On 20 December 1860, 169 delegates met in Institute Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, to consider the motion of secession from the United States of America. They voted unanimously to do so; by voting to cut ties with the Union, South Carolina would trigger the Secession Crisis of 1860-61 which would lead to the formation of the Confederate States of America and, ultimately, to the American Civil War (1861-65).
On the same day they voted for secession, the South Carolina delegates penned a declaration in which they expressed their reasons for separation. Known as South Carolina’s ‘Declaration of Secession’, the document’s primary claim is that states have the right to secede if the federal government violates the United States Constitution. It argues that, on the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, each state became a free and sovereign polity. They only joined together in the aftermath of the American Revolution for mutual protection – the continued existence of the Union, therefore, was contingent on both the states and the federal government fulfilling their obligations to one another, as set forth in the Constitution.
South Carolina became the first of eleven states to ultimately leave the Union.
But, as South Carolina puts it, the federal government has not only failed to uphold its constitutional obligations to the states, it has been actively asserting its power over them. As a ‘sovereign’ state within the Union, South Carolina claims that it has the right to choose its own institutions; but, by attacking the institution of slavery, the federal government is denying South Carolina that right, thereby restricting its sovereignty. Furthermore, South Carolina expresses its concern over the recent victory of Abraham Lincoln and the antislavery Republican Party in the US Presidential Election of 1860. They view Lincoln’s election as a sign that the Northern states will continue to weaponize the federal government as a tool to attack slavery and, by extension, the sovereignties of the Southern states. South Carolina claims that, in acting this way, the federal government has failed to protect the rights of the states, and that the Union has failed to serve its purpose…