Confeder-H8 History Month: Did the South Secede from the Union over Slavery? Part II - South Carolina

It is often said that the South seceded for reasons other than slavery, economics in general, sectional discord, States' Rights, or taking a stand against "Federal tyranny" as the real cause. And yes, it's pretty easy to see that these excuses "reasons" simply extend from slavery, e.g., "economics" being the economics of a slave economy, "Federal tyranny" meaning that slavery wasn't able to expand into the newer territories, etc.

The contention, however, that the preservation of slavery was not the overriding preoccupation of the seceding states is wholly unsupportable from the secession documents themselves.

All that said, South Carolina, the first state to secede, took a little bit different angle than some other states, in that, as I mentioned at the end of the previous installment, it constitutes an anti-States'-Rights position. The document begins by laying out what South Carolina alleged to be a right to secede from the Federal Union and then moves on to the justification of their secession, to wit, that free States are violating South Carolina's right to hold slaves by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave clause in Article 4 of the Constitution, by freeing African Americans who are brought into their territory, by allowing African Americans to have citizenship, and other things that the white supremacist Palmetto State considered to be heinous offenses against their property rights:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. 

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. 

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety... 

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

Thus South Carolina, seceded from the Union on December 24, 1860, the stated cause being that the other States had failed in their obligation to help prop up the system of keeping people in chains, and in fact worked against the perpetuation of that criminal enterprise.

READ: Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union