Disunion Feed

"We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained [...] that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of "The United States of America," is hereby dissolved."

The operative act, adopted at Charleston at 1.15 p.m. — the whole of it repeals South Carolina's 1788 ratification of the Constitution and declares the Union dissolved. It names no cause; the reasons came four days later (the Declaration of Immediate Causes). The first state out. Middle repeal clause elided with an ellipsis; verified verbatim against the Wikisource transcription.

Read it in the original — Ordinance of Secession, Dec 20, 1860 ↗

"Those in the border Slave States who are willing to give up everything that freemen should hold dear, to maintain the existing Union, and, if that cannot be done, desire to fasten these States on as the tail of the Northern Confederacy, complain bitterly of what they call the precipitancy of the Cotton States [...] The Cotton States [...] owe it to their own citizens and the world to secure themselves now."

A border-state (Kentucky) fire-eater defends South Carolina's "precipitancy" and scorns the conditional Unionists who would make the border South "the tail of the Northern Confederacy." Via the AHA "Sixteen Months to Sumter" reproduction of Dumond's Southern Editorials on Secession.

Read it in the original — Louisville Daily Courier, Dec 20, 1860 ↗