Abraham Lincoln’s election had put an end to the political ascendancy of the South, where anxieties ran high over the possible fate of the South in a nation with a growing antislavery majority. To prevent the loss of their political power in the future, seven southern states seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration. Northerners protested that the nation was not built on a voluntary bond, that secession was unconstitutional, and that it might set a dangerous precedent for other forms of separatism. A compromise proposed by Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky, meant to extend the Mason-Dixon Line between free and slave states through the West, failed and could not prevent the ratification of a separate Confederate Constitution that guaranteed slave property and strengthened state sovereignty. When the Union refused to abandon but instead resupplied Charleston’s Fort Sumter, Confederate troops attacked. Four more southern states then joined the Confederacy, but the slaveholding states along on the Confederacy’s northern border—Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland—remained in the Union. Confident of a quick victory and glory, young men in the North as well as the South enthusiastically volunteered for military service. In the West, Indian tribes allied both with the Union and the Confederacy.