The provisional Confederacy likewise sought vigorously to stimulate secession sentiment in the border states. Had all the border slave states thrown in their lot with one or the other government, there might not have been a war, or conversely, separation might well have become an accomplished fact.
As it was, however, the prompt action of the Lincoln administration after the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter secured Maryland and Delaware for the Union. Kentucky proclaimed its neutrality but eventually remained loyal to the Union. Once the war was joined, waves of patriotic sentiment swept over North and South. Vocal political opposition would exist on both sides, but it was never strong enough to overthrow either government. Secession as revolution, an early theme in southern rhetoric, was not emphasized after the formation of the Confederacy.
A nation could not have been formed, nor a war fought, if the states were wholly independent of any central authority. Behind it all, of course, was the unity of a minority geographical section defending a distinct set of institutions that were thought to be under attack. The original federal Union that shared the exercise of power with the states strengthened the concept of secession. It also supplied a pretext for southern leaders to seize the initiative and form a separate nation.
Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. All rights reserved. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Confederate States of America was a collection of 11 states that seceded from the United States in following the election of President Abraham Lincoln.
Led by Jefferson Davis and existing from to , the Confederacy struggled for legitimacy and was never The election of was one of the most pivotal presidential elections in American history.
Crittenden introduced legislation aimed at resolving the looming secession crisis in the Deep South. From February until the end of the American Civil War in April , Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. William Seward was a politician who served as governor of New York, as a U. Seward spent his early career as a lawyer before winning a seat in the New York State Senate in An ardent Its members became known for their bravery and fierce fighting against Confederate forces.
It was the second all-Black Union regiment to fight in the war, after the 1st During and immediately after the Civil War, many northerners headed to the southern states, driven by hopes of economic gain, a desire to work on behalf of the newly emancipated slaves or a combination of both. Jefferson Finis Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, was a Southern planter, Democratic politician and hero of the Mexican War who had represented Mississippi in the U.
House of Representatives and Senate and served as U. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. Wilmot Proviso. General Sherman's Legacy. So, which one is correct? Why did southern states secede from the union The United States?
The act of secession was not an easy one, and once a state decided to do so, it would change the nation drastically.
Secession is the act of a state formally leaving the Union. Many believe that secession is what caused the war too. With southern states actively leaving the Union, war broke out. As the industrial north continued to grow and flourish with waves of immigrants coming to the U.
Many southerners considered the north to be full of abolitionists who were simply trying to push big government as well as industrial progressivism on them. To the average southerner this was an attack on their culture.
This fracture was only growing between the two cultures as the United States began to expand westward and more states would start applying for Statehood.
Would the new state be considered a slave state or a free state? If one side gained a state, the other side would need to gain one as well. In , the Missouri Compromise threatened to upset the balance of slave to free states in the United States as there would be twenty three states in the Union 12 slave and 11 free. The Missouri Compromise only affirmed to many southerners that the national government could create laws against slavery and diminish the state governments powers in the process.
Shortly thereafter, the Tariff of surfaced. The South with great unanimity declared her purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity. Georgia: We had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it; how, in relation to slavery, was the question then demanding solution.
Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South.
We had shed our blood and paid our money for its acquisition; we demanded a division of it… or an equal participation in the whole of it. The price of the acquisition was the blood and treasure of both sections-- of all, and, therefore, it belonged to all upon the principles of equity and justice. Texas: The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretenses and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States.
Georgia: For twenty years past the abolitionists and their allies in the Northern States have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions and to excite insurrection and servile war among us. Mississippi: [Abolitionism] advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice. Texas: The people [of non-slave holding states] have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.
They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
Mississippi: We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. Georgia: But they know the value of parchment rights in treacherous hands, and therefore they refuse to commit their own to the rulers whom the North offers us. South Carolina: We hold We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
Georgia: Our Constitution wisely gives Congress the power to punish all offenses against the laws of nations. These are sound and just principles which have received the approbation of just men in all countries and all centuries; but they are wholly disregarded by the people of the Northern States, and the Federal Government is impotent to maintain them.
South Carolina: In the state of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation. Texas: The States… by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the Fugitive Slave Clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation.
Georgia: This is the party to whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in and succeeded. The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.
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