Southern states' secession

“ In our judgment the Republicans are resolute in the purpose to grant nothing that will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people require the organization of a Southern Confederacy--a result to be obtained only by separate State secession--that the primary object of each slave-holding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from a Union with hostile States. ”

“ The assumption upon which its chief politicians had built so confidently had collapsed. The South was not really a unit. It was not true that the secession of any one State, on any sort of issue, would compel automatically the secession of all the Southern States. North Carolina had exploded this illusion. Virginia had exploded it. The South could not be united on the issue of slavery; it could not be united on the issue of sectional dread. It could be united on but one issue-State sovereignty, the denial of the right of the Federal Government to coerce a State. ”

“ My regard for [12] the personal welfare of yourself and yours is too warm and deep, not to regret seeing you float to the Southern extreme of American society at the present juncture of our National affairs.
"The loud blast of secession is already heard in the South, and I am impressed that the Southern sisterhood of States will unite in a desperate effort to dissolve this Union and destroy the General Government. And that no renewal of compromise effort can save the tremendous shock of war, between the North and South, that portends in the political heavens. ”

“ Whatever their views had been at first as to secession, the great majority of the Southern people had followed the fortunes of their states. To disfranchise their leaders was to throw the control into the hands of a less able and small minority of whites; to enfranchise the blacks while disfranchising the white leaders was to undertake the task of subordinating the former political people of a section to a different race, just released from slavery, ignorant, untrained, without property and fitted only to follow the leadership of outside elements. ”

“ Again the South is to be a unit for the interests of slavery; again the united Southern vote, with a few Northern States, is to command our elections; again the knife of secession is to be flourished over the head of the Nation; again our legislators and the people are to be terrorized with the cry: “Do what our Southern brethren want you to do, or they will dissolve the Union once more!” and the terrors of the past are to be used as a powerful means of intimidation for the future. Again this great Nation is to be swayed not by reason but by fear ”

“ The cause of emancipation takes, therefore, a very important step in advance, in the hypothesis of a Southern Confederacy reduced, or nearly so, to the Gulf States alone. Limited secession is perhaps of all combinations, the one most favorable to the suppression of slavery. Picture to yourself, in fact, what this Southern Confederacy will he. It will be an impossible, short-lived republic, the separation of which will one day cease, and which, meanwhile, will be incapable of realizing any of its favorite projects. ”

“ As the rebellious States have, by the mere act of secession, forfeited all State rights, and thereby reduced themselves to territories, this question would seem to settle itself without difficulty, were it not that a vast body of the ever-mischief-making, ever-meddling, and never-contented politicians (who continue to believe that the millennium would at once arrive were Emancipation only extinguished) cry out against this measure as an infringement of those Southern rights which are so dear to them. They argue and hope in vain. ”

“ As a politician, representing Southern interests, he cannot be severely condemned for his fear and anger over the discussion of the slavery question, which, politically considered, was out of the range of Congressional legislation or popular agitation. But when he advocated or threatened the secession of the Southern States from the Union, unless the slavery question was let alone entirely both by Congress and the Northern States, he was unpatriotic, false in his allegiance, and unconstitutional in his utterances. ”

“ To the eye of the student of history, who has closely traced in many ages and countries the vast action of secret societies in events, the whole Southern movement bears, however, intrinsic evidence of that peculiar form of hidden political power. The prompt and vigorous action of the whole Secession movement, by which States with a majority attached to the Union were hurled, scarce knowing how, into rebellion, would never have been accomplished save by a long established and perfectly drilled organization. ”

“ They made it quite clear that they cared nothing for the distinction between coercing a State and coercing individuals, and that they held a State ordinance of secession to be perfectly efficacious to absolve its people from obeying the laws of the United States. They declared that any movement of troops or munitions of war into the Southern States would instantly be accepted as proof of a design to prevent peaceable secession, would promote bloodshed and inaugurate civil war. ”

“ They admitted that a State could not be coerced into the Union; but they held that no State really and legitimately desired to go out, or had gone out—"the great Union-loving majority in the South had been overruled by a factious secession minority, and the Union troops were only to liberate them from that violence, and enable them to declare their unabated love for the Union." No well informed man was, at first, absurd enough to speak of a State as "committing treason" against the confederation, the creature of the States ”

“ Its defenders felt their defeat as men feel the downfall of a political cause to which they are attached, not quite as men feel the conquest of their country by foreigners. The second is that from the first there had been many who, [212] while admitting the right of secession—and therefore, by implication, the justice of the Southern cause—had yet doubted its expediency. It is surely not unnatural to suppose that the disastrous issue of the experiment had brought a great many round to this point of view. ”

“ And how they believed in this impossible future in 'the cradle of the rebellion!' Only a minority of darker conspirators apprehended—hoped for—war, thinking it necessary to precipitate the remainder of the Southern States into revolution, and the establishment of a separate nationality; the great majority of South Carolinians accepting Secession with an enthusiasm (or rather self-exaltation) and confidence astounding to witness. There would be no collision; the North could not and dared not push it to the extreme issue ”

“ The Southern leaders knew all these things. But they made up their minds that now the time had come to secede from the Union and to establish a Southern Confederacy. For the first time all the southernmost states were united. No matter what Lincoln and the Republicans might say, the Southern slaveholders believed that slavery was in danger. In advising secession, many of them thought that by this means they could force the Northerners to accept their terms as the price of a restored Union. Never were political leaders more mistaken. ”

“ The wealthy men in the Old Dominion, who were Secessionists for the sake of secession, and who gave every assistance to the Rebel cause, are opposed to the admission of Northern settlers. They may be unable to prevent it, but they will be none the less earnest in their efforts.
This feeling extends throughout a large portion of Virginia, and exists in the other States of the South. Its intensity varies in different localities, according to the extent of the slave population in the days before the war, and the influence that the Radical men of the South have exercised. ”

“ Indeed, the ladies everywhere seem imbued with the spirit of patriotism, and never fail to exert their influence in behalf of Southern independence.
April 15th.—To-day the secession fires assumed a whiter heat. In the Convention the Union men no longer utter denunciations against the disunionists. They merely resort to pretexts and [Pg 20] quibbles to stave off the inevitable ordinance. They had sent a deputation to Washington to make a final appeal to Seward and Lincoln to vouchsafe them such guarantees as would enable them to keep Virginia to her moorings. ”

“ When, therefore, by the formal and constitutional act of the States, secession from the Federal government was declared in 1860 and 1861, it is almost impossible for any one not familiar with the habits and thoughts of the South, to understand how completely the question of duty was settled for Southern men. Shrewd, practical men who had no faith in the result, old and eminent men who had grown gray in service under the national flag, had their doubts and their misgivings ”

“ On the one hand, it avoided an immediate practical challenge to the doctrine of State Sovereignty, strongly held by many in the Middle States who were nevertheless opposed to Secession. On the other, it tended, if prolonged, to render the Southern assumption of the rôle of "a people risen against tyrants" a trifle ridiculous. A freeman defying the edicts of the oppressor is a dignified spectacle: not so that of a man desperately anxious to defy edicts which the oppressor obstinately refuses to issue. ”

“ He sketches the state of feeling in each of the States he has visited, and represents the Union party as decidedly in the ascendant in every one of them. He proceeds to say that although some of the recent measures of Congress, and particularly the admission of California, were exceedingly unjust to the South, yet they afford no justification for a disruption of the confederacy. Many, he says, believe that in the event of secession a collision will arise with the Federal Government, and South Carolina would have the sympathy and the aid of the other Southern States. ”

“ No issue in the world is deader than the question whether states have a right to secede, for the simple reason that the experience of forty years ago shows that in case any state or group of states hereafter may wish to secede, the other states will infallibly combine to resist by military force: no state or section can ever again assert that it has reason to suppose that secession is a peaceful and constitutional remedy, which should be accepted quietly by the sister states. ”

“ That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable strength. ”

“ The defeated Democrats, who all the while had predicted dire mischief in case of a Republican victory, were, of course, not slow to take advantage of the disturbed state of the popular mind. Some of them openly justified the secession movement under existing circumstances; others loudly demanded that the victorious party should abandon the anti-slavery principles and policy it had been contending for, and thus induce the Southern leaders to let their States stay in the Union. ”

“ Actuated solely by a desire to protect and preserve our own rights and promote our own welfare, the secession of the Confederate States has been marked by no aggression upon others, and followed by no domestic convulsion. Our industrial pursuits have received no check ”

“ Secession and permanent division will not cure the trouble, but will increase it. Moreover, the contrariety of feeling between people in the non-slaveholding States, made intense by the departure of the Southern section, may inaugurate hostilities among ourselves more fearful than those which drive away the Southern people. ”

“ Even after the compromise was accepted in the South and the secessionists defeated in 1850-1851, the Southern states generally adopted the Georgia platform or its equivalent declaring that the Wilmot Proviso or the repeal of the fugitive-slave law would lead the South to "resist even (as a last resort) to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the Union". Southern disunion sentiment was not sporadic or a party matter; it was endemic.
The disunion sentiment in the North was not general ”

“ Great pecuniary distress in the country owing to the political discussions which have arisen out of the election of Lincoln for President. Several of the Southern States threaten secession, and will in all probability go. It is a dark time for our country. The North has agitated the subject of slavery until the South is maddened to desperation and unless she retraces her steps, the Union can not stand. The Lord is our only help. ”

“ It is true, that amongst those who aided in his election, there are various shades of anti-slavery hostility. But if African slavery in the Southern States, be the evil their political combination affirms it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic, must lead them to emancipation. If it is right, to preclude or abolish slavery in a Territory,—why should it be allowed to remain in the States? The one is not at all more unconstitutional than the other, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. ”