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The Confederate States (including Texas) withdrew from the Union lawfully, civilly, and peacefully ...

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• Numerous compromise proposals are rejected; they all involve protection of slavery (none involve tariffs or economic deals); Confederacy demands complete independence and will not negotiate a return to the Union.
• Confederates capture US arsenals and forts in CSA states; General David E. Twiggs surrenders one-fourth of US Army in Texas, then joins Confederacy.
• President Buchanan decides not to order Major Anderson out of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor[1]
• CSA army fired on Fort Sumter; it surrenders.
• Northern uprising—mass meetings everywhere to demand Lincoln overthrow the rebellion.

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... after enduring several decades of excessive and inequitable federal tariffs (taxes) heavily prejudiced against Southern commerce.

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Southern fears of losing control of the federal government to antislavery forces, and Northern fears that the slave power already controlled the government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor vs. slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.

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Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said[12][13] that slavery was the chief cause of secession[14] in his Cornerstone Speech shortly before the war.

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