Excerpt from The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia, Vol. 1: Compiled and Published Under Authority of the Legislature When the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Candidate of a purely sectional party, on a platform which an im partial British Historian has characterized as a virtual declaration of war against the Southern States of the Union, was announced, astonishment and alarm spread all over the South like a contagion. Had he been elected by a National, and not a sectional, party, and in accord ance with the Spirit as well as the letter of the law, nine men out of every ten in Georgia would have cheerfully acquiesced in his election, notwithstanding his well known hostility to the South. But this was not true. Count ing the electors provided for under the clumsy electoral system, he had secured a majority, but every Lincoln elector was from a State North of the Potomac and the Ohio. Counting the popular vote cast in the entire coun try, he had been defeated by nearly a million votes. Thus Mr. Lincoln had been elected according to the letter, but in utter violation of the spirit of the law. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.