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I want to take you back in time and into the minds of the men attending as delegates South Carolina’s Secession Convention who voted unanimously 169 to 0 to take a willing South Carolina out of the United States on 20 December 1860. They then wrote and signed a declaration of such on Christmas Eve 1860. Below, in their own words recorded for posterity and stated openly and clearly, is proof that the first secessionist spark in South Carolina that lit the Civil War formed a Confederacy of states and a
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government that was, in its core, of the slaveowners, by the slaveowners, and for the continuation of slavery. South Carolina was the first of eleven Southern states to secede from the Union in this order: South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. The border states of Missouri and Kentucky were claimed but never under effective control, bringing the number to 13 states.
South Carolina’s declaration of secession will be the subject of Part Three of this four-part series on the Confederate Flag controversy. (To catch up on the others, click on Part 1 and Part 2). This document is taken from the following Historical Archive source at Yale: click on the Avalon Project. I will be inserting points of clarification under “HOGUE” into this document, we’ll call “THE DECLARATION.”
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Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union
THE DECLARATION
The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
And now the State of South Carolina having resumed her separate and equal place among nations, deems it due to herself, to the remaining United States of America, and to the nations of the world, that she should declare the immediate causes which have led to this act.
HOGUE
In other words, South Carolina in deference of other slaveholder states had stayed in the Federal Union up to December 1860 when North-South tensions over the issue of slavery as a right—human, state or otherwise—reached, in their view, a critical mass requiring this slaveholder state to be the first to leave the Union.
THE DECLARATION
In the year 1765, that portion of the British Empire embracing Great Britain, undertook to make laws for the government of that portion composed of the thirteen American Colonies. A struggle for the right of self-government ensued, which resulted, on the 4th of July, 1776, in a Declaration, by the Colonies, “that they are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”
They further solemnly declared that whenever any “form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government.” Deeming the Government of Great Britain to have become destructive of these ends, they declared that the Colonies “are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; adopted for itself a Constitution, and appointed officers for the administration of government in all its departments– Legislative, Executive and Judicial. For purposes of defense, they united their arms and their counsels; and, in 1778, they entered into a League known as the Articles of Confederation, whereby they agreed to entrust the administration of their external relations to a common agent, known as the Congress of the United States, expressly declaring, in the first Article “that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right which is not, by this Confederation, expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”
Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: “ARTICLE 1— His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.”
Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.
In 1787, Deputies were appointed by the States to revise the Articles of Confederation, and on 17th September, 1787, these Deputies recommended for the adoption of the States, the Articles of Union, known as the Constitution of the United States.
The parties to whom this Constitution was submitted, were the several sovereign States; they were to agree or disagree, and when nine of them agreed the compact was to take effect among those concurring; and the General Government, as the common agent, was then invested with their authority.
If only nine of the thirteen States had concurred, the other four would have remained as they then were– separate, sovereign States, independent of any of the provisions of the Constitution. In fact, two of the States did not accede to the Constitution until long after it had gone into operation among the other eleven; and during that interval, they each exercised the functions of an independent nation.
By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May, 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.
Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.
We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
HOGUE
In other words, “No SLAVE held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
Again, the division of interpretation between Northerners and Southerners of this Fourth Article divided on the lines of free and enslaved men. Right or wrong, the issue of slavery is the matrix causing this divide, not states rights. Do not confuse the legal vector with what it’s carrying.
What had happened in the North was a growing moral awareness that slavery was evil. In the South, evil or not, it provided the means for their agrarian way of life—cotton—to sustain itself. The Northern states began breaking this compact because they could not in their hearts deliver African Americans seeking refuge from slavery back to the Southern states by force. Yes indeed, the North had broken the compact. And on the grounds of that act of bad Northern faith, and on the grounds of the South wishing to sustain their crime against human beings they didn’t recognize as humans, this grievance of South Carolina led to this declaration of secession.
THE DECLARATION
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
HOGUE
Read “fugitives from slavery from other States.” From now on, the rest of this Declaration focuses on the slave issue as the cause for their secession. Please read it carefully, especially all those folks who read or dropped a comment or two inserted in the last two parts of this series who complained that secession was a states rights dispute without going any farther to explain what was in dispute as a “right.”
These gentlemen South Carolina Secession Convention, the point men of the Confederate rebellion, unlike their modern apologists, have no qualms about spelling it out in writing what they have a right to hold as property, human beings. These human beings are descendants of Africans who had been abducted from their homes, against their will and sold into slavery that made possible the Southern way of life up to the Civil War. Those of you apologizing for that lost way of life apparently don’t read your own white ancestors’ clearly defined stance as pro-racist, pro-slave. Why indeed do you shy away from this conviction?
THE DECLARATION
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
HOGUE
These secessionist slaveholders are specific. They define this state’s rights controversy as a disagreement between Northern anti-slave and Southern pro-slave states. So why is it that so many modern I keep hearing many Southerners disconnect the problem from the state’s right? I believe it’s mostly out of ignorance. I doubt that in these days of declining education scores the Northerners on average don’t know Jack about views from their pro-Union ancestors’ side. For the Southerner it is far more imperative to sustain happier myths about the good old, Gone with the Wind days before the war. The less you know what ugliness was considered a “right” of states the easier it is to love your “heritage” based on this “Voldemort” issue, i.e., the “issue” that cannot be named. (Whisper, whisper…s-l-a-v-e-r-y…)
THE DECLARATION
The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
HOGUE
Blacks, of course, are not “people” in the South Carolinian view of 1860, so the Constitution doesn’t apply to their slaves, whereas a feeling growing in the North believed those rights could not hold true for all if half the country kept human beings as slaves. Indeed, in the South one out of three people were slaves.
THE DECLARATION
These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States.
HOGUE
This is exactly correct. Those laws of compromise agreed to in Washington prevented the Civil War happening decades earlier than it did. The problem when governance legalizes something evil is that it can delay the truth of evil from hatching out. Eventually, it does hatch out and those laws protecting an evil are broken. America’s understanding of people and individual rights was evolving faster in the North than in the South. I doubt very much if the North needed a slave workforce to run its farms and factories as much as the South that these rules would have been broken for another 50 years or more. No matter how you judge whether the aggrieved slaveholder states are right in the letter of the broken law to secede or not can be debated. What I’m emphasizing here is that all problems that led to the Civil War are sourced to the cancer of Slavery in America. It made northern states break the law in bad faith, and compelled slaveholder states to defend a constitutional law that was morally unjust. In the end, this impasse had to be settled in blood and fire on the battlefield.
What the Declaration says next is true:
THE DECLARATION
Those [Northern] States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
HOGUE
All true. The states have divided over this issue along the Macon-Dixon line compromise. Then, the Northern states pick Lincoln, who already is known as antislavery in platform by the South. No need for Emancipation Proclamations to put it in writing two years into the Civil War later. The North have done the unthinkable, given black men in some states the vote. Black men who aren’t human enough to be considered “white” men created equal under the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, according to the slaveholder state’s view.
Everything that led to this Civil War is about slavery.
The Northerners aren’t telling you this. Some Yankee revisionist historians aren’t over emphasizing it.
I have before you all the words of the first secessionists to boldly act in South Carolina. They had assembled a more than willing white populace in complete support. The first shot fired in the American Civil War would vomit in flame out of a South Carolina cannon battery shelling the Federal-held Fort Sumter.
I would propose that you Apologists haven’t honored those men in your defense of their “way of life” as you honestly should. If you did, we’d see you write comments proudly promoting the return of slavery in America. You’d demand all African Americans be returned to your cotton fields.
You don’t dare declare that, because this country has evolved too far to go back to a throwback Neanderthal interpretation of what the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution defines as a US citizen created equal in the American “way of life.”
Indeed many of you still believe that blacks are subhuman, but dream as you might, you do not live in a time that supports turning back that clock. You have not the political or cultural support to make it. Men of the South like in Columbus, SC, in December 1860, who drafted this declaration, were prescient about what a Lincoln government meant to their future—no future for the slavery-based economic system, the foundation of their way of life:
THE DECLARATION
On the 4th day of March next, this party [The anti-Slave Republican Party and Lincoln] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.
We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.
Adopted December 24, 1860
***
HOGUE
One final point, the American Historical Association wrote—and with my underline added—the following taking place on 8 February 1861: “Delegates in Montgomery [Alabama] adopt a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The document contains only a few variations from the U.S. Constitution, among which are a clause protecting slavery and one that prohibits tariffs designed to protect domestic industry.”
We can’t escape fact. We can pretend that ignorance is our shield only for so long. We can hope that someone burns the documents and the evidence that slavery is the center of all things leading to a civil war.
The final part of my series will look at those blacks and whites on opposite sides of this controversy that are trying the revise history, censure and erase one another’s heritage. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
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