Dec 17, 2017 3 min read

This week (Dec. 20) in 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union, and when six other slave-holding Southern states followed suit, the Civil War became inevitable (four more states seceded after the war began).

South Carolina’s reasons for seceding went back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when it successfully led the fight to protect slavery in the Constitution, after which it agreed to join the Union created by the Constitution. But when, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president, South Carolina saw his election as a threat to slavery. True, Lincoln had repeatedly stated he would not abolish slavery in states “where it currently existed,” because, as Lincoln acknowledged, the Constitution protected slavery in those states. Rather, his goal was to prevent slavery’s spread to any U.S. territories that would one day become states, which he believed the Constitution did not protect.

It was a distinction without a difference to South Carolina and the other seceding states, because ending slavery’s expansion would mean confining it to the South, thereby isolating it in one region of the ever-expanding country and making it an economic, cultural and political anachronism that would eventually die out.

South Carolina’s other, more legalistic, reason for seceding was its belief that the federal government had violated the “compact” that all states and the government agreed to upon creating the Constitution. In that compact all sides agreed to meet certain constitutional “responsibilities.” Chief among the responsibilities South Carolina felt the federal government had not met was enforcing the return of runaway slaves to their owners in Southern states, as required by the Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 2) and by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. South Carolina believed this abrogation gave it the right to secede.

Indeed, when members of South Carolina’s specially appointed state convention unanimously passed the “Ordinance of Secession,” thereby making secession official, they cited as justification the Declaration of Independence, which says that when any government becomes “destructive of [those] ends” that the people have assigned it – one of which was protecting their right to property (slaves) – then “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Of course, the institution of slavery, which South Carolina had seceded from the Union to perpetuate, was, according to that same Declaration of Independence, also “destructive” of one of the other “ends” that the people assigned to the government. Since “all men are created equal” and are equally “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the government is required to protect those rights, which slavery unequivocally violates.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.