Lincoln carried every free state but not a single Southern one, winning the Electoral College decisively while capturing less than 40 percent of the national popular vote in a four-way race. Southern political leaders, who had warned for months that a Republican victory meant disunion, began organizing secession conventions within weeks. South Carolina would leave the Union before year's end.
Lincoln did not appear on the ballot in ten Southern states at all, so total was his party's toxicity below the Mason-Dixon line. Yet the arithmetic of the Electoral College made the outcome inevitable once the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern factions, each running its own candidate, alongside a fourth ticket from the Constitutional Union Party. Lincoln needed only the free states, and he swept nearly all of them.
News traveled by telegraph that night, and in Charleston, South Carolina, church bells rang not in celebration but in alarm. Editorials that had spent months predicting doom now called for action. Within six weeks, delegates in South Carolina voted unanimously to secede, explicitly citing the election of a president 'hostile to slavery.' Lincoln himself, sitting in a telegraph office in Springfield, Illinois, reportedly said little as the returns came in, aware that the victory he'd just won might cost the country more than any election in its history.