The Secession Winter: Two Documents, Two Stories

A Nation Pulling Apart

1By 1850 the North and the South had grown apart. The North had more factories, cities, railroads and immigrants. The South's economy depended on cotton and other crops grown mostly by enslaved people, and by 1860 nearly 4 million people were enslaved in the United States. Only about one in four white Southern families enslaved anyone, but enslavers held great political power, and many white Southerners defended slavery as necessary to their economy and way of life. The Northern states had ended slavery one by one, and a growing number of Northerners opposed its spread.

2As the nation gained western land, the hardest question was whether slavery would spread into new territories and states. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and it banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of a set line. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state, but it also included a stronger Fugitive Slave Act, which required people in the North to help capture and return people who had escaped slavery. Many Northerners were angered by the law.

3In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act let settlers in those territories vote on whether to allow slavery, an idea called popular sovereignty. The act ended the Missouri Compromise line. Supporters and opponents of slavery rushed into Kansas, and fighting there earned the name "Bleeding Kansas." Opponents of slavery's spread formed the new Republican Party. In 1857 the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.

4In 1860 the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern groups, and four major candidates ran for President. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican, promised to stop slavery from spreading into the territories. He was not even on the ballot in most Southern states, but he won because the free states held most of the electoral votes. In December 1860 South Carolina voted to secede, or leave the Union. By February 1861 six more states of the Deep South had followed and formed the Confederate States of America. A last compromise plan in Congress, offered by Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky, failed.

Document A: Adapted from South Carolina's declaration of the causes of its secession, December 1860

The Constitution promised that people who escaped from slavery would be returned. Many Northern states have refused to keep this promise and have passed laws that make it useless. They have allowed groups whose goal is to end slavery to organize and to stir up enslaved people to leave. Now a party from one section of the country has elected a President whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He has said that the government cannot last forever half slave and half free. The states of the North have broken the agreement that held the Union together, so South Carolina is free of its duty to stay in it.

Document B: Adapted from President Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." I believe I have no lawful right to do so. The Constitution's rule on returning people who escape from slavery should be obeyed, and I will not ask anyone to ignore it. One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only real dispute. No state can lawfully leave the Union on its own. We are not enemies, but friends.