Why the South Seceded

 

The Man Without A Country: Clement Laird Vallandigham

Writing in 1913, historian Nathaniel Wright Stephenson explained the political situation in America thus: “It is almost impossible to-day to realize the state of the country in the year 1860. The bad feeling between the two sections, all came to a head, and burst into fury, over the episode of John Brown.”

In The Declaration of the Immediate Causes issued by the South Carolina Secession Convention in December 1860, one of the grievances put forth was the activity of Northern abolitionist organizations which “sent emissaries, books and pictures” into the South intended to incite the slaves to a violent uprising. Southerners well remembered a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831 in which fifty-seven white persons, many of them women and children, were massacred by slaves led by Nat Turner. A raid in Virginia in 1859 led by the abolitionist John Brown made Southerners even more anxious about their safety in the Union. Brown planned to capture weapons at an armory at Harper’s Ferry and to lead an armed slave rebellion, and it was soon revealed that his murderous raid had been funded by six wealthy abolitionists in the North. Newspaper reports described Brown’s maps of Southern states, including South Carolina, which were ominously marked to suggest the locations of more plotted uprisings.

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