Prevailing scholarly approaches to the U.S. Secession Crisis suggest that the crisis reflected either the interests of slaveowners or mounting socioeconomic pressure in the electorate. Both arguments suffer from empirical and analytical challenges, chief among these being that the southern Whig Party and its planter base actively resisted secession until the early 1850s. Why did the largest slaveowners oppose disunion only to fold by 1861? Drawing on beat‐level electoral returns, newspapers, and private correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue that the answer lies in conceiving of the prelude to secession as a “crisis sequence,” so named because it precipitates crises of hegemony, when no one political actor possesses the mass consent to rule and once salient social cleavages cease to resonate. Such sequences destabilize the relationship between parties and their constituents and allow political allegiances to swing wildly from one party to the next, giving such sequences their nonlinear character.