The South Carolina Secession convention, day by day

Andersonh1

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The South Carolina secession convention, or The Convention of the People of South Carolina, to give the more formal title, opened in Columbia on December 17, 1860. The proceedings were covered, transcribed by Robert Barnwell Rhett and published by the Charleston Mercury. My intention with this thread is to present the very long articles in short segments and walk through the conversations and debates that led to the adoption of the Ordinance of Secession on December 20th, four days later, with the goal being to learn what was discussed, what was adopted and what was not.

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Rhett first describes the scene:
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Business began at noon.
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After a few motions, including the appointment of a temporary secretary, the President of the convention spoke.
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Gentlemen: We have met here under circumstances more solemn than any of us have ever been placed in before. No one, it seems to me, is duly impressed with the magnitude of the work before him, who does not at the same time feel that he is about to enter upon the gravest and most solemn act which has fallen to the lot of this generation to accomplish. It is no less than the fixed determination to throw off a Government to which we have been accustomed, and to provide new safeguards for our future security. If any thing has been decided by the elections which sent us here, it is, that South Carolina must dissolve her connection with the Confederacy as speedily as possible. In the progress of this movement, we have two great dangers to fear, overtures from without and precipitation within. I trust that the door is now forever closed to all further connection with our Northern confederates; for what guarantees can they offer us, more strictly guarded, or under higher sanctions, than the present written compact between us? And did that sacred instrument protect us from the jealousy and aggressions of the North, commenced forty years ago, which resulted in the Missouri Compromise?

Did the Constitution protect us from the cupidity of the Northern people, who, for thirty-five years, have imposed the burden of supporting the General Government chiefly on the industry of the South? Did it save us from Abolition petitions, designed to annoy us and insult us, in the very halls of our Federal Congress? Did it enable us to obtain a single foot of the soil acquired in the war with Mexico, where the South furnished three-fourths of the money, two-thirds of the men, and four-fifths of the graves? Did it oppose any obstacle to the erection of California into a free-soil State, without any previous territorial existence, without any defined boundaries, or any census of her population? Did it throw any protection around the Southern settlers of Kansas, when the soil of that territory was invaded by the emissaries of Emigrant Aid Societies, in a crusade preached from Norther pulpits, when churchmen and women contributed Sharp's rifles and Colt's revolvers, to swell the butchery of Southern men? And has not that Constitution been trodden under foot by almost every Northern State, in their Ordinances nullifying all laws made for the recovery of fugitive slaves, by which untold millions of property have been lost to the South?

Let us no longer be duped by paper securities. Written Constitutions are worthless, unless they are written at the same time, in the hearts, and founded on the interests of a people; and as there is no common bond of sympathy or interest between the North and the South, all efforts to preserve this Union will not only be fruitless, but fatal to the less numerical section. The other danger to which I referred, may arise from too great impatience on the part of our people to precipitate the issue, in not waiting until they can strike with the authority of law.

At the moment of inaugurating a great movement like the present, I trust that we will go forward, and not be diverted from our purpose by influences from without. In the outset of this movement I can offer you no better motion than Danton's at the commencement of the French Revolution: "To dare! and again to dare! and without end to dare!" [Applause].
 
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