To announce Georgia's formal intent to secede from the Union.
An Ordinance of Secession was the name given to multiple resolutions[1] drafted and ratified in 1860 and 1861, at or near the beginning of the Civil War, by which each seceding slave-holding Southern state or territory formally declared secession from the United States of America. South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas also issued separate documents purporting to justify secession.
Adherents of the Union side in the Civil War regarded secession as illegal by any means and President Abraham Lincoln, drawing in part on the legacy of President Andrew Jackson, regarded it as his job to preserve the Union by force if necessary. However, President James Buchanan, in his State of the Union Address of December 3, 1860, stated that the Union rested only upon public opinion and that conciliation was its only legitimate means of preservation; President Thomas Jefferson also had suggested in 1816, after his presidency but in official correspondence, that secession of some states might be desirable.
Beginning with South Carolina in December 1860, eleven Southern states and one territory[2] both ratified an ordinance of secession and effected de facto secession by some regular or purportedly lawful means, including by state legislative action, special convention, or popular referendum, as sustained by state public opinion and mobilized military force. Both sides in the Civil War regarded these eleven states and territory as de facto seceding.
Two other Southern states, Missouri and Kentucky, attempted secession ineffectively or only by irregular means. These two states remained within the Union, but were regarded by the Confederacy as having seceded. Two remaining Southern states, Delaware and Maryland, rejected secession and were not regarded by either side as having seceded. No other state considered secession. In 1863 a Unionist government in western Virginia created a new state from 50 western counties which entered the Union as West Virginia. The new state contained 24 counties that had ratified Virginia's secession ordinance.[3]
The first seven seceding states, all of the Deep South, were motivated mainly by the election in November 1860 of President Lincoln, who had no support among Southern voters, and the direct threat to slavery his election posed.
The next four seceding states, further north, also were motivated by the same two factors, but another factor was the Federal policy of using military force to preserve the Union.[citation needed]
In Missouri and Kentucky, attempted secession was belated, severely disrupted, lacked sufficient popular support, and failed. In Missouri, the state government called a convention whose members disfavored secession. Union military intervention quickly restored Union control, first in St. Louis, then throughout nearly the whole state. The ineffective Missouri ordinance of secession eventually was passed only by a rump convention meeting at Neosho. In Kentucky, whose potential secession Unionists particularly feared,[19] both the legislature and public opinion firmly opposed secession. Only an even less influential rump convention purported to secede. When Confederate armies invaded Kentucky in 1862, bringing extra arms to equip new volunteers, briefly seizing the state capital, and installing an ephemeral state government, local recruitment proved weak and Union forces soon decisively defeated the invasion. Despite Missouri and Kentucky remaining within the Union, thousands from both states embraced secession by choosing to fight for the Confederacy.
Elsewhere, the Delaware legislature quickly, firmly rejected secession despite targeted lobbying from states intending to secede. President Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and overwhelming Union military intervention aimed at protecting Washington blocked the Maryland legislature, or any other group in Maryland, from considering secession further after the legislature overwhelmingly rejected calling a secession convention but retained some notion of limiting cooperation with the Union and military coercion. Geographic exposure to conflict between larger neighboring states also deterred secession in Delaware and Maryland. As in Missouri and Kentucky, thousands from Delaware and Maryland also fought for the Confederacy. The unorganized Indian Territory did not document secession and was not unanimous in its orientation, but generally supported the Confederacy. No other state or territory contemplated secession, and the Confederacy did not claim Delaware or Maryland as member states.[20]
Bitter, violent controversy remained even in states where a popular majority clearly favored secession. A geographic correlation existed between local prevalence of slavery[21] and support for secession. Beyond Virginia, effective secession in most of a state could critically destabilize or virtually eliminate state government control over a region where people strongly rejected secession and favored the Union, such as East Tennessee and other areas. Thousands from seceding states, including slaves where the opportunity arose, also chose to fight for the Union.
See also
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↑ On January 19, the Tennessee legislature in special session beginning January 7 required that approval of a possible secession convention be put to referendum on February 9. Voters rejected the convention, and by extension, any secession. Had it convened, it would have been overwhelmingly pro-Union. Thousands of pro-Union voters voted for a secession convention aiming that it should fail.
↑ Curry, Richard Orr, A House Divided, A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1964, pg. 49
The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union. The central conflict leading to war was a dispute over whether slavery should be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prohibited from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States (C.S.), the Confederacy, or the South, was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confederacy comprised eleven U.S. states that declared secession and warred against the United States during the American Civil War. The states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
The 1860 United States presidential election was the 19th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 1860. In a four-way contest, the Republican Party ticket of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won a national popular plurality, a popular majority in the North where states already had abolished slavery, and a national electoral majority comprising only Northern electoral votes. Lincoln's election thus served as the main catalyst of the states that would become the Confederacy seceding from the Union. This marked the first time that a Republican was elected president. It was also the first presidential election in which both major party candidates were registered in the same home state; the others have been in 1904, 1920, 1940, 1944, and 2016.
In the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states or the Border South were four, later five, slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia. To their north they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware bordered slave states of the Confederacy to their south.
Claiborne Fox Jackson was an American politician of the Democratic Party in Missouri. He was elected as the 15th Governor of Missouri, serving from January 3, 1861, until July 31, 1861, when he was forced out by the Unionist majority in the Missouri General Assembly after planning to force the secession of the state.
The Peace Conference of 1861 was a meeting of 131 leading American politicians in February 1861, at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the American Civil War. The conference's purpose was to avoid, if possible, the secession of the eight slave states from the upper and border South that had not done so as of that date. The seven states that had already seceded did not attend.
The 37th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, consisting of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C., from March 4, 1861, to March 4, 1863, during the first two years of Abraham Lincoln's presidency. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was based on the 1850 United States census.
Alabama was central to the Civil War, with the secession convention at Montgomery, the birthplace of the Confederacy, inviting other slaveholding states to form a southern republic, during January–March 1861, and to develop new state constitutions. The 1861 Alabaman constitution granted citizenship to current U.S. residents, but prohibited import duties (tariffs) on foreign goods, limited a standing military, and as a final issue, opposed emancipation by any nation, but urged protection of African-American slaves with trials by jury, and reserved the power to regulate or prohibit the African slave trade. The secession convention invited all slaveholding states to secede, but only 7 Cotton States of the Lower South formed the Confederacy with Alabama, while the majority of slave states were in the Union at the time of the founding of the Confederacy. Congress had voted to protect the institution of slavery by passing the Corwin Amendment on March 4, 1861, but it was never ratified.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, and was one of the founding member states of the Confederacy in February 1861. The bombardment of the beleaguered U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, is generally recognized as the first military engagement of the war. The retaking of Charleston in February 1865, and raising the flag again at Fort Sumter, was used for the Union symbol of victory.
Texas declared its secession from the Union on February 1, 1861, and joined the Confederate States on March 2, 1861, after it had replaced its governor, Sam Houston, who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. As with those of other states, the Declaration of Secession was not recognized by the US government at Washington, DC. Some Texan military units fought in the Civil War east of the Mississippi River, but Texas was more useful for supplying soldiers and horses for the Confederate Army. Texas' supply role lasted until mid-1863, when Union gunboats started to control the Mississippi River, which prevented large transfers of men, horses, or cattle. Some cotton was sold in Mexico, but most of the crop became useless because of the Union's naval blockade of Galveston, Houston, and other ports.
The American state of Virginia became a prominent part of the Confederacy when it joined during the American Civil War. As a Southern slave-holding state, Virginia held the state convention to deal with the secession crisis and voted against secession on April 4, 1861. Opinion shifted after the Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, and April 15, when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union to put down the rebellion. For all practical purposes, Virginia joined the Confederacy on April 17, though secession was not officially ratified until May 23. A Unionist government was established in Wheeling and the new state of West Virginia was created by an act of Congress from 50 counties of western Virginia, making it the only state to lose territory as a consequence of the war. Unionism was indeed strong also in other parts of the State, and during the war the Restored Government of Virginia was created as rival to the Confederate Government of Virginia, making it one of the states to have 2 governments during the Civil War.
The Missouri Constitutional Convention of 1861–1863 was a constitutional convention held in the state of Missouri during the American Civil War. The convention was elected in early 1861, and voted against secession. When open fighting broke out between Pro-Confederate governor Claiborne Fox Jackson and Union authorities, and Union forces occupied the state capital, the convention formed a provisional state government, and functioned as a quasi-legislature for several years. The convention never did produce a new constitution; that task was delegated to a new convention, elected in 1864.
In the context of the United States, secession primarily refers to the voluntary withdrawal of one or more states from the Union that constitutes the United States; but may loosely refer to leaving a state or territory to form a separate territory or new state, or to the severing of an area from a city or county within a state. Advocates for secession are called disunionists by their contemporaries in various historical documents.
Events from the year 1861 in the United States. This year marked the beginning of the American Civil War.
The Central Confederacy was a proposed nation made up of American states in the Upland South prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
The U.S. state of Louisiana declared that it had seceded from the United States on January 26, 1861. It then announced that it had joined the Confederate States (C.S.); Louisiana was the sixth slave state to declare that it had seceded from the U.S. and joined the C.S.
The Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 was called in the state capital of Richmond to determine whether Virginia would secede from the United States, govern the state during a state of emergency, and write a new Constitution for Virginia, which was subsequently voted down in a referendum under the Confederate Government.
The Confederate States of America was created on February 8, 1861, by representatives from six states that had recently declared their secession from the United States of America, starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860. After the start of the American Civil War on April 12, 1861, between the two countries, five additional states would secede, and representatives of two others would gain admittance to the Confederacy. The country also held alliances with several Indian nations and claimed a territory in its far west. However, after its swift formation, it would only lose control over its territory over the next four years, culminating in total defeat in early 1865 and the formal dissolution of the government on May 5. The entire claimed area of the Confederate States was claimed by the United States.
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