Self-Preservation Compelled Southern Secession

Slavery was undoubtedly a potent cause; but more powerful than slavery was the Negro himself. It was the fear of what would ultimately happen to the South if the Negro should be freed by the North, as the abolitionists seemed so intent on doing--and Southerners considered Republicans and abolitionists the same. This fear had worried Calhoun when he wrote in 1849, "The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents." It was not the loss of property in slaves that the South feared so much as the danger of the South becoming another San Domingo, should a Republican regime free the slaves. And it is no argument to say that Lincoln would never have tried to do this. The South believed that his party would force him to it if he did not do so of his own volition. If he were not himself an abolitionist, he had got his position by abolition votes. What Southerners believed to be the fact impelled them to action--not what the fact might have been. A friend of Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, had told him that the South's knowledge of what happened in San Domingo and "Self preservation had compelled secession."

— E. Merton Coulter, Ph.D., The Confederate States of America (Louisiana State University Presss, 1950), pages 9-10.

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