Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 7: South Carolina's Declaration of Secession

The last two days' posts discussed a presentation by the Hon. Christopher Gustavus Memminger of South Carolina to the Virginia legislature early in 1860 cataloguing the grievances of the South against the free states.

The Honorable Gentleman later in 1860 a key player in the South Carolina secession. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union was adopted by a secessionist state convention on 12/24/1860. It spells out the state's motivation for secession along the same lines as his speech to the Virginia legislature did 11 months earlier.

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. [my emphasis]

The reference here is to laws passed by various free states to impede the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: South Carolina justified its secession on the grounds that free states were asserting states rights to impede the national government in its task of defending slavery.

In many of these States the fugitive [slave] 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 [accused supporters of John Brown]. 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.

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 defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

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 [sic] 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 escaped slaves].

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. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions [slavery]; and have denied the rights of property [in human beings] 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 [remove] 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 [Abraham Lincoln], 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 [African-Americans]; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party [Lincoln's Republicans] 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. [my emphasis]

Of course, Lincoln at the Republicans had no intention of waging a "war against slavery" in the states where it existed. That was just a lie.

Contemporary documents like this show many times over how ridiculous it is for advocates of the Lost Cause dogma to claim that the Confederate states seceded from the Union not over slavery but over the cause of states rights. As South Carolina's declaration shows, slavery was not only the cause of that state's secession. But a large part of their pro-slavery litany of grievances had to do with free states asserting "states rights" against slavery.

If one reads the South Carolina declaration closely, it's pretty clear from the passage just quoted that it takes the position that it was against the meaning of the US Constitution in the Slave Power's reading of it for any state to outlaw slavery within its own borders: those states "have denied the rights of property [in slaves] established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution."

It also contains a protest based on the Supreme Court's atrocious Dred Scott decision when they complain that free states have been "elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens". The Dred Scott decision had held that African-Americans had no rights under the Constitution that whites were bound to respect.

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery,south carolina, us civil war