Secession
Nolan Anselmi
Secession, as it applies to the outbreak of the American Civil War, includes the series of events that began on December 20, 1860, and extended through June 8 of the next year when the eleven states in the Lower and Upper South cut off their ties with the Union. The term "secession" had been used as early as 1776. South Carolina threatened separation when the Continental Congress sought to tax all the colonies on the basis of a total population count that would include slaves. Secession in this instance and throughout the whole entire antebellum period came to mean that the assertion of the smaller number of sectional interests against what was perceived to be a hostile or the inferior bigger number. Secession had been a matter of concern to some of the members of the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787. But as modernizing the United States began, differences between the two major sections grew more pronounce. A plantation cotton culture worked by slave labor became very heavily concentrated in the South and industrial development with free labor in the North. A wave of reform activity in Europe and the United States made the abolition, or at least the restriction of slavery a major goal in the free states. Since abolition affected the labor system as well as the social structure of the slave states, threats of secession expressed the political dialogue from 1819 through 1860. |
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