Secession | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The secession of seven Southern states in 1860 to 1861 set in motion the train of events that led to the American Civil War. The war ultimately cost 620,000 lives, precipitated the internal collapse of slavery, prompted President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, changed the Constitution, and transformed the American union of states into a nation. The destruction of slavery was arguably the greatest social revolution in American history, and it removed the most glaring contradiction to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Union victory ensured the inviolability of the Union and supremacy of the federal government. Secession, in short, inaugurated the most transforming crisis in American history. More than any other single event, the Civil War defined modern America.

As early as the 1820s, some southerners raised secession as a last resort to defend slavery and southern rights. The notion that any state could voluntarily leave the Union was based on the state compact theory of the Constitution, articulated first in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799. The states existed before the Constitution, this argument ran, came together to create the national government, and therefore were ultimately superior to it. This theory was the basis for nullification and secession, neither of which are mentioned in the Constitution. Southerners sometimes voiced an abstract commitment to the ideal of states' rights, but most regional spokesmen understood it as a means through which they might protect slavery. As the South's share of population, and thus its political power, shrank within the Union, the drastic step of secession became more attractive and likely as the last gamble of an increasingly out numbered minority.

Prior to the 1850s, the actual threat to slavery remained slight, although southerners watched closely the steady growth of abolitionism in the North. The turning point in the sectional conflict (and ultimately the real beginning of widespread support for secession) was the birth and rapid success of the free soil Republican Party. Increasingly dominant in the North after 1856, Republicans threatened slavery because of their commitment to its non-extension. Most southerners believed that slavery needed to expand in order to survive—to preserve its economic viability by finding productive ways to use slaves, to maintain racial control amidst a growing slave population, and to add slave states to preserve the South's political power within the national government. Finally, the success of Republicanism, for southerners, represented an insult to their equality within the Union. If their slave-based way of life were not allowed to expand, most southerners considered it an insult to their standing as good Americans and good Christians. In addition to the threats posed by the concept of free soil, more and more Republicans actually were abolitionists and, although still a minority, they gained rapidly in New England. Thus, by the late 1850s a large number of southern whites considered a Republican president unacceptable.

The most important event that preceded the much-anticipated election of 1860 was the confused raid led by abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now part of West Virginia). Apparently planning to start a regional slave rebellion, Brown and his followers seized the federal arsenal in the small town in October 1859. Brown was quickly captured, convicted by the state of Virginia for inciting slave rebellion, and hanged. Although most northerners condemned his violent methods, Brown became something of a martyr and symbolic victim of southern arrogance and violence. For their part, southerners often failed to distinguish Brown from Republicans or northerners generally. The Harpers Ferry raid panicked southerners, heightened tensions across the country, and invigorated secessionists who preached disunion if a Republican was elected in 1860.

Throughout the 1860 presidential campaign, southerners debated potential responses to a Republican victory. By October, Abraham Lincoln seemed certain to win after he carried crucial early elections in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio. The bottom line for Southerners, as always, was how best to protect slavery and the southern way of life based on the peculiar institution. Immediate secessionists called for southern states to leave the Union as soon as Lincoln's election was certain. Others counseled a more moderate course, possibly a cooperative movement in which states would withdraw as a group.

Secessionists moved quickly in November and December 1860 to capitalize on the public outrage over Lincoln's victory and to maintain the momentum toward disunion. The popular mood across the lower South where slavery was so widespread favored immediate secession, and local "vigilance committees," Minute Men clubs, and volunteer militia units pressured and intimidated Unionists. Leaders in South Carolina acted first. Following the procedure used for nullification in 1832, a special election was held for delegates to a special convention that would decide the state's course of action. On December 20, the South Carolina convention unanimously approved an Ordinance of Secession, declaring "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States under the name of the United States of America is hereby dissolved." Six other states in the deep South followed South Carolina out of the Union early in 1861. Everywhere, secessionists emphasized the dangers of a Republican administration hostile to slavery's growth and future within the Union; spokesmen painted a bleak picture of potential slave rebellions, racial warfare, and the violation of southern women. With their homes and women threatened, leaders invoked the language of honor and masculinity when they called on southern men to support immediate secession—a "bold and manly move," as hundreds of editors and politicians phrased it. Or, as Mississippi's Governor John Pettus declared: "Can we hesitate! when one bold resolve, bravely executed, makes powerless the aggressor, and one united effort makes safe our homes?"

Among scholars the popularity of secession remains in dispute. In nearly all southern states, convention delegates rejected proposals to submit secession to a popular vote, prompting some historians to conclude that they feared being rejected by the masses. On the other hand, Southern Democrats preached secession throughout the 1860 presidential campaign, and their candidate, John Breckinridge, received nearly two-thirds of the vote in the lower South. Immediate secession candidates controlled the conventions in each of the first seven states to leave the Union.

The remaining eight slave states rejected secession before Lincoln took office. Only after the surrender of Fort Sumter and the President's subsequent call for volunteers to ensure "the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government" did four more states (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) secede and join the Confederacy. The Republicans' refusal to accept secession signaled the beginning of civil war.

Confederate States of America; Lincoln, Abraham.

Barney, William L. The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Channing, Steven A. Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

Crofts, Daniel W. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Ford, Lacy K. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Olsen, Christopher. Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Thornton, J. Mills, III. Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

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