Historica Olomucensia

The South against the Union: Background of 19th Century Southern Secessionism

The purpose of this article, based on a lecture given at the Department of History, Palacky University in Olomouc, is to present the readers with some insight into the complex set of motivations that led one part of the United States to embrace the "states' rights" theory and, in the end, to put it into a political reality, starting the American civil war. Author explicitly follows two main sources of motivation - the cultural dichotomy of the original colonial society, the one which grew over time instead of leveling itself - i.e., the tension between agrarian and ever more conservative South, more and more dependent on its "peculiar institution" in economic as well as social and, at the end, cultural sense; and the group of states loosely defined as "the North" and later also "the West", undergoing the social revolution of modernization, fuelled by massive immigration of 1840s and 1850s. The main argument is that the Southern secessionism grew out of fear of modernity (which would inevitably bring a downfall of slave-based society), and that the real crisis came when this ever-growing fear connected with the ambiguous nature of the country itself. As it was never particularly clear if the Constitution constituted a "Perpetual Union" or just a "compact" to be possibly dissolved through people's or states' rights, with some of the Founding Fathers (especially Thomas Jefferson) sometimes leaning to the latter, connection of this inherent ambiguity with a deep political rift was probably a question of time. When the Southerners, through John C. Calhoun, finally claimed the "states' rights" theory for themselves and perfected it in late 1830s, it took it only a short time to connect with their growing fear (however irrational it might be) of being ridden of slavery. Getting more and more defensive and watching changes in the North with fear, the South ended up using the ultimate "state right" that was only slightly invoked before - secession. Lincoln and most of the North insisted on the idea of "Perpetual Union", and the civil war followed.