Timeline for Did the Southern States make any attempt to secede from the Union through an act of Congress?
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7 events
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| Mar 3, 2016 at 21:50 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | From the slaveholder point of view, failure to maintain balance in slave vs. free states meant eventually they would be powerless to stop something like the 13th amendment. So in the long run, not allowing slavery in new states in their minds was just a delayed-action abolition. | |
| Mar 3, 2016 at 19:30 | comment | added | Oldcat | Again, this is an irrational fear of encirclement. Abolition in the states could not happen and it was not a Republican plank. Free Soil in the Territories was such a plank, which is the "exclusion" fear, which again is irrational because they already knew that the remaining territories would never support a new slave state. Kansas showed that. Secession and War were the two things that provided the Republicans a large majority in Congress and the ability to use War Powers to act on slavery in the short term. | |
| Mar 3, 2016 at 2:32 | comment | added | Athanasius | @Oldcat: And yet the Southern states asserted this fear in their Acts of Secession: "[Lincoln] has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction...On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory...and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States." | |
| Aug 18, 2015 at 17:47 | comment | added | Oldcat | There was no threat of abolition on Lincoln's election. The Republicans only got a house majority when Southern congressmen defected and left. They did fear the Republicans and Free Soil Democrats "encircling" them mostly for irrational reasons, which is why they defected. | |
| Jan 30, 2015 at 0:27 | comment | added | Anaryl | @Oldcat - that's completely wrong. The catalyst was the election of a President who they felt would abolish slavery. The Confederates weren't gunning for a separate state until they felt certain that the Republicans would attempt to abolish slavery. Despite Lincoln's protestations that he was not going to abolish slavery, the southerners refused to accept Republican rule. There was no reason to secede until Lincoln because the slaveholders pretty much had what they had wanted. Without Abolition there was no raison de etre for secession. | |
| Jan 29, 2015 at 0:02 | comment | added | Oldcat | Their problem was worse than that. Several times secessionists had seen their attempts to break away fizzle in the 1830s and 1850s. They knew that time to think would hurt their cause, so they moved quickly to escalate to acts the North would see as unsupportable. And seeing themselves as revolutionaries, of course filing papers and checking boxes was a waste of time. | |
| Jan 28, 2015 at 18:13 | history | answered | T.E.D.♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |