Secession

In response to the election of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; served 1861–65), eleven slaveholding states officially seceded (withdrew) from the United States of America in 1860 and 1861. Citizens of the seceding states feared that Lincoln's government would try to abolish slavery in America. The eleven states united to form a new nation called the Confederate States of America .

Southern movement

The idea of secession from the United States was not new. At various times in the nation's history, other states had threatened to sever ties to the Union in protest of federal policies. As Northern and Southern economies grew in very different ways, however, the slavery issue began to create particularly severe disagreements between the states.

When United States territories expanded westward during the first half of the nineteenth century, the spread of slavery became the subject of national debate. Southern slaveholders, whose economies depended on farm labor, proposed that slavery be allowed to spread if those in control of new territories wanted it. Many Northerners argued for the protection

of slavery where it already existed, but prevention of slavery in new territories. Northern economies depended on free immigrant labor rather than slaves, so expansion of slavery was not in the interest of Northern states. Voices for the nationwide abolition of slavery were in the minority and had little influence on federal policies. Slaves fought for freedom as best they could while still in bondage, but they had no political power to fight for their rights.

By 1860 Congress had legislated compromises that allowed slavery in some new territories and disallowed it in others. The compromises prevented the nation from splitting apart over the issue. Continued expansion to the west, however, kept alive discussion concerning the future expansion of slavery.

The Republican Party came into power in the 1850s on a platform opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories. Although they believed in protecting slavery where it already existed, many Republicans also hoped for the eventual elimination of the institution. One of those men, Abraham Lincoln, was the Republican presidential candidate in 1860.

Rebellion

Southerners feared that President Lincoln and the Republicans were planning to abolish slavery throughout the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina called a secession convention at which delegates voted to dissolve the state's relationship to the Union. Over the next two months, six other states in the deep South followed with their own votes to secede: Mississippi , Alabama , Florida , Georgia , Louisiana , and Texas .

Secession debates in eight other Southern states were slower thanks to large concentrations of non-slaveholders who resisted secession. When violence erupted between Southern and federal forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina , in April 1861, however, the Civil War (1861–65) began. President Lincoln's call for troops to quell the rebellion spurred four more states to secede: Virginia , Tennessee , Arkansas , and North Carolina .

The other four Southern states—Kentucky , Delaware , Missouri , and Maryland —either stayed with the Union or declared neutrality. The northwestern part of Virginia also remained part of the Union, eventually becoming the state of West Virginia . Although Kentucky and Missouri did not vote to secede, the Confederate States of America claimed them as member states, and both had representatives in the Confederate Congress.

Political right or wrong

Most Northerners viewed the act of secession as rebellious and those who supported it as traitors under the law. Southerners argued that secession was legal, consistent with the belief that the people of each state have the power of self-government to organize as they see fit. Each state had willingly entered the Union with a vote to ratify the Constitution . That decision could be reversed through the same process of calling a convention to withdraw ratification. Northerners argued that state sovereignty had been surrendered with membership in the Union, and that therefore the legal right of secession did not exist.

Debate over the legal nature of the Union was as old as the Union itself. In writing the Constitution in 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention struggled to compromise between states that wanted a strong central (federal) government and those that sought to preserve state powers. Ambiguity of power was necessary to provide a middle ground on which both sides could agree to ratify the document. Power divided between the federal and state governments provided that necessary compromise.

Ambiguity, however, allowed both sides to use the Constitution to support their views on the legality of secession. As each side sought either to preserve or to dissolve the Union, the legal debate evolved into the bloodiest war in American history. Some people consider the North's victory in the Civil War a confirmation of the view that states do not have the legal right to secede from the United States. Others believe that no government, through war or otherwise, can take away the people's right of self-government, which includes the right to decide whether to be part of a nation.