Video: 'Alabama in the Civil War'

(Friday, January 11, 1861; nine weeks after the 1860 United States presidential election) — 66 days after Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1860 on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, Alabama became the fourth Southern state to secede today when delegates to the Alabama Secession Convention meeting in Montgomery voted 61-39 to leave the Union.

Alabama followed South Carolina, Mississippi and Florida. By February, three more cotton states would follow (Georgia, Louisiana and Texas), forming the Confederate States of America.