Disunion Feed

"An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery [...] 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 [...] the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State;"

Four days after the terse ordinance (se-011), the convention issued its manifesto — and named the cause plainly: Northern hostility to "the institution of slavery," broken fugitive-slave obligations, and "the right of property in slaves." The document that says the quiet part out loud. Non-contiguous sentences from the one text joined with [...]; verified against the Yale Avalon Project.

Read it in the original — Declaration of Immediate Causes, Dec 24, 1860 ↗

Next post: New York Herald, Dec 24, 1860 →

"While maintaining, what is undeniable, that no power to coerce a State is delegated by the constitution to either the President or to Congress, it has as strenuously asserted that individual delinquents may, if expedient, be reached and punished by the strong arm of the central government, through its federal courts. The attempt to coerce a State by military force would, as declared by Mr. Madison, be an act of war—a virtual recognition of its separate independence, and tantamount to a dissolution of the Union. Such an act of folly will never be committed by Mr. Buchanan."

The Herald (Bennett), the North's largest Democratic daily, states the coercion doctrine that governed the paralyzed final weeks of the Buchanan administration: the Constitution grants no power to force a State back, and the attempt would be war. Two days later a Pennsylvania Republican paper reprinted a Baltimore letter telling Buchanan that abandoning the Charleston forts made him one of the rebels (se-017). Via the AHA "Sixteen Months."

Read it in the original — New York Herald, Dec 24, 1860 ↗