In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners both slaveholders and nonslaveholders willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery s westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they...