December 20 · This Day in America
Six weeks after Lincoln's election, delegates in Charleston vote unanimously to dissolve "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States." It is December 20, 1860. Church bells ring; crowds pour into the streets as if for a festival. They believe they are founding something. They are, in fact, lighting a fuse. Within weeks ten more states will follow, and the question the country had argued about for seventy years — whether a nation half-slave and half-free could go on being one nation — will stop being a question of words. More than 600,000 Americans will die settling it. The men signing in Charleston that night cannot see Antietam or Gettysburg or Appomattox. They only see a door closing. History was about to open it the hard way.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1803
In the Place d'Armes at New Orleans, the French tricolor comes down and the American flag goes up: the formal transfer of the Louisiana Purchase, December 20, 1803. For about three cents an acre, the United States has just doubled in size — 828,000 square miles of unmapped river country. Jefferson, who doubted he even had the constitutional power to buy it, had bought a continent's worth of future anyway.
Source: history.state.gov