Ordinance of Secession Adopted

While the National Legislature were tossing upon the suddenly raised surges of disunion, and the people of the free-labor States were listening with breathless anxiety to the roar of the tempest at the Capitol, the noise of the storm in the far South was like the portentous bellowing of distant thunder. It was raging vehemently in South Carolina. The Convention at Charleston, after passing the Ordinance of Secession, appointed commissioners to proceed to Washington to treat for the possession of public property within the limits of South Carolina. They also issued an Address to the people of the other slave-labor States, and a Declaration of the causes which impelled South Carolina to leave the Union. In the former, they said: "South Carolina desires no destiny separate from yours. To be one of a great slave-holding Confederacy, stretching its arms over territory larger than any power in Europe possesses, with a population four times greater than that of the whole United States when they achieved their independence of the British empire; with productions which make our existence more important to the world than that of any other people inhabiting it; with common institutions to defend and common dangers to encounter, we ask your sympathy and confederation. All we demand of other people, is to be let alone to work out our own high destinies. United, we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages. We ask you to join in forming a Confederacy of Slave-holding States." In their declaration of causes for the separation, they failed to point out a single act of wrong on the part of the Government they were intending to destroy, and it consisted chiefly of complaints that the Northern people did not look upon slavery with favor; were opposed to the Fugitive-Slave Law, and did not believe a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States was superior in authority to the Divine Law.

On the day when that Declaration was adopted, the governor of South Carolina (Pickens) issued a proclamation declaring the sovereignty, freedom and independence of that State, and that it was vested with national functions. The proclamation closed with the words--"Given under my hand, the 24th of December, 1860, and in the eighty-fifth year of the sovereignty and independence of South Carolina." Then, with perfect consistency, the Charleston newspapers published intelligence from the other States of the Union, under the head of "Foreign News." A small medal was struck to commemorate the secession of the State, and a banner for the new empire was adopted, composed of red silk, bearing a blue silk cross with fifteen white stars, the number of the slave-labor States. The Convention appointed one commissioner to each of the States to invite the politicians to form a Southern Confederacy; authorized Governor Pickens, as chief magistrate of the new nation, to receive ambassadors, consuls, etc., from foreign countries, and took other measures for organizing a national government. The governor chose cabinet ministers, and the South Carolina nation began its brief career.

"A nationality!" exclaimed the London Morning Star, when commenting upon this Declaration of the sovereignty of South Carolina. "Was there ever, since the world began, a nation constituted of such materials--a commonwealth founded on such a basis? The greatest empire of antiquity is said to have grown up from a group of huts, built in a convenient location by fugitive slaves and robber huntsmen. But history nowhere chronicles the establishment of a community of slaveholders solely upon the alleged right of maintaining and enlarging their property in man. Paganism at least protected the Old World from so monstrous a scandal upon free commonwealths, by shutting out the idea of a common humanity, and of individual rights derivable from inalienable duties."