Ordinance of Secession

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 20th of December 1860, delegates in South Carolina signed a document that set the United States on a collision course with itself. The Ordinance of Secession was not a declaration of war. It was, in the eyes of its authors, a legal instrument. A statement of departure. A notice that one state had decided the Union was no longer its home.

  What followed was a cascade. Within weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had each put their names to similar documents. By mid-1861, eleven states and one territory had done the same. Each one posed the same fundamental question: could a state simply leave? And if it could not, what would the nation do to stop it?

  This is the story of those ordinances. Of the conventions that debated them, the governors who pushed for them, and the states that refused. It is the story of what a legal document can and cannot accomplish when the country it addresses has taken up arms.

• 2. The Question of Legality

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  President Abraham Lincoln drew in part on the legacy of President Andrew Jackson when he concluded that his job was to preserve the Union by force if necessary. Lincoln regarded secession as illegal by any means. That position was not universally shared, even within the government he inherited.

  President James Buchanan had addressed the crisis directly in his State of the Union Address on the 3rd of December 1860, just weeks before South Carolina acted. Buchanan argued that the Union rested only upon public opinion. Conciliation, he said, was its only legitimate means of preservation. He did not say the states had a right to leave. But he also said he had no authority to stop them.

  The tension between these two positions was not new. President Thomas Jefferson, after his presidency but in official correspondence in 1816, had suggested that the secession of some states might actually be desirable. What each seceding state claimed, in effect, was that entering the Union had been a voluntary act, and leaving it was equally within their power.

  Adherents of the Union side rejected that logic entirely. The question of whether any of these documents carried legal force would not be settled at a convention table. It would be settled on battlefields across half a continent.

• 3. Mechanisms of Departure

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  Secession did not happen the same way in every state. Some states acted through their legislatures. Others called special conventions. Texas put the question to a popular referendum, where voters approved secession 46,153 to 14,747. Virginia held a referendum as well. On the 23rd of May 1861, Virginia voters approved secession 132,201 to 37,451.

  Georgia formally seceded on the 22nd of January 1861, after a vote of 208 to 89 by delegates to the Georgia Secession Convention in Milledgeville. Tennessee's path was more complicated. Governor Isham G. Harris pushed for a referendum on a sovereignty convention, but on the 9th of February 1861, voters rejected it. The defeat was real: 59,499 voted against the convention, 68,262 in favor, a margin that made clear Tennesseans were divided.

  That division did not last. After Lincoln called for troops following the attack on Fort Sumter, the debate reignited. A second vote on the 8th of June 1861 produced a different result: 104,471 for secession, 47,183 against. But even as the state formally departed, East Tennessee remained a Unionist stronghold throughout the entire war.

  Bitter, violent controversy persisted even where popular majorities clearly favored secession. A geographic pattern emerged: local prevalence of slavery correlated with support for leaving the Union. In regions where that support was weakest, effective secession could critically destabilize or virtually eliminate state government control.

• 4. States That Stayed

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  Kentucky's governor in 1861 was Beriah Magoffin, and his response to the crisis was singular. A month after the battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Magoffin issued a proclamation declaring neutrality. He urged Kentuckians to stay out of the conflict entirely. Magoffin did not think slavery was a moral, social, or political evil. But he opposed secession for two reasons. He believed the country's divisions could be resolved through dialogue. And he feared Kentucky would be invaded if it joined the Confederacy.

  Magoffin's concerns proved partly correct. When General Leonidas Polk and the Confederacy tried to force Kentucky into the Confederate States, the attempt failed. The failure pushed the state legislature to choose a side. Kentucky asked the Union Army for help. By early 1862, most of Kentucky was under Union control. The final count told the story: around 125,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union, and around 35,000 for the Confederacy.

  Delaware acted more quickly. The Delaware legislature quickly and firmly rejected secession, despite active lobbying from states intending to secede. Maryland's situation was more precarious. President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and deployed overwhelming Union military force specifically to protect Washington and prevent Maryland from acting. The legislature there had overwhelmingly rejected calling a secession convention but retained some notion of limiting cooperation with the Union. Geography mattered too: Delaware and Maryland's exposure to conflict between larger neighboring states also deterred secession.

  The Confederacy nonetheless counted Missouri and Kentucky among its claimed member states, even though both remained within the Union. Thousands from those states, and from Delaware and Maryland as well, chose to fight for the Confederacy regardless of what their governments decided.

• 5. Collapse in Missouri

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  Missouri's attempted secession unraveled from the start. The state government called a convention to consider the question, and the delegates who attended disfavored secession. That outcome should have ended the matter. It did not.

  Union military intervention moved quickly, first securing St. Louis, then spreading control throughout nearly the whole state. The rump convention that eventually passed a Missouri ordinance of secession did so from Neosho. It was not a statewide body. It carried no meaningful authority. But the Confederacy recognized it, and Missouri became one of the thirteen stars on the Confederate battle flag.

  For all the legal maneuvering, the practical reality was that thousands of Missourians embraced secession personally, even when their state could not do so officially. They crossed lines, joined Confederate armies, and fought in a war that was also a civil war within their own state. The unorganized Indian Territory, for its part, did not declare secession and was not unanimous in its orientation, but generally supported the Confederacy. The Confederacy did not claim Delaware or Maryland as member states.

• 6. Reconstruction's First Step

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  Tennessee eventually seceded, but the story of what came after is as significant as the ordinance itself. East Tennessee remained a Unionist stronghold throughout the entire Civil War, a region that never reconciled with the government in Richmond.

  When the war ended in 1865, Tennessee moved faster than any other former Confederate state. In 1866, Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to rejoin the Union. That act marked the beginning of Reconstruction. It opened a long, ongoing struggle to build a society where people of all races could fully enjoy their rights as citizens.

  In the same period, a Unionist government in western Virginia had already acted. In 1863, that government created a new state from 50 western counties, which entered the Union as West Virginia. The new state included 24 counties that had ratified Virginia's secession ordinance. Those counties had voted to leave and then found themselves on the other side of a new border. The map drawn by secession was not the map left when the shooting stopped.