South Carolina Seceded - Dec. 20, 1860

South Carolina seceded from the Union on this day in 1860.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December.

(00:22):
South Carolina seceded from the Union on the state at
eighteen sixty and this is marked as a turning point
on the way to the US Civil War. And it was,
but disputes between northern and southern states, between free and
slave states have been going on for decades. By that point,
there had been a whole series of compromises might to

(00:42):
try to preserve the balance of power between free states
and slave states. As one example, there was the Missouri Compromise,
which allowed Missouri to be admitted into the Union as
a slave state, while Maine was split off for Massachusetts
and admitted as a free state. But by eighteen sixty,
even after all of these compromises, things had grown progressively

(01:03):
more tense. Northern states had started abolishing slavery and passing
laws to prevent the return of escaped slaves to the
states where they had been held in bondage. There was
increasing pressure on slave states to start abolishing slavery slave states.
Dissatisfaction with all this increased dramatically in eighteen fifty when California,

(01:25):
which was a free state, was admitted into the Union
without a corresponding slave state to preserve this balance of
power in Congress between slave and free. As the eight
teen sixty election approached, the prevailing wisdom was at the
election of a Republican president would guarantee that slaveholding states

(01:45):
would start breaking away from the Union. The Republican Party
had been founded six years earlier by anti slavery Whigs,
and the Republican president who was elected was Abraham Lincoln.
He was elected on November sixth, and on December twentieth,
South Carolina became the first state to secede. On December

(02:05):
twenty four, South Carolina adopted a Declaration of the Immediate
Causes which induce and justify the Secession of South Carolina
from the Federal Union. It begins quote the People of
the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled on the
twenty six day of April a d eighteen fifty two,

(02:26):
declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the
United States by the federal government and its encroachments upon
the reserved rights of the states, fully justified this state
and then withdrawing from the Federal Union, but in deference
to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding states,
she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since

(02:50):
that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further
forbearance ceases to be a virtue. In other words, we
said you had the right to succeed back in eighteen
fifty two, but because the other slaveholding states asked us
not to, we did not. But now we are. It
goes on about the idea of free, sovereign and independent

(03:12):
states before it gets around to what freedoms specifically we're
talking about. One of these is outlined an Article four
of the Constitution. Quote, no person held in service or
labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another, shall,
in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged

(03:33):
from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up
on claim of the party to whom such service or
labor maybe do. In other words, if you're enslaved in
one state and you run away to another, you can't
be just kept there. You have to be sent back.
That was in the Constitution. This document then goes on
to talk about the hostility of the non slaveholding states

(03:55):
to the slaveholding states, which quote led to a disregard
of their ab gations, and the document goes on to
condemn abolition societies which have quote encouraged and assisted thousands
of our slaves to leave their homes, and those who
remain have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to
servile insurrection. Towards the end, the statement says, quote the

(04:20):
slaveholding states will no longer have the power of self
government or self protection, and the federal government will have
become their enemy. A total of eleven states seceded from
the Union, several others repeatedly citing slavery as their reason
for doing so, and they formed the Confederate States of America.

(04:41):
The Civil War began on April twelfth of eighteen sixty one.
Thanks to Casey Pegram and Chandler Mays for their audio
work on this show. You can subscribe to This Day
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can tune in tomorrow for an infamous bombing Britain probat

(05:03):
of the park