Mississippi: A Declaration of the immediate Causes and Justifications for Secession from the United States of America
[Copied by Justin Sanders from "Journal of the State Convention", (Jackson, MS: E. Barksdale, State Printer, 1861), pp. 86-88]
A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
“In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France. The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
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.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It 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.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better [system].
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. 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. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.”
Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance on the Causes of Secession
NORTH CAROLINA SECESSION: PROTECTING SLAVE PROPERTY UNITES THE SOUTH TO FIGHT A WAR OF SECESSION, 1861 to 1965
“You know perfectly well it was the wealthy men of the South who dragooned the people into Secession” President Andrew Johnson in 1865 speaking with a delegation of Virginians. As it turned out secession was the ONLY option the privileged men of the South, who held the exclusive power to decide, presented to the people for their consideration. In 1861, in North Carolina, the decision to secede and join the Confederacy was not submitted for a popular vote of the state’s legal voters in dramatic contrast with the referendums submitted to all the voters living in Virginia and Tennessee.
****************************************************
“The great popular heart is not now, and never has been in this war. It is a revolution of Politicians, not the people; and is fought at first by the natural enthusiasm of our young men and has been kept going by State and sectional (the Confederate States of America) power, assisted by that bitterness of feeling produced by the cruelties and brutalities of the enemy.”
[These two sentences appear in a letter from North Carolina's Civil War Governor Zebulon Vance to a friend written in September 1864; as cited by W. K. Boyd, "William W. Holden: Part II - Secession and Peace Movement," in THE TRINITY COLLEGE HISTORICAL PAPERS. Series III [Durham, NC: Historical Society of Trinity College, 1899]: 69.
Posted: 26 May 2011
Comments to: civilwar.tar.heel.elites@gmx.com
*****************************************************
Thomas Ruffin: 1861 Spokesman for North Carolina's Ruling Class
THOMAS RUFFIN, North Carolina Representative in the United States Congress and former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, on the state’s reason for seceding:
“Sir, the day for a settlement after long years, has come. The time must not be procrastination. If the slaveholding states of this Union are not coequal with other members of the Confederacy [the Federal Union], it is high time that it was known. Equality has been denied them. That denial has superinduced the fatal malady of which the Government is now perishing. No hollow truce, no temporary expedient of patched-up congressional compromise, will avail now. The disease has passed that stage. I may almost say, sir, that it is immedicabile vuluus, not to be cured by the nostrums of empyricism; neither can the magic charms and mystic incaptations of political charlatanry drive it from the surface back into the vital organs, again to make its appearance as a corroding ulcer upon the body politic. Illusory legislation, contrived and adopted in the exigencies of the times, has heretofore been tried and failed of its purpose.” He summarizes the legislative compromises of 1820 and 1850 by the United States government and their failure to protect slave property in the Southern states, emphasizes that as of February, 1861 six (Southern) states have seceded to recover their sovereignty and then proclaims: “It becomes us to deal with facts as they are. It is useless and absurd not to discuss the right of a state to secede; it is idle to speculate on the abstract right of secession; for this great remedy of sovereign States has been asserted and exercised, even to a practical application; and secession – a word that has heretofore so often shocked the nerves of a certain class of timid politicians in the South – is something that they have seen carried into practice, and secession itself has become un fait accompli . . .From my first entrance into public life, I have been an advocate of the right of secession . . .In this connection, I would state that, in my judgment, the time has come for the Southern states yet in the Union, [who recognize or] recognizing the institution of slavery, should proceed to carry out this inestimable remedy of secession, and to seek, outside of the present Union, such associations as would afford them the protection denied them within it.”
from: a Speech by Thomas Ruffin, on 20 Feb 1861, in the United States House of Representatives on “States Rights and State Equality” Also, he was a delegate, representing Alamance County, to the May 1861 North Carolina Secession Convention in Raleigh and a representative of the state to the Virginia called Peace Conference in Washington.
Clearly, the top jurist in North Carolina, one of the state’s four or five most powerful political leaders and a person expert on intergovernmental relations and its history in the Union since 1789 states the view, held by the overwhelming majority of men serving in the North Carolina Senate, House of Commons and Secession Convention, as of late February 1861; namely, that secession is being used by the states south of the Potomac because it uniquely offers them, especially when they exercise it in concert, the maximum protection for slave property. Also, in his speech above, he identifies slavery as THE primary institution unifying the Southern states in a common culture. Further, this revealing, determinitive speech is prior to Lincoln’s call for troops, the firing on Fort Sumter and, most importantly, two months prior to North Carolina’s secession from the Union. This speech occurred not only before the Old North State seceeded but also before Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia withdrew from the Union. Finally, the preference of the Southern ruling class for secession to protect their most valuable property investment is obvious since it was the only option they presented to the middle and lower class citizens of the South, including North Carolina. This singular approach, perfected in the lower South and advocated by the new Confederate government, eventually appeared in the upper South conventions in the form of secession resolutions penned by Judah Benjamin. At the time of Thomas Ruffin's speech, 85% of the men serving as representatives in the North Carolina legislature owned slaves.
Posted: May 26, 2011
Comments to: civilwar.tar.heel.elites@gmx.com
********************************************
