The chronological order of the thirteen states that
seceded from the Union are as follows:
-South Carolina: Dec. 20, 1860
-Mississippi: Jan. 9, 1861
-Florida: Jan. 10, 1861
-Alabama: Jan. 11, 1861
-Georgia: Jan. 19, 1861
-Louisiana: Jan. 26, 1861
-Texas: Feb. 23, 1861
-Virginia: April 17, 1861
-Arkansas: May 6, 1861
-North Carolina: May 20, 1861
-Tennessee: June 8, 1861
-Missouri: Oct. 31, 1861
-Kentucky: Nov. 20, 1861
South Carolina was the first state to secede after Abraham Lincoln claimed 180 of the 303 electoral votes cast for that presidential election. Lincoln made his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861. The following are excerpts from that address which specifically refer to the secession of several slave states.
"Apprehension seems to exist among the people of
the Southern States that by accession of a Republican administration their
property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered.
There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.
Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed
and been open t their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published
speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of
those speeches when I declare that 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe
I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.'
Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had
made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them.
And, more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and
as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which
I now read:
'that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially
the right
of each State to order and control its domestic institutions according
to its
own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which
the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend, and we denounce
the
lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory,
no matter under
what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.'
...There is much controversy about the delivering
up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as
plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions:
'No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof,
escaping
into another, shall be in consequence of any law or regulation therein
be discharged
from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party
to whom
service or labor may be due.'
...But if the destruction of the Union by one or
by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is LESS perfect
than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can
lawfully get out of the Union; that Resolves and Ordinances to that effect
are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States,
against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary,
according to circumstances.
...In YOUR hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen,
and not in MINE, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government
will not assail YOU. You can have no conflict without being yourselves
the aggressors. YOU have no oath registered in heaven to destroy
the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect,
and defend it.'"
To understand the importance of the political issues
involved, one must comprehend the necessity of keeping the numbers of free
and slave states in the government equal. After the "original" Union
was established, each slave state that joined afterward must be balanced
by a free state, and vice versa. Each subsequent state had to be
the opposite kind of its predecessor. This was to ensure equal representation
in the American government. When the free states began putting restrictions
on slavery, those slave states began losing power and confidence in the
political system of the nation. Later, the Emancipation Proclamation
would prove that the ultimate plan had indeed been to abolish slavery.
Each state claimed various reasons for secession:
Georgia
"An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support,
but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all
of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon.
Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final
triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very
general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive;
it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity. This question
was before us. 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. This state of facts gave form and shape
to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North and the conflict began.
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 on the line of the Missouri restriction or
an equal participation in the whole of it. These propositions were refused,
the agitation became general, and the public danger was great. The case
of the South was impregnable. 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.
...The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of
the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after
this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to
unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery an to stake their
future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This
is the party two whom the people of the North have committed the Government.
They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered
the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded."
Mississippi
" ...It
refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to
extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power
of expansion."
"...It tramples the original equality of the South under foot."
South Carolina
"...The
General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect
these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed.
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States
to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations,
and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects
of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan,
Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of
Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these
States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in
none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made
in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a
law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of
anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render
inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress.
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.
...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."
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 slave holding States.
...In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith
and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people
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.
...By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave holding
States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation
of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
...They have impoverished the slave holding States by unequal and partial
legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
...And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding
States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole
confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their
approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue
them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave
holding States.
...For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution
has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named,
seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of
our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to
those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no
longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons-- We the delegates
of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance
dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States
of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence
and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot
box, on the 23rd day of the present month."
The seceding states made it very clear why they decided
to leave the Union and the inadequacies they saw in the Constitution.
These states felt that they were simply mirroring their forefathers who
had revolted against the British. They were not fighting only for
their own rights; they felt they were defending the rights that those before
them had already died for. When South Carolina addressed the Convention,
making many more arguments in support of a revolution to other slave holding
states, some of the claims were:
"The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position toward the
Northern States that our ancestors in the colonies did toward Great Britain.
The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power
of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament. "The general welfare"
is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress,
as in the British Parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of
the legislation this "general welfare" requires. Thus the Government of
the United States has become a consolidated Government, and the people
of the Southern States are compelled to meet the very despotism their fathers
threw off in the Revolution of 1776.
...The Southern States now stand in the same relation toward the Northern
States, in the vital matter of taxation, that our ancestors stood toward
the people of Great Britain. They are in a minority in Congress. Their
representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation,
and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit exactly
as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British Parliament
for their benefit. For the last forty years the taxes laid by the Congress
of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests
of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports
not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue -- to promote,
by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and
manufactures.
...The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit
of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected three fourths
of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others connected with
the operation of the General Government, has provincialized the cities
of the South. Their growth is paralyzed, while they are the mere suburbs
of Northern cities. The bases of the foreign commerce of the United States
are the agricultural productions of the South; yet Southern cities do not
carry it on.
...Yet, by gradual and steady encroachments on the part of the North, and
submission on the part of the South, the limitations in the Constitution
have been swept away, and the Government of the United States has become
consolidated, with a claim of limitless powers in its operations.
It is not at all surprising, while such is the character of the Government
of the United States, that it should assume to possess power over all the
institutions of the country. The agitations on the subject of Slavery in
the South are the natural results of the consolidation of the Government.
Responsibility follows power; and if the people of the North have the power
by Congress "to promote the general welfare of the United States," by any
means they deem expedient, why should they not assail and overthrow the
institution of Slavery in the South? They are responsible for its continuance
or existence, in proportion to their power. A majority in Congress, according
to their interested and perverted views, is omnipotent.
...Time and the progress of things have totally altered the relations between
the Northern and Southern States since the Union was first established.
That identity of feeling, interests, and institutions which once existed
is gone. They are now divided between agricultural and manufacturing and
commercial States -- between slave holding and non-slaveholding States.
Their institutions and industrial pursuits have made them totally different
peoples. That equality in the Government between the two sections of the
Union which once existed, no longer exists."