- What were the Ordinances of Secession?
- Click here for the South Carolina Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.
- Click here for the text.
Some highlights:
The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D. 1852, declared that
the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon
the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to
the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time,
these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.
. . . 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 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.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be
excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged
against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding
States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have
become their enemy.
Dear ChaptGPT: Does the U.S. Constitution grant states the right to seceed?
