Was secession the best course available to the South following the election of Abraham Lincoln?

Secession
was probably the only course South
Carolina saw available to it if it's culture and lifestyle
were to be
maintained. Prior to formation of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln had been
a
Whig. The Republican Party formed from the old Whig Party to oppose the
spread of slavery into
the Western territories. South Carolina saw the
election of Lincoln as an indication that
slavery would be confined to the
South; expansion into the West was a dead letter. This prospect
would not be
so terrible (in fact most Northerners were happy to see it continue only in
the
South) except South Carolina knew that Western territories would one day
be States; that those
States would come in as free States, and the necessary
constitutional amendment to end slavery
was a foregone conclusion. This was
the reasoning behind the South's insistence that the balance
of free and
slave states remain the same, --the reasoning behind the Missouri Compromise and
the
Compromise of 1850--slavery would thereby...