The sectional nature of the election of 1860 was evident in the outcome. Douglas, the only national candidate, won the undivided electoral vote of only one state, Missouri, though he received almost 30 percent of the popular vote. Breckinridge carried the slave states and had a popular vote of 570,000. Bell trailed Breckinridge by only 55,000 votes. Lincoln's plurality of 39 percent of the popular vote gave him a majority in the Electoral College. He received 180 electoral votes, followed by Breckinridge with 72 votes, Bell with 39, and Douglas with 12. Lincoln did not receive one vote in the Deep South because his name did not appear on any of the ballots. Viewed superficially, the returns suggest that Lincoln was victorious because of the Democratic split. However, had all of the opposition votes been united behind a single candidate, Lincoln would still have won an electoral majority. Such was the strength of the Republican coalition in its second presidential contest.
Southerners had promised secession if Lincoln won, but after the election only Douglas seemed aware of the immediate and real danger. Republicans, including Lincoln, discounted the threat to the Union as just overblown rhetoric. All of that changed when scarcely a month after Lincoln's election, South Carolina seceded from the Union. South Carolina was followed within two months by the secession of the entire Lower South. Fearful of their own simmering problems with slaves, free blacks, and the landless poor whites who outnumbered them, a group of political and community leaders sought and won the allegiance of the yeoman class. They convinced these small farmers that the incoming Lincoln administration, through the resources of the federal government, would destroy the existing power structures throughout the South, abolish slavery, and raise both landless poor whites and blacks to positions of economic and social equality.
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