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. Did the Southern states "have it in" for Lincoln from the beginning? In the election of 1860, Lincoln was not on the ballot in about 10 states. Was this due primarily to the Republican party being a very new political party or did many Southern states see something about Lincoln that the rest of the country didn't?

I'll confirm what N-S vaguely recalls. The whole concept of the ballot as we know it today--all the candidates listed, selection made in secret and dropped in a sealed box--was essentially unknown to 1860 America. Known as the "Australian Ballot", those innovations came to US elections in the late 1880s. Prior to that, each party printed up it's own ballots and passed them out to its members to hand in on election day. This is the "ticket" that we still talk about today.

The whole concept of the ballot as we know it today--all the candidates listed, selection made in secret and dropped in a sealed box--was essentially unknown to 1860 America.

That's true, I was kind of going for brevity rather than detail on a few of these, but I did remember this from reading the late William Rehnquist's book "Centennial Crisis: the Disputed Election of 1876". Even the way candidates were nominated was entirely different, since there wasn't anything that resembled primary elections back then either.