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Why White Southerners Want To Secede Essay

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Southern commissioners employed various tactics to persuade the southern states to secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861. Commissioners, who were average people, were tasked to help convince slave states to secede from the North. Their messages illustrate the main reasons for white southerners wanting to secede from the Union. Although commissioners varied their arguments depending on the state, they set forth a clear message as to the South’s desire to separate. Racial equality, the Republican Party, and economics all caused a deep-rooted fear in the southern states. This fearfulness led to the secession of the South and the creation of the Confederacy. The biggest and most notable source of fear that white southerners possessed was …show more content…

James Orr illustrated South Carolina’s stance against racial equality by saying he “never would submit to such equality, equality at the ballot box and jury box, and at the witness stand.” Southern white men feared racial equality for three main reasons: a justification to end slavery, the possibility of being outnumbered by the black populace, and a drastic change in the social life. At this point in history, the south no longer viewed slavery as a ‘necessary evil,’ but rather as the primary consequence of the inferiority of the black man. Mississippi’s commissioner Jacob Thomson vocalized that slavery was justified by racial differences by saying, “the social principle that equality is not the right of man, but the right of equals only.” Although not spoken outright, southerners feared that racial equality …show more content…

The southern whites feared the “the fate of the white race under Republican rule.” Many southern white men noted that Abraham Lincoln clearly wanted to end the southern way of life by forcing racial equality. “The North has variably exerted against slavery, all the power which it had at the time.” Many southern states saw the plans of the party as an abuse of federal government power, and feared what that could mean for the future. The southern states reasoned that secession was the natural response to the election of Republican president Abraham Lincoln. Finally, the South feared the economic repercussions that racial equality and Republican rule would initiate. The interstate slave trade consisted of nearly a significant portion of the South’s economics. Stephen Hale did not exaggerate when he said, “Constitutes the most valuable species of their [southern states] property, worth, according to recent estimates, not less than $4,000,000,000.” The South feared to lose the wealth and power that slavery provided since the formation of the United

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In this paper there has been a discussion of the legislation and the tensions preceding the southern Secession. Based on this discussing it can be concluded that the tensions, which culminated with the Civil War, were present many decades before the secession itself. Even threats of Civil war and secession were present much prior to this particular conflict. 
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However, in order to push their belief of a secession, “South Carolina’s headlong rush to secede required some explanation and justification, particularly in light of the state’s well-deserved reputation as the most radical of all the slaveholding states” (49) So these commissioners did. Judge Handy said to the audience in Baltimore, that the Republicans will take their God given right way to own slavery because, “slavery was ordinated by God and sanctioned by humanity,” (33) and that it was religious and state right for southerners to own slaves. Judge Harris was the one to set the tone for the racial theme that the commissioners needed to persuade the southern states to join them in the secession. In his speech at the George General assembly he said that, “she had rather see the last of her race…immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.”

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Throughout early 1861, the State Commissioners spread a narrative of impending destruction to the Southern way of life at the hands of a Republican, abolitionist government. Mississippi’s Commissioner to Georgia stated, ““They have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and negro races, under our Constitution; equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony” (Dew 2001, 29). The remainder of the Commissioners speaking across the South continued such rhetoric. As succession became imminent the States met respectively and adopted their individual Declarations of

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