, “The union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”48 Six states followed—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—and in February 1861 they formed the Confederate States of America, with, as president, former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, a man the Texan Sam Houston once called “as ambitious as Lucifer and as cold as a lizard.