Why Did South Carolina Secede So Quickly?
In the 1830s South Carolina lead a nullification crisis where they attempted to threaten the United States over a tariff which they thought would affect slavery. It is the state where John C. Calhoun was their most important political figure. Calhoun was a Senator who held fervent pro-slavery views. Leading up to the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina felt that it had the most to lose when Lincoln became President because slavery was so crucial to their lives and they felt it would be abolished. There was also the tremendous influence from the planter class who began to dominate the way many South Carolinians thought. The planter class had more political clout than people up in Columbia, the state capital, and in some ways, they got to model the kind of behavior that the rest of South Carolina followed. Along with the political leadership that came out of the planter class, there was sensitivity about what federal government interference would mean. All of this leads Edmund Ruffin, a
