The Secession Crisis

By the end of the 1850s and the beginning of the 1860s, the United States was on the brink of collapse. The borders between the various states were stuffed with expansive, boiling tensions, pushing the regions that once bonded to fight for liberty from Britain apart from one another. Slavery, a gross violation of every word in the Declaration of Independence and each foundational value serving as the basis of the American Revolution, was tearing the Union apart. Northerners were puzzled by how a nation that inscribed beautiful values of personal freedom and democracy in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights could tolerate the extreme hideousness of slavery. Ever since Eli Whitney made cash crop production much more efficient with the cotton gin, Southerners had become financially bound to the evils of slavery. Thus, they clung to the practice with an unhinged grip. Beginning with the debate over Missouri being a free or slave state from 1818 to 1820, Americans argued about the fate of slavery with increasing wrath. Come 1860, it was apparent that civil war was inevitable. What was less clear, though, was what the final straw would be.

That final straw proved to be the 1860 election. Betraying its left-wing origins under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the Democratic Party had become a hub of pro-slavery sentiment. But even the Democratic Party, by 1859 and 1860, was split along lines of slavery. President James Buchanan supported the Lecompton Constitution, an effort to make Kansas a slave state. However, a prominent Democratic Senator named Stephen Douglas, despite his pro-slavery policies, opposed the Lecompton Constitution. Douglas butted heads with fellow Democrat Buchanan, arguing that party support for the Lecompton Constitution would repel abolitionists from the party of Jackson. As a result, in 1860, the Democratic Party actually nominated 2 separate candidates. Douglas' supporters, known as the Northern Democrats nominated Douglas himself. Meanwhile, Buchanan's supporters, known as the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, Buchanan's vice president.

Just a year before the election, in 1859, John Bell, a senator from Tennessee known for being one of only a few southerners to oppose the expansion of slavery, founded the Constitutional Union Party. The Constitutional Union Party argued that since the Constitution protected the ability to own slaves, southern states did not need to secede and shouldn't secede. Its motto was "The Constitution as it is, the Union as it is". In other words, Bell and his supporters endorsed slavery but opposed southern secession. Bell, of course, became the Constitutional Union Party's nominee in 1860. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, founded as a single-issue progressive anti-slavery party back in 1854, nominated Abraham Lincoln. Interestingly, Lincoln was Douglas' rival. The election was set: The Democratic Party was represented by two men simultaneously, Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge. The Constitutional Union Party had nominated Bell, while the Republicans had nominated Lincoln.

Lincoln enjoyed several advantages in the election. By 1860, Americans had become a majority anti-slavery populace, boosting the Republican Party's odds. Since the pro-slavery vote was divided between Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas, each received fewer votes than they would have if their positions were confided within a single candidate. Finally, from March to June 1860, Republicans in Congress investigated corruption in the Buchanan Administration with the Covode Committee. The Covode Committee disbanded upon releasing a final report that stated that Buchanan was the most corrupt president in US history up until that point. This destroyed faith in the president and his party, with Republicans even distributing copies of the Covode Report at rallies. It was clear that Lincoln, at the very least, had a good shot of winning the election, provoking numerous southern states into threatening secession were the Republicans to win. The aforementioned factors - Buchanan's corruption, the split in the pro-slavery vote, and Americans' expanding disdain for enslavement - blended together to ensure Lincoln's victory in November. He became president-elect!

The people and the government, though mostly in support of Lincoln, were terrified by his success. Southern secession was imminent. Hoping to keep the Union together, a Senator from Kentucky named John Jordan Crittenden proposed the Crittenden Compromise on December 18, 1860. Were it to pass, the Crittenden Compromise would have enacted 7 Constitutional amendments:

• No clause of the Crittenden Compromise could be repealed
• The Missouri Compromise, a ban on slavery in any part of the Louisiana Purchase located north of Missouri's southern border (exempting only Missouri itself), would be revived following its repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska Act under Franklin Pierce
• Congress would have to financially reimburse any slaveowner who permanently and irretrievably lost their slave due to the efforts of abolitionists
• Congress would not be allowed to ban slavery on land it owned if that land existed within the boundaries of a slave state
• Congress would not be allowed to institute a nationwide ban on slavery or ban slavery within the boundaries of any specific state
• Congress would not be allowed to regulate the sale of slaves to any extent
• Congress would be barred from banning slavery in Washington DC until both Virginia and Maryland did so; even then, the ban had to be preceded by an election in which a majority of people in the city expressed a desire for slavery to be prohibited

Ultimately, though, the Crittenden Compromise would be futile. Just 2 days after its passage, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. Mississippi followed suit on January 9, 1861. The beginning of January 1861, in fact, saw numerous states break away from the Union one after the other. Florida seceded on January 10, 1861, as did Alabama on January 11, 1861. As this took place, Congress bickered over whether or not it would implement the Crittenden Compromise. Lincoln himself staunchly opposed the idea. He was an abolitionist, although a moderate one who simply wanted to condemn slavery to a gradual death by banning its expansion into areas where it didn't already exist. Still, he was appalled by the implications of the Crittenden Compromise. Thus, Congress formally rejected Crittenden's amendments on January 16, 1861. This only irritated southern rage even more. On January 19, 1861, Georgia seceded to protest the failure of the Crittenden Compromise. Louisiana and Texas did the same on January 26, 1861, and February 1, 1861, respectively.

The Crittenden Compromise, however, was not the final attempt to spare the Union from the vile delusions of southern plantation owners. On February 4, 1861, a group of politicians led by ex-President John Tyler met at Willard Hotel to begin the Washington Peace Conference, a meeting organized by the state of Virginia. Ridiculed by the press as "the Old Gentlemen's Convention", the Washington Peace Conference adjourned on February 27, 1861, upon publishing its plan for preserving the Union. Under this proposal, the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850, 2 previous attempts at quelling tensions over slavery, would be embedded within the Constitution. What's more, any pre-existing Constitutional policy regarding slavery would be exempt from reversal or abolition. And since most conflicts over slavery centered around the introduction of the practice into new territories, the Washington Peace Conference argued that no new land could be acquired by the United States unless a majority of delegates to Congress from both free and slave states agreed to the addition of that land. These amendments were quickly rejected by Congress, however.

During the Washington Peace Conference's brief existence, the newly-seceded southern states merged on February 8, 1861, to establish the Confederate States of America. 10 days later, Jefferson Finis Davis, a Senator from Mississippi who originally opposed secession but switched his position when his home state left the Union, was made the president of the Confederacy on February 18, 1861. Davis was chosen for 2 main reasons: For starters, as previously mentioned, he opposed secession until Mississippi broke away. This made him appear like a moderate, which the Confederacy hoped would make him diplomatic and palatable in the eyes of the Union. Secondly, he had immense political and military experience. He spent years in Congress and had graduated from West Point, even being secretary of war under Pierce. Either way, Davis was now the leader of the evil, depraved, unhinged counterpart of the Free World.

Both the Crittenden Compromise and Washington Peace Conference had failed. But the Union was not going to give up so easily! Buchanan, who prior to this had done practically nothing to address secession out of the belief that the federal government had no Constitutional authority to enforce laws permanently tying states to the Union, even took action. On February 28, 1861, he sent a message to Congress requesting the passage of a Constitutional amendment barring the federal government from banning slavery. Although Buchanan was incredibly unpopular, this idea was unfortunately well-received. Named for its main author - Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio - the Corwin Amendment did just as Buchanan had asked, being approved by the necessary 2/3 of Congress on March 2, 1861. In order to join the list of Constitutional amendments now, the Corwin Amendment had to be endorsed by 3/4 of the remaining states. Even Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment! Speaking of whom, Lincoln was inaugurated, officially replacing Buchanan as president on March 4, 1861.

A mere day into his presidency, on March 5, 1861, Lincoln received word that Fort Sumter, a Union-owned military base in Confederate South Carolina, was running out of supplies. This forced Lincoln to sit between two horrid options: He could either send new materials to Fort Sumter, thus provoking a Confederate declaration of war, or allow Fort Sumter to run out of food and other supplies, dooming its inhabitants to an agonizing death. He did, however, find a brilliant middle ground. He decided to resupply Fort Sumter, but, as he would make abundantly clear to the Confederacy, would send exclusively food and no munitions. Lincoln hoped that this would satisfy the southern slaveowners and hold off, or perhaps even prevent civil war. Sadly, he was wrong. On April 12, 1861, at the behest of Confederate President Davis, southern forces led by P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter, beginning the American Civil War.

With civil war at hand, Lincoln began working to crush the Confederate rebellion. On April 15, 1861, he issued a presidential proclamation asking that 75,000 Americans volunteer to join the military with the goal of ending the war in a Union victory by July 4 of that year. For some of the remaining southern slave states, this was the last straw. On April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded in protest of the Call for 75,000 Volunteers. This provoked an interesting intra-state secession of its own. Ever since the 1830s, people in the western half of Virginia had grown increasingly distant from those in the eastern half of the state, mainly because the west disliked slavery while the east supported it. On May 13, 1861, delegates from various counties across the western portion of Virginia met at the Wheeling Convention to decide what they'd do regarding the state's choice to secede. They originally wanted to set up their own state government in Wheeling that claimed control over all of Virginia, but then discarded that idea. They then came up with a new solution: Since the state of Virginia had seceded from the Union, western counties would secede from the state of Virginia! The Wheeling Convention disbanded on May 15, 1861, with the modern state of West Virginia being carved out soon after.

Just before the Wheeling Convention, Arkansas seceded and defected to the Confederacy on May 6, 1861. North Carolina then joined with its southern counterpart in seceding on May 20, 1861. Then, Tennessee became the final state to secede, declaring separation from the Union on June 8, 1861. Two distinct geopolitical identities had formed. The United States of America, the culmination of Enlightenment ideals that solidified in the form of one of history's most important mutinies back in 1775 and 1776, had, by the start of the civil war, existed for almost a century. It was a glistening beacon of liberty fighting to emancipate another oppressed population, to shatter the chains wrapped around the ankles and wrists of southern slaves. Meanwhile, the Confederate States of America, a shell government made up of the states hesitant to endorse the Revolutionary War, represented a deranged attempt to restore the totalitarianism the US was established to escape. With violent tensions established between the two, a civil war commenced. The next 4 years would define America's destiny. Would it begin to ignore the cries of the tyrannized by first neglecting the sorrows of slavery, or would it strengthen its status as a symbol of freedom?