First Calls for Secession

Following ratification by 11 of the 13 states, the government began operation under the new U.S. Constitution in March 1789. In less than 15 years, states of New England had already threatened to secede from the Union. The first time was a threat to leave if the Assumption Bill, which provided for the federal government to assume the debts of the various states, were not passed. The next threat was over the expense of the Louisiana Purchase. Then, in 1812, President James Madison, the man who had done more than any other individual to shape the Constitution, led the United States into a new war with Great Britain. The New England states objected, for war would cut into their trade with Britain and Europe. Resentment grew so strong that a convention was called at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, to discuss secession for the New England states. The Hartford Convention was the most serious secession threat up to that time, but its delegates took no action.

Southerners had also discussed secession in the nation‘s early years, concerned over talk of abolishing slavery. But when push came to shove in 1832, it was not over slavery but tariffs. National tariffs were passed that protected Northern manufacturers but increased prices for manufactured goods purchased in the predominantly agricultural South, where the Tariff of 1828 was dubbed the "Tariff of Abominations." The legislature of South Carolina declared the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 were "unauthorized by the constitution of the United States" and voted them null, void and non-binding on the state.

President Andrew Jackson responded with a Proclamation of Force, declaring, "I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed." (Emphasis is Jackson‘s). Congress authorized Jackson to use military force if necessary to enforce the law (every Southern senator walked out in protest before the vote was taken). That proved unnecessary, as a compromise tariff was approved, and South Carolina rescinded its Nullification Ordinance.

The Nullification Crisis, as the episode is known, was the most serious threat of disunion the young country had yet confronted. It demonstrated both continuing beliefs in the primacy of states rights over those of the federal government (on the part of South Carolina and other Southern states) and a belief that the chief executive had a right and responsibility to suppress any attempts to give individual states the right to override federal law. The Abolition Movement, and Southern Secession

Between the 1830s and 1860, a widening chasm developed between North and South over the issue of slavery, which had been abolished in all states north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Abolition Movement grew in power and prominence. The slave holding South increasingly felt its interests were threatened, particularly since slavery had been prohibited in much of the new territory that had been added west of the Mississippi River. The Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision case, the issue of Popular Sovereignty (allowing residents of a territory to vote on whether it would be slave or free), and John Brown‗s Raid On Harpers Ferry all played a role in the intensifying debate. Whereas once Southerners had talked of an emancipation process that would gradually end slavery, they increasingly took a hard line in favor of perpetuating it forever.

In 1850, the Nashville Convention met from June 3 to June 12 "to devise and adopt some mode of resistance to northern aggression." While the delegates approved 28 resolutions affirming the South‘s constitutional rights within the new western territories and similar issues, they essentially adopted a wait-and-see attitude before taking any drastic action. Compromise measures at the federal level diminished interest in a second Nashville Convention, but a much smaller one was held in November. It approved measures that affirmed the right of secession but rejected any unified secession among Southern states. During the brief presidency of Zachary Taylor, 1849-50, he was approached by pro- secession ambassadors. Taylor flew into a rage and declared he would raise an army, put himself at its head and force any state that attempted secession back into the Union.

The potato famine that struck Ireland and Germany in the 1840s–1850s sent waves of hungry immigrants to America‘s shores. More of them settled in the North than in the South, where the existence of slavery depressed wages. These newcomers had sought refuge in the United States, not in New York or Virginia or Louisiana. To most of them, the U.S. was a single entity, not a collection of sovereign nations, and arguments in favor of secession failed to move them, for the most part. The Election Of Abraham Lincoln And Nullification

The U.S. elections of 1860 saw the new Republican Party, a sectional party with very little support in the South, win many seats in Congress. Its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency. Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories, and many party members were abolitionists who wanted to see the "peculiar institution" ended everywhere in the United States. South Carolina again decided it was time to nullify its agreement with the other states. On Dec. 20, 1860, the Palmetto State approved an Ordinance of Secession, followed by a declaration of the causes leading to its decision and another document that concluded with an invitation to form "a Confederacy of Slaveholding States." The South Begins To Secede

South Carolina didn‘t intend to go it alone, as it had in the Nullification Crisis. It sent ambassadors to other Southern states. Soon, six more states of the Deep South—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana—renounced their compact with the United States. After Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This led four more states— Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee—to secede; they refused to take up arms against their Southern brothers and maintained Lincoln had exceeded his constitutional powers by not waiting for approval of Congress (as Jackson had done in the Nullification Crisis) before declaring war on the South. The legislature of Tennessee, the last state to leave the Union, waived any opinion as to "the abstract doctrine of secession," but asserted "the right, as a free and independent people, to alter, reform or abolish our form of government, in such manner as we think proper."

In addition to those states that seceded, other areas of the country threatened to. The southern portions of Northern states bordering the Ohio River held pro-Southern, pro-slavery sentiments, and there was talk within those regions of seceding and casting their lot with the South.

A portion of Virginia did secede from the Old Dominion and formed the Union-loyal state of West Virginia. Its creation and admittance to the Union raised many constitutional questions—Lincoln‘s cabinet split 50–50 on the legality and expediency of admitting the new state. But Lincoln wrote, ―It is said that the admission of West-Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the constitution, and secession in favor of the constitution.‖