Secession in the United States in the context of "Mississippi"

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defeating the Confederate States and playing a major role in the abolition of slavery.

Lincoln was born into poverty in Kentucky and raised on the frontier. He was self-educated and became a lawyer, Illinois state legislator, and U.S. representative. Angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the territories to slavery, he became a leader of the new Republican Party. He reached a national audience in the 1858 Senate campaign debates against Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, prompting a majority of slave states to begin to secede and form the Confederate States. A month after Lincoln assumed the presidency, Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War.

The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union to preserve African American slavery, which they saw as threatened because of the election of Abraham Lincoln and the growing abolitionist movement in the North.

Decades of controversy over slavery came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election. Seven Southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized US forts and other federal assets within its borders. The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina. A wave of enthusiasm for war swept over the North and South, as military recruitment soared. Four more Southern states seceded after the war began and, led by its president, Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy asserted control over a third of the US population in eleven states. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.

The Union is a term used to refer to the central government and loyal states of the United States during the American Civil War. Its military forces and civilian population resisted the purported secession of the slave states that formed the Confederate States of America following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. Lincoln's administration asserted the permanency of the federal government and the continuity of the United States Constitution, and it refused to recognize the Confederate government.

Nineteenth-century Americans commonly used the term Union to mean either the federal government of the United States or the unity of the states within the federal constitutional framework. The Union can also refer to the people or territory of the states that remained loyal to the national government during the war. The loyal U.S states located mostly above the Mason–Dixon line were also known as the North, although four southern border states and the future state of West Virginia remained loyal to the Union, and Black Southerners and many Southern Unionists opposed secession and supported the Union war effort.

The Confederate States of America (CSA), also known as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States from 1861 to 1865. It comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These states fought against the United States during the American Civil War.

With Abraham Lincoln's election as President of the United States in 1860, eleven southern states believed their slavery-dependent plantation economies were threatened, and seven initially seceded from the United States. The Confederacy was formed on February 8, 1861, by South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. They adopted a new constitution establishing a confederation government of "sovereign and independent states". The federal government in Washington D.C. and states under its control were known as the Union.

American political ideologies conventionally align with the left–right political spectrum, with most Americans identifying as conservative, liberal, or moderate. Contemporary American conservatism includes social conservatism and fiscal conservatism. The former ideology developed as a response to communism and then the civil rights movement, while the latter developed as a response to the New Deal. Modern American liberalism includes cultural liberalism, social liberalism and progressivism, developing during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. Besides conservatism and liberalism, the United States has a notable libertarian movement, developing during the mid-20th century as a revival of classical liberalism. Historical political movements in the United States have been shaped by ideologies as varied as republicanism, populism, separatism, fascism, socialism, monarchism, and nationalism.

Political ideology in the United States began with the country's formation during the American Revolution, when republicanism challenged the preexisting monarchism that had defined the colonial governments. After the formation of an independent federal government, republicanism split into new ideologies, including classical republicanism, Jeffersonian democracy, and Jacksonian democracy. In the years preceding the American Civil War, abolitionism and secessionism became prominent. Progressivism developed at the beginning of the 20th century, evolving into modern liberalism over the following decades, while modern conservatism developed in response. The Cold War popularized anti-communism and neoconservatism among conservatives, while the civil rights movement popularized support for racial justice among liberals. Populist movements grew in the early-21st century, including progressivism and Trumpism.

The 1860 Constitutional Union National Convention met on May 9, 1860, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the only national convention ever held by the Constitutional Union Party, which was organized largely by former Whig Party members from the Southern United States who opposed secession. The convention nominated former Senator John Bell of Tennessee for president and former Secretary of State Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president.

Bell won the presidential nomination on the second ballot of the convention, defeating Everett, Governor Sam Houston of Texas, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, former Governor William Alexander Graham of North Carolina, Associate Justice John McLean of Ohio, and several other candidates. In the 1860 presidential election, Bell and Everett finished third in the electoral vote and fourth in the popular vote.

Mississippi was the second southern state to declare its secession from the United States, doing so on January 9, 1861. It joined with six other southern states to form the Confederacy on February 4, 1861. Mississippi's location along the lengthy Mississippi River made it strategically important to both the Union and the Confederacy; dozens of battles were fought in the state as armies repeatedly clashed near key towns and transportation nodes.

Mississippian troops fought in every major theater of the American Civil War, although most were concentrated in the Western Theater. Confederate president Jefferson Davis was a Mississippi politician and operated a large cotton plantation there. Prominent Mississippian generals during the war included William Barksdale, Carnot Posey, Wirt Adams, Earl Van Dorn, Robert Lowry, and Benjamin G. Humphreys.

Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 – July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. The 16th vice president, he assumed the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was a War Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket in the 1864 presidential election, coming to office as the American Civil War concluded. Johnson favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union without protection for the newly freed people who were formerly enslaved, as well as pardoning ex-Confederates. This led to conflict with the Republican Party-dominated U.S. Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1868. He was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

Johnson was born into poverty and never attended school. He was apprenticed as a tailor and worked in several frontier towns before settling in Greeneville, Tennessee, serving as an alderman and mayor before being elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835. After briefly serving in the Tennessee Senate, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1843, where he served five two-year terms. He was the governor of Tennessee for four years, and was elected by the legislature to the U.S. Senate in 1857. During his congressional service, he sought passage of the Homestead Bill, which was enacted soon after he left his Senate seat in 1862. Slave states in the Southern U.S., including Tennessee, seceded to form the Confederate States of America, but Johnson remained firmly with the Union. He was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who did not promptly resign his seat upon learning of his state's secession. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him as Military Governor of Tennessee after most of it had been retaken. Johnson was a logical choice as Lincoln's running mate in 1864 because Lincoln wanted to send a message of national unity in his re-election campaign. Following their victory, Johnson became vice president.