resolved to leave their union with the United States. Most Deep South residents and many in the border states believed the new nation about to be born in a revolution to perpetuate slavery was the logical result of defeats in sectional contests. Meeting at Montgomery The 1859 John Brown Raid to free slaves in Virginia was hailed in the North by abolitionists, who proclaimed that it was a noble martyrdom, while many in the South saw Brown as a provocateur seeking to incite servile insurrection. The North seemed unwilling to accept the Supreme Court ruling in the Dredd Scott case guaranteeing slavery in the territories, and the Democratic Party had split among Northern and Southern factions over the issue. Sectional antagonism was magnified with the decline of the national Whig Party, and the upsurge of the new Republican Party, insistent on ending the extension of slavery in the territories, was seen as a threat to the very existence of a Southern civilization. The economic rivalry between Northern industry and mechanized farming versus Southern slave cash-crop agriculture seemed to be a losing battle that would permanently subject the South as diminished colonists dependent on an aggressive business world. Secession was to the state delegates meeting in Montgomery a clear cut solution to over a decade of humiliation, reverses and defeats. A new nation of secessionist states would assure uncompromised slavery and deliver an independent economic security based on King Cotton. The November 1860 election of Lincoln proved to be the deciding catalyst for the Deep South. Southern members of Congress repeatedly addressed their constituents, saying that all hope of sectional relief and redress was done and that “the sole and primary aim of each slaveholding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from an unnatural and hostile Union." A chain reaction was set off, as the “secessionists”, “straight-outs” and “States’ Rights men” demanded separate state action to withdraw from the United States and immediate regrouping as a Southern union for self defense. Cooperation towards such a new government was being achieved even before the Montgomery Convention, as the Southern states had been exchanging a series of commissioners to determine their joint action since the fall of 1860. On December 31, 1860, the South Carolina Convention issued an invitation to Southern states to form a Southern Confederacy, and, after their next commissioners returned on January 11, 1861, South Carolina invited