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On December 20, 1860, the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention voted to leave the Union. In the declaration explaining the causes of their momentous decision, they charged that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution." "Thus," they concluded, "the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation." As almost all historians have increasingly recognized, the institution of slavery was the primary cause of secession and, consequently, of the Civil War. At the same time, as the South Carolina declaration suggests, the debate over slavery and secession was framed in constitutional terms (Figure 1).
The "objects" of the U.S. Constitution referred to the various protections for slavery written into the document in 1787. In the decades leading to the i860 Charleston convention, Southern extremists claimed that those protections were increasingly weakened by Northern state laws, court decisions, and abohtionist activity. By i860, alarmed at the scope of these trends, secessionists argued that Northern states had violated the "compact" underlying the Constitution. In contrast, newly elected President Lincoln argued that the Union was "perpetual," had been created by the people of the nation, and could not be unilaterally dissolved by the act of any group of states. Despite Confederate charges of abolitionism, Lincoln correctly asserted that neither he nor the national government threatened slavery because both lacked the constitutional power to touch slavery in the states. Only when the war came and the Confederacy proclaimed its independence from the United States did Lincoln claim constitutional authority to end slavery. In all these respects, a consideration of constitutional issues is vital to an understanding of the origins of the Civil War.
The Antebellum Period
Most Americans believe that secession was about "states' rights," but the South Carolina delegates' complaints about the "increasing hostility" to slavery suggests quite the opposite. In the four decades before the outbreak of Civil War, Southern leaders had called for Northern states to support and enforce the federal fugitive slave law, change their own...