South Carolina Declaration of Secession

• 1. Four Days After

  ›

  The South Carolina Declaration of Secession arrived on the 24th of December, 1860. Four days earlier, the state had already formally left the United States. That first action, the Ordinance of Secession issued December 20, was a single paragraph of spare legal language. It declared the union dissolved and offered no explanation. The convention had already agreed to produce a second document that would supply the reasoning. Drafting it fell to a committee of seven, led by Christopher G. Memminger. In that declaration, South Carolina named its cause in plain terms: 'an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.' The document was adopted December 24, following Abraham Lincoln's November 1860 election to the presidency. Decades later, the historian Harry V. Jaffa would examine the declaration closely. He found that what the authors chose to leave out was as significant as anything they included.

• 2. The Law of Compact

  ›

  South Carolina's delegates in 1860 did not regard themselves as revolutionaries. They argued they were exercising a legal right the state had explicitly reaffirmed as recently as 1852. The foundation of their argument was a principle called the law of compact. Under this doctrine, the Constitution was not a permanent binding agreement between the American people. It was a contract between sovereign states, one that placed obligations on both parties. If one party failed those obligations, the other was released from the deal. The opening section of the declaration laid out this reasoning in detail. South Carolina's ratification of the Constitution in 1788 had been, the document argued, the act of a sovereign state. That state had delegated only specific powers to a central government. It had not surrendered its independence permanently. The declaration was careful to note that this was not a simple argument about states' rights. It protested other states' failure to meet their own obligations under the same Constitution. The question the declaration then had to answer was which obligations had been violated, and by whom.

• 3. Article Four, Section Two

  ›

  Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution required states to return 'person(s) held in service or labor' to their state of origin. South Carolina placed this provision at the center of its legal argument. The federal Fugitive Slave Act gave the constitutional requirement legal force, and for years the declaration acknowledged that it had been enforced. Then Northern states began refusing. They would not hand back people who had escaped enslavement. South Carolina described these refusals as a gathering breach, built up over twenty-five years. Each such refusal was, in South Carolina's framing, a further violation of the agreement. The federal government, which the declaration called 'the common agent,' had passed laws to enforce the constitutional requirement. But those laws were no longer being honored. The declaration stated it plainly: 'the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.' The situation had been worsening for decades. But the declaration's authors argued that one specific recent event had made continued membership in the union impossible.

• 4. A Geographical Line

  ›

  Abraham Lincoln's name appears nowhere in the South Carolina Declaration of Secession. Instead, the declaration refers to 'a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.' Lincoln's name is never written. He had run on a platform explicitly opposing the extension of slavery into U.S. territories. For South Carolina's secessionists, that position was the final provocation. 'A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,' the declaration stated. Every state north of that line had united behind this unnamed president. The result was not, in the declaration's framing, a neutral political outcome. It was evidence of a settled and hostile Northern consensus. South Carolina's committee had reached for the founding generation's language of political legitimacy to frame its exit. In doing so, they had to make choices about which parts of that founding language they were prepared to use.

• 5. What Was Left Out

  ›

  'A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War' appeared in 2000. Its author, Harry V. Jaffa, identified what South Carolina's committee had chosen to remove from the founding language. The declaration had borrowed the structure of the Declaration of Independence, detailing grievances before announcing separation. But three phrases central to the 1776 document were absent. Gone were 'all men are created equal' and the passage stating that people are 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.' The phrase 'consent of the governed' was absent as well. Jaffa's explanation was direct. The enslaved people of South Carolina had given no consent to be governed. The phrase could not honestly appear in a document produced by their enslavers. The founders of 1776, Jaffa noted, had at least described slavery as a necessary evil. South Carolina in 1860 held slavery to be a positive good. The distance between those two positions, Jaffa argued, explained exactly which words had to disappear. The convention had assigned a separate writer the task of persuading other slaveholding states to follow South Carolina's lead.

• 6. The Document and Its Reach

  ›

  Robert Barnwell Rhett wrote the third document the convention produced. Its title began 'The Address of the People of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States.' It called on other slaveholding states to secede and join in forming a new nation. The convention resolved to print 15,000 copies of all three documents and distribute them to various parties. After the war ended, claims began circulating that tariffs and taxes had been the real cause of secession. The declaration offered no support for this account. The word tariff does not appear in it. The only tax reference is a note that the Constitution had counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for direct taxation purposes. Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas each issued similar declarations when they seceded. Rhett had written specifically to achieve that result.