The first state to secede was South Carolina, which passed an "Ordinance of Secession" on December 20, 1860. After South Carolina seceded, other states also broke from the Union, including Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas in January 1861; Virginia in April 1861; and Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina in May 1861. Missouri and Kentucky were also considered to be part of the Confederate States of America, although they never issued documents of secession. Lincoln based the proclamation on his belief that secession was illegal and that all of the Southern states had remained in the Union. According to this view, the governments of the Southern states had temporarily been taken over by rebels, and the key role of Reconstruction was to return loyal officials to power. It was Lincoln's hope that the South would withdraw back to the Union and the retreated states would return.
Lincoln announced a union blockade on April 19, 1861. The Union continued to blockade the South throughout the Civil War until the war ended in 1865. While the South did not have a lot of industry at the time, they did have cotton which many foreign countries such as Great Britain relied on. If they could keep their ports open, they could trade cotton for weapons such as the repeating rifle, submarines, poison gas, and balloons dropping bombs. The Union Navy used as many as 500 ships to patrol the East Coast all the way from Virginia south to Florida and the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas. The Union navy captured or destroyed 1,500 blockade runner ships during the course of the Civil War. The blockade ended up covering 3,500 miles of coastline and 180 ports. The Anaconda Plan was meant to be a long term end to the Civil War, but, more damage came out of the outcome, targeting the South especially.
In the Border states (states part of the Union that still allowed slavery) the situation was full of problems.
