It cleverly assigned fire-eating secessionists like Leonidas W. South Carolina sent secession commissioners to the other Lower South states, urging disunion. There was also an element of strategy: immediately after it seceded, When South Carolina seceded, emissaries from Alabama and Mississippi were on hand to commend the decision. What had changed?Ībove all was a new sense of regional unity. That changed over the next three decades, though - and in 1861, after nearly 30 years of resisting the siren call of secession from SouthĬarolina, the cotton states followed its lead. Held back regional unity proved too thin to justify swift action. The state had gone to the brink in the 1830s, but the rest of the South Criticized widely for its political distemper throughout the antebellum period, SouthĬarolina remained immune to the charms of Jacksonian democracy and guided by the stern proslavery constitutional logic of John C. Though actual secession occurred quickly, South Carolinian leaders had indeed been pushing the idea for decades, without success. Calhoun, the father of South Carolina’s secession movement. Newspapers like the New York Times went so far as to call the seceded Lower South states the “Calhoun states” of America. have been schooled and in training for 30 years in their political doctrines.” Republican party Rights Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential elections, blamed secession fever on “the chronic hatred of South Carolina to the national Union.” Edmund Ruffin, an ardent Virginia secessionist,Īrgued that it was natural for South Carolina to lead the secession movement because “the people of S.Ca. Breckinridge of Kentucky, the pro-Union uncle of the southern While each state had its share of secessionist fire-eaters, observers on all sides laid the blame firmly at the feet of the Palmetto State. In that time six other states, comprising the entireĭeep South - Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas - had followed. Less than two months separated South Carolina’s decision to secede from the United States and the creation of a new country, the Confederate States of America. Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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