Locations of Conflict: The Southern Seizure of Federal Property from November 1860 to April 1861

My research analyzes the southern seizure of federal forts, customs houses, arsenals, post offices, and courthouse before the firing on Fort Sumter.  Previous scholarship has paid very little attention to the capture of federal property and the decline of federal authority in the South prior to the Sumter crisis.  When dealing with the secession movement scholars have focused nearly all of their attention on Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the only remaining federal presence in the Deep South when Lincoln took office.  In doing so, historians have not considered how the secessionists’ earlier actions provoked war and shaped President Abraham Lincoln’s and Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s handling of the secession crisis.  My research examines both how the Buchannan Administration’s policy allowed Deep South secessionists to seize federal property and the implications this had for the origins of the war.

Following Lincoln’s election many southerners believed that the “Black Republicans” had launched a deliberate plan to destroy slavery, reduce southern political power, and undermine state sovereignty.  As many southerners saw it, secession alone was not enough to safeguard homes, family, slaves, and sovereignty from potential abolitionist violence.  In hopes of insuring peaceful secession, preventing coercion, and possible slave insurrections southerners seized federal property within each state’s borders.  This poster will include a map that illustrates all the locations of southern seizures from December 1860 to April 12, 1861.  The map will document when, where, and who captured the public property.  By mapping out the property captured by secessionists, the poster will demonstrate that despite southern political and military leaders insistence that their actions were peaceful, the capture of federal property were clearly acts of war.