The Pretext for Disunion: National Constitution and South Carolina

The Legislature of South Carolina assembled at Columbia on the day after Mr. Lincoln's election, when joint resolutions of both houses providing for a State Convention to consider the withdrawal of the State from the Union were offered. Some of the more cautious members counselled delay, but they were overborne by the more fiery zealots, who did not wish the popular excitement caused by the election to cool before the decisive step should be taken. One of the latter (Mr. Mullins, of Marion), in a speech against delay and waiting for the co-operation of other States, revealed the fact that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the State were opposed to the schemes of the politicians. He also revealed the important fact that emissaries had been sent to Europe to prepare the way for aid and recognition by foreign governments of the contemplated Southern Confederacy. "We have it from high authority," he said, "that the representative of one of the imperial powers of Europe [France], in view of the prospective separation of one or more of the Southern States from the present Confederacy, has made propositions in advance for the establishment of such relations between it and the government about to be established in this State, as will insure to that power such a supply of cotton for the future as their increasing demand for that article will require." He urged the importance of immediate action. "If we wait for co-operation," he said, "Slavery and State rights will be abandoned; State sovereighty and the cause of the South lost forever." James Chestnut, a member of the United States Senate, recommended immediate secession; and W. W. Boyce, of the National House of Representatives, said: "I think the only policy for us is to arm as soon as we receive authentic intelligence of the election of Lincoln. It is for South Carolina, in the quickest manner and by the most direct means, to withdraw from the Union."

Other members of the Legislature were equally vehement; and on the 12th of November (1860) an act was passed authorizing a Convention. The Legislature also formulated the doctrine of "State Sovereignty" or State Supremacy, in a resolution that declared that a "Sovereign State" of the Union had a right to secede from it, adopting as its own the doctrine that the States of the Union are not subordinate to the National Government; were not created by it, and do not belong to it; that they created the National Government; from them it derives its powers; to them it is responsible, and when it abuses the trust reposed in it, they, as equal sovereigns, have a right to resume the powers respectively delegated to it by them. This is the sum and substance of the doctrine of State Supremacy ("State Rights" as it was adroitly called) which dwarfs patriotism to the narrow dimensions of a single State, denationalizes the American citizen, and opposes the fundamental principles upon which the founders of the Republic securely built our noble superstructure of a free, powerful and sovereign Commonwealth. And it perverts the plain meaning of the Preamble to the National Constitution, which declares that the people (not States) of the whole country had given vitality to that fundamental law of the land, and to the nation. James Madison, one of the founders of the Republic, in a letter to Edmund Randolph in April, 1787, wrote: "I hold it for a fundamental point, that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcilable with the idea of aggregate sovereignty." And Washington wrote in a letter to John Jay, in March, 1787, on the subject of the National Constitution: "A thirst for power, and the bantling--I had liked to have said the monster--sovereignty, which have taken such fast hold of the States individually, will, when joined by the many whose personal consequence in the line of State politics will, in a manner, be annihilated, form a strong phalanx against it."