Perman & Taylor (Chapter 4: Sectionalism & Secession)

First, in regards to the Preston Brooks caning of Charles Sumner, please see my previous post.  I became so incensed regarding that incident, that what was just supposed to be a few sentences ended-up taking over the whole posting, so it was posted separately.  Anyway, I find the whole incident to be yet another example of the lengths to which Southerners would go to forcibly push their beliefs onto others.  Just like in Kansas, if they cannot get their way by "fair means", then they are perfectly willing to use "foul" ones, such as fraudulent elections, arson and in the case of of Brooks, assault.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was right on the money with his condemnation of the South and the questioning of how a "barbarous community" which could support such actions (South) could exist along side a "civilized community".  Though Lincoln expressed the sentiment better in his "A House Divided" speech, Emerson's statement that "I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom" was a point well made also. 

In matters of secession, I feel that South Carolina, and any other slave state for that matter, can cloak their reasons for seceding in any language they like and pretend that the actions of the North can somehow justify their actions, but that they cannot obfuscate the simple fact that keeping "slavery" as an institution was their TRUE motivation for their act of secession.  Just consider the these paragraphs from "3.  South Carolina Declares and Justifies its Secession, December 1860": 

1. We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have 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.

1. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he 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.

South Carolina is fixated on slavery, even to the point of misrepresenting President-elect Lincoln's words on the matter and assigning future federal positions and actions to a government that has yet to take power. 

Historian Manisha Sinha also reinforces this point in the essay "The Political Ideology of Secession in South Carolina", but also states that the desire to protect slavery is also a desire to protect the power of the white planter class at the expense of not just the slaves or Northerners, but at the expense of other Southern whites.  The conflict was not just a racial divide, but also a class and gender divide, with the South afraid of the growing progressivism in the North towards the enfranchisement of not only blacks, but also of middle class, poor and immigrant white men, and even of women.  These were the people who would be less likely to have anything in common with the Southern slave-holding elite and thus less inclined to vote in support of this "American aristocracy" down south.  And the South was firmly against any concept of either social or political equality.  (p. 129)

Though secession was seen as inevitable by some, other Southern politicians attempted to keep the union whole, albeit with sharp divisions between Southern and Northern government. Calhoun, had in fact, proposed the concept of "nullification" as an attempt check the actions of the federal government.  By allowing any "ONE" state to nullify "ANY" federal law it considered to be unconstitutional, this would have led to a "rule of the minority", one in which the desires of any one state would take precedence over the needs of the whole country.  (p. 124)  This is a gross distortion of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants "all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people", which would permit abuses by individual states, at the expense of the others.  As Spock said so elegantly in Star Trek II:  the Wrath of Khan, "The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few".  The federal government should not be held accountable to the whims of any individual person, state or region.  The United States, only truly works as a country when there is majority rule. 

In fact, just look at how well the United Confederate States of America did as a government, they were besieged by the concerns of the States and ultimately doomed by their lack of a strong central government.