created by sickboy775 on 24/01/2025 at 14:00 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
In the American civil war, the war was fought primarily over a states right to secede. Yes, the issue of contention that caused it was slavery, but the purpose was preservation of the union, not necessarily eradication of slavery. Secession was the tipping point. At least as far as I understand it.
So, within the Confederacy, could states secede? And if the question never came up during the proto-nation's short life, how might it have likely played out when the topic eventually came up?
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Comment by secessionisillegal at 24/01/2025 at 17:38 UTC
56 upvotes, 4 direct replies
In the American civil war, the war was fought primarily over a states right to secede.
Well, first thing is first, this is not true. The war was fought over the South's determination to preserve and protect slavery upon the election of an anti-slavery President, and an anti-slavery majority (or nearly so) in Congress. Specifically, the 1860 Republican Party platform[1] had resolved to:
1: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860
A) Outlaw slavery in the federal territories, and
B) Repeal and replace the Fugitive Slave Act.
While not part of the platform, many members of the party also aimed to outlaw slavery in Washington DC, as well as on other federal property such as military bases. These three goals would effectively overturn the Kansas-Nebraska Act as well as the pro-slavery provisions of the Compromise of 1850.
The pro-slavery side in US Congress did not have the votes to stop any of this, and the situation would only get worse over time, due to projected differences in population increase between North and South.
If the issue was the constitutionality of a state's unilateral right to repeal the entire Constitution (i.e., "secession"), then that could have been resolved in a court of law. And the answer would have been no. Just as a state did not have the right to repeal the 1st Amendment or the 2nd Amendment, they did not have the right to repeal all the amendments and all the articles of the Constitution, short of getting 2/3 of the other states to agree (and 3/4 of the state houses) via the Constitutional Amendment process.
Slavery-related issues being the cause of the conflict is pretty easily proven by referring to the journals of all the efforts in 1860-61 to prevent war, before the Confederates stopped negotiating. The Report of the Committee of Thirteen[2] that led to the Crittenden Compromise, The Report of the Committee of Thirty-Three[3] that led to the Corwin Amendment, and the Journal of the Washington Peace Conference[4] detail, at length, the conditions that the Confederates were insisting upon in order to return to Congress and revoke their calls for war.
2: https://books.google.com/books?id=vaMFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1
3: https://books.google.com/books?id=RV1UAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA9-PA1
4: https://books.google.com/books?id=cGwFAAAAQAAJ
These conditions were mostly aimed at the three slavery-related issues of the 1860 presidential campaign, but it may be useful to refer to what the Virginia delegates at the Washington Peace Conference laid out as the bare minimum of what the Confederates were willing to accept to prevent war. You can read each proposed Article of the resolution in the Peace Conference journal[5], but to summarize, this was Virginia's peace proposal at the *end* of "negotiations" in late February 1861:
5: https://books.google.com/books?id=cGwFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA418
1. Extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, and allow slavery in all territory "hereafter acquired" south of that line. (There were enough Republican votes to agree to at least extend it to the border of the state of California, but not enough votes to accept the "hereafter acquired" clause that could expand slavery south of the then-current US border - a very real threat, considering the Democrats' two[6] separate 1860 platforms[7] included a plank to "acquire" Cuba from Spain.)
6: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1860-democratic-party-platform
7: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/democratic-party-platform-breckinridge-faction-1860
2. A Constitutional Amendment that says the federal government can never abolish slavery in Washington D.C. or in the slave states. (This is essentially what the Corwin Amendment said, which passed with 2/3 votes in both houses of Congress on the final day of James Buchanan's presidency, and then was sent to the states for ratification. Several states had ratified it, but then Fort Sumter happened, which essentially made this effort moot.)
3. Congress cannot interfere with the slave trade between the slave states, and travel/passage of enslaved people accompanied by slaveholders must be allowed through the free states. (There were enough Republicans to get the slave trade between slave states protected, but in exchange, they would have wanted "slave transit" through free states to be banned at the federal level. But the Confederates said no.)
4. When an escaped person cannot be recaptured, then the free state where they reside must pay monetary restitution to the original slaveholder. (There were plenty of Republicans who would be happy to negotiate a new Fugitive Slave Act, but what the Confederates really wanted was to limit the rights of black people in the North in regards to "Personal Liberty Laws". Northerners believed they should have "states' rights" within their own borders, so were not willing to go to nearly the lengths that the Confederates demanded they do.)
5. The Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution cannot be repealed except by unanimous consent of all the states.
6. Black Americans, whether in the North or in the South, or anywhere else in the country, must be barred from government office, and denied the right to vote. This must extend to federal, state, territory, and municipal offices and elections. (Again, Northerners wanted to be able to grant the citizens of their states whatever rights they wished without interference from Confederates, but Confederates wanted to trample Northern "states' rights" and impose their will. This was something the North was unwilling to negotiate on.)
You can read the rest of that journal[8] to see what else the two sides negotiated on at the Washington Peace Conference, but the above is basically everything they ever discussed. The North was willing to make concessions on these slavery issues to prevent war, but never enough to satisfy the Confederates, who recognized that US Congress could always reverse course. Their best hope to get further concessions was by means of a battlefield contest, forcing the US government to make concessions that the pro-slavery Confederates had no political leverage on, other than through their ability to wage war.
8: https://books.google.com/books?id=cGwFAAAAQAAJ
So, no, secession itself was not "the tipping point". The tipping point was the election of Abraham Lincoln. On the Friday after the election, November 9, 1860, the South Carolina state legislature passed a resolution[9] declaring their intent to withdraw from the Union, and calling for a "secession convention". The name given to the resolution was the "Resolution to Call the Election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. President a Hostile Act and to Communicate to Other Southern States South Carolina's Desire to Secede from the Union". The other treasonous states passed similar resolutions. Abraham Lincoln's election upon an anti-slavery platform was "the tipping point".
9: https://books.google.com/books?id=sYhDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA30&dq=Lincoln