Which state was the first to secede from the United States in 1860?

South Carolina was the first state to secede from the United States in 1860.

After Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina called a secession convention. Meeting in Charleston, the convention voted unanimously on December 20, 1860, to dissolve the state's relationship with the Union. Its separate declaration of causes, adopted four days later, explicitly centered on conflicts over slavery and the rights of slaveholding states.

South Carolina's secession came before the other ten Confederate states withdrew. Mississippi followed in January 1861, while Georgia and Virginia seceded later, after the war began. South Carolina then helped establish the Confederate States of America in February 1861.

The state is also closely linked to the war's opening military episode. Confederate forces fired on the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. That bombardment followed months of tension over whether the federal fort would be surrendered, and it prompted additional Southern states to leave the Union.