On 20 December 1860 — exactly 150 years ago — a room of 169 of the State of South Carolina’s leaders would conclude four days of debate.
The topic? Secession. The vote? In favor…
At a Convention of the People of the State of South Carolina, begun and holden at Columbia on the Seventeenth day of December in the year or our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty and thence continued by adjournment to Charleston, and there by divers adjournments to the Twentieth day of December in the same year –
An Ordinance To dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled “The Constitution of the United States of America.”
We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled do declare and ordain, and it is herby declared and ordained, That the Ordinance adopted by us in Convention, on the twenty-third day of May in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven hundred and eight eight, whereby the Constitution of the United State of America was ratified, and also all Acts and parts of Acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendment of the said Constitution, are here by repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of “The United States of America,” is hereby dissolved.
Done at Charleston, the twentieth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty.
Four days after the Ordinance was passed, the leaders of South Carolina would issue yet another document — the Declaration of Immediate Causes — in which the reasons for secession read:
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.…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; 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.On the 4th day of March next, this party 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.
Thus was the spark of secession lit, the end of the Jeffersonian “Empire of Liberty” inaugurated, and the lives of 600,000 Americans extinguished. At the end, one half of the nation would be ruined, the other half a world power. An entire class of human beings would be liberated from the bondage of slavery, though the road to equality would be long and, in the eyes of many, is still being traveled.
Most notably, the Commonwealth of Virginia would side with the Deep South — not on the issue of slavery but on Lincoln’s call for 90,000 men to bring the slave states to heel. Thus would Virginia side with secession. 25% of all the battles fought in the War would be fought inside the Commonwealth. Virginia herself would be split in two. The capital of the Confederacy would come to Richmond, and for five bloody years Virginia would become a battleground, dramatically altering the landscape, homes, and families of Virginia.
All that was sparked by one action. 150 years ago today.
