William L. Harris, the Mississippi secession commissioner to Georgia, addressed a joint session of the General Assembly at noon at the capitol in Milledgeville.  He urged secession and concluded his speech by saying that Mississippi "had rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race."  (By John Osborne) 

Charles Edward Hook of Mississippi and John Archer Elmore of Alabama, official secession commissioners from their states to South Carolina, addressed an evening session of the South Carolina Secession Convention in Columbia.  One after the other, on behalf of their own states, they supported strongly the meeting and urged a final decision for secession.  Three days later, South Carolina left the Union.  (By John Osborne) 

Philadelphia Democrats from the city's Twenty-second Ward met in Germantown and declared that while the results of the election were regrettable they must be accepted.  They went on to appeal to the South not to take precipitous action and abandon "the weaker party at the North, struck down in their defense." They could not "spare a single star or single stripe from the glorious flag of the Union."   (By John Osborne)

By Election Day, observers thought that the city of Philadelphia saw a Republican victory as inevitable. One newspaper reported, "we never saw an election for even ward officers, that excited so little interest."  Processions did appear in the later evening of election day with Lincoln clubs celebrating the victory.  Police reported one disturbance with arrests.  (By John Osborne)

With disunion talk everywhere, twenty southern U.S. senators and representatives gathered at the Washington D.C. lodgings of Congressman Reuben Davis of Mississippi, ostensibly to seek a compromise position for the South.  By evening's end, at 11 p.m., however, they had produced what came to be called the "Southern Manifesto" that stated that only an independent "Southern Confederacy" could save the South and called for independent state secession. (By John Osborne) 

Three weeks after the national election, Governor John J. Pettus of Mississippi sent a message to the state legislature calling for a state convention to discuss secession, appropriations for a military build-up in the state, and the appointment of commissioners to tour other slave states outlining Mississippi's position.  These actions were needed, he said, to avoid "Black Republican politics and free negro morals."  (By John Osborne) 

From Annapolis, Midshipman William Barker Cushing wrote to a cousin of the current state of the Naval Academy saying that cadets were resigning everyday and that "each southerner has orders to resign as soon as his state secedes."  Outside the gates in Maryland "men were arming in every portion of the State."  Cushing, younger brother of Gettysburg hero Alonzo Cushing was himself to achieve fame in the upcoming war as a naval raider. (By John Osborne)