Ironically enough, Greg, I couldn't resist the impulse myself to get sucked into making some more political comments! Ron said some things that interested me so much that I could not hold back. (sigh)

A study of the bizarre 4-way election campaign of 1860, the results of which basically made secession and civil war inevitable, can provide for some interesting reading.

See this wickipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860

Here's a quote from the summary at the beginning (I added the italics):

The United States presidential election of 1860 set the stage for the American Civil War. The nation had been divided throughout most of the 1850s on questions of states' rights and slavery in the territories. In 1860 this issue finally came to a head, fracturing the formerly dominant Democratic Party into Southern and Northern factions and bringing Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party to power without the support of a single Southern state.

Hardly more than a month following Lincoln's victory came declarations of secession by South Carolina and other states, which were rejected as illegal by the then-current President, James Buchanan and President-elect Abraham Lincoln.