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Secession from the Union, 1860-61: The Causes and Rationale
By John E. Semonche
Restive Southerners had questioned their future within the Union well before the
election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but the interests of that section of
the country were generally well protected by all three branches of the federal
government. For instance, although South Carolina received no support from sister states
when it sought to nullify tariffs imposed by Congress, the compromise that was worked
out in 1833 led to a tariff policy that generally met Southern demands. Almost five years
later the United States Senate went on record through a series of resolutions introduced
by the section's leading political theorist, John C. Calhoun, to register its support for the
view that the Union was a compact among sovereign states and that the federal
government had the responsibility of protecting the domestic institutions of one state
against attacks from others. The nationalism of earlier years had been displaced by a
sectionalism that had all but forgotten the changes that the Constitution had brought to
the shaky union under the Articles of Confederation.
What Calhoun was referring to, of course, was the institution of slavery, then
being attacked by some Northern abolitionists. Slavery would become the thorn in the
side of the Union that would fester over the next two decades. Compromises that had
characterized the past were now much more difficult, not only because of a growing
moral condemnation of the institution but also because of a Southern initiative that
sought national protection for what had been, except for fugitive slave laws, strictly a
local institution. A Supreme Court sympathetic to the Southern cause seemed to be on its
way to ruling that the Constitution protected a property right in slaves throughout the
entire American Union.
Often the North-South conflict has been portrayed as one of nationalism vs. states'
rights, but Southerners had made the price for remaining in the Union national protection
for their domestic institution, while Northern states, such as Wisconsin, were challenging
the authority of the federal government to interfere with the state's personal liberty law.
When the Democratic Party, the one party that had been able to hold together interests on
both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, could no longer do so in 1860, the way was paved
for a Republican victory. The new Republican Party had been born in 1854 as various
political factions united on one common goal--opposition to the extension of slavery in
the territories. That common goal gave the party a clear sectional character. Although
Lincoln, the Republican Party standard bearer in 1860, saw nothing in the Constitution
that gave the federal government any right to interfere with slavery where it existed and
was willing to support a constitutional amendment to that effect, the election of a
containment candidate was enough to convince some Southern leaders that now was the
time to act.
That the first action would come from South Carolina was no surprise given its
history of challenging the federal government since the early 1820s. South Carolina
would not only be the first state to secede; it would also be the locale in which the first
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shots in the resulting civil war would be fired. Its ordinance of secession adopted on
December 20, 1860 announced the repeal of its 1788 ratification of the Constitution and
the dissolution of the preexisting union between South Carolina and the other states. The
terse ordinance was followed by a more lengthy declaration of the causes that had
impelled the action. Alluding to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the ascendancy of
"a sectional party" hostile to slavery, the state's leaders said that this party will
"inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its peace and safety."
Citing earlier forbearance, the declaration proclaimed that the state has now taken action
because the non-slaveholding states have broken the constitutional compact. Insisting that
without the Constitution's fugitive slave clause no union under the Constitution would
have been formed, South Carolina's leaders now concluded that the failure of certain
Northern states to return fugitive slaves broke the compact hitherto existing among the
states. Therefore, they continued, South Carolina was released from any further
obligation under that Union.
Here, then, was the heart of the argument for secession--that the Union was not
composed of the American people but rather was composed of states linked by a
contractual agreement that could be severed by a state deciding that its continued
presence in that Union no longer served the state's best interests. A resolution passed by
the Mississippi legislature urging secession summed up this theory quite succinctly:
[T]he several States are distinct sovereignties, whose supremacy is
limited so far only as the same has been delegated by voluntary compact to a Federal Government, and when it fails to accomplish the
ends for which it was established, the parties to the compact have the
right to resume, each State for itself, such delegated powers.
The argument was based on the view that the states were older than the Union created
under the Constitution and that the sovereignty of each state had not been surrendered
when it decided to ratify the Constitution. Therefore, each state had the right to withdraw
and assume the independent position it had before joining the Union.
The opposing view held that the Union was established not by the states but, as
the Preamble to the Constitution proclaimed, by "the People of the United States." A
permanent Union was created by the ratification process in which the states had ceded
portions of their sovereignty to the federal government. The actions of that government
now became the "supreme law of the land." This was not only Lincoln's view, but that of
most Northerners as well.
At times in the nation's history since the Civil War, writers have tried to
subordinate the issue of slavery and highlight the differences in economies between the
North and the South or stress the protection of states' rights against national interference.
The problem with such a reordering, however, is that in the first instance, differing
economies, the South had been served well in regard to national policy, and although the
election of the Republican Lincoln suggested some modification in this type of control,
Southerners still had considerable influence and power in Congress. As to states' rights,
the issue is largely abstract and hardly worth contesting until it is linked to some more
urgent and practical matter. Secondly, the South had no monopoly on a states' rights
position. As indicated, in the late 1850s Wisconsin was resisting the imposition of the
federal fugitive slave law, just as worries were increasing about the nationalization of
slavery.
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Furthermore, the various state resolutions detailing the causes of separation did
not mince words about the need to protect the institution of slavery. Alabama accused
the North of hostility to the state's domestic institutions, and Texas took Republicans to
task for "proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men . . . a doctrine at
war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the
plainest revelations of Divine Law." Georgia accused the North of exciting "insurrection
and sevile war among us," and Mississippi noted hostile acts against slavery going back
to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Although the Confederacy's president in his
inaugural address insisted that the protection of states' rights was the sole reason for
secession, the less guarded words of state secessionist leaders confessed that secession
was the answer to insuring the protection of the domestic institution of chattel slavery.
And the Confederacy's vice-president, Alexander Stephens, did not hesitate to stress the
slave issue, saying that the Founding Fathers had erred in proclaiming the equality of
men. He corrected his Southern predecessors, such as Thomas Jefferson, insisting that
the slave's "subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition."
South Carolina was quickly joined by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana and Texas, and in early February 1861 the seven states assembled in
Montgomery, Alabama, formed a provisional government, and drafted a constitution for
the Confederate States of America. The new constitution was largely based upon the
Constitution of the United States, and provisions of the Bill of Rights were incorporated
into the text of the new document. Although the constitution did not mention any right to
secede from the new union, it did recognize "the sovereign and independent character" of
each state. A number of clauses directly protected slavery, though the importation of
slaves from abroad was prohibited. The protective tariff, a source of contention from the
beginning of life under the Constitution and the occasion for South Carolina's attempt at
nullification, was prohibited under the Confederate constitution. Although the document's
framers retained the supremacy clause, they did eliminate the "general welfare" provision
from both the Constitution's Preamble and from the taxing provision, apparently in the
belief that such wording could be used to strengthen national authority. Ratification by
five states was necessary to put the new document into effect. The constitution could be
amended when any three states united in suggesting changes. A convention would then
be convened that would propose amendments to the states for ratification. Only twothirds, not three-fourths, of the states would have to agree to make the constitutional
changes.
When Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861 seven states had seceded.
Four upper south states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, remained in
the Union but warned that they would oppose the use of force against the seceded states.
In his inaugural address the President sought to assure these states' leaders that the
accession of a Republican to the presidency did not threaten their property, peace or
security. Furthermore, he denied any authority or inclination to interfere with slavery in
the areas where it then existed. After these conciliatory words, Lincoln took direct issue
with the theory of secession, based as it was on the idea of a compact of sovereign states.
He asserted that the Union was perpetual and that "no State upon its own mere motion
can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally
void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the
United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary." His Southern antagonists had not
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relied upon a right of revolution, and the President did not deny that such a right might be
invoked . However, he limited that right to the situation in which a concerted majority
deprives a minority of a vital constitutional right, something that he insisted had not been
done in the present instance. He closed, saying that the decision as to whether war would
result was in the hands of those who sought to challenge the perpetuity of the Union,
reminding his adversaries of his oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" that Union.
Of course, the problem with a right of revolution is that it can only be established
by victory on the field of battle. Were the Confederate forces to have succeeded, the
history of the period would read quite differently. The reason the Southern states sought
to base secession on the compact theory of Union was to give their action some
semblance of legitimacy. For instance, Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan took the
position that a state could not secede from the Union, but if it sought to do so there was
nothing the President nor Congress could do to prevent the action. Clearly Lincoln had
different ideas.
War came when shots were fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, an action that
enabled Lincoln to assert that the Union had been attacked. His sworn duty, he said, was
to defend the attacked Union. When the war began and Lincoln called for volunteers, the
four upper South states joined the Confederacy, which brought the total of seceded states
to eleven. The President had to proceed cautiously, but if the initiation of military action
had not occurred at Fort Sumter it would have come at another place. At this stage, a
military conflict was all but impossible to avoid. Jefferson Davis, who had been elected
president of the Confederacy, called the Confederate Congress into session in late April
1861 to respond to what he called a declaration of war by Lincoln. What neither man
could see, of course, was that the armed conflict would continue for four long years.
The Union would prove victorious,in part because its leader, Lincoln, was able to
use the constitutional mechanisms in place to fight a total war, while his adversary,
Davis, always had to work against assertions of state autonomy that hindered the
Confederate war effort. This is not to say that Lincoln did not have to deal with
resistance to mobilization from the states (One need only remember the draft riots in New
York City), but that resistance was mild in comparison.
Some observers might say that the South lost the argument as to the nature of the
Union only on the battlefield and that the nation about which President Lincoln so
eloquently spoke was only created after the war. But anyone familiar with the substitution
of the Constitution for the Articles of Confederation in 1789 must concede that under its
terms a far different government was created – one which seemed to leave little room for
assertions of state sovereignty. Lincoln could never understand how a nation could
continue to exist if dissenting states could opt out of the union, and neither time nor
distance has afforded us the understanding that eluded the President.