South Carolina seceded from the Union

On December 20, 1860, a convention meeting in Charleston voted unanimously to adopt an Ordinance of Secession, declaring that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States… is hereby dissolved.” With that, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States.

The trigger was the election of Abraham Lincoln the month before. South Carolina’s leaders, overwhelmingly wealthy slaveholders — 153 of the 169 delegates enslaved people — saw his victory as a threat to slavery and moved swiftly to break away.

Four days later, the state issued a declaration spelling out slavery as the central cause.

The ordinance was brief and blunt, but its consequences were not. Six more Deep South states followed within weeks, forming the Confederacy, and by April 1861 the firing on Fort Sumter — in Charleston’s own harbor — opened the American Civil War. South Carolina had struck the first match.