In the Shadow of Our Founders: Part Three

It remains to this day somewhat unclear what violations of the Constitution actually occurred to drive the southern states from the Union. In fact, many of the Confederacy's present-day defenders drop all pretense of justifying the South's secession on alleged northern or federal violations of the Constitution. They sometimes argue that the "natural" rights of self-government and self-determination support the right of any people to change course and establish their own destiny. While compelling in a classroom, this view was not shared by Jefferson Davis, who was initially reluctant to support secession and only later embraced it, believing the South had no choice given perceived violations of the Constitution.

A review of the ordinances of secession reveals three general issues cited by the cotton states in their decision to leave the Union. First, many northern states refused to enforce the fugitive slave laws. Second, the presidential election of 1860 reflected the successful emergence of a purely "sectional" party built around a denunciation of slavery, an institution that the southern economy and culture depended upon. Finally, President-elect Lincoln's pledge to close the territories to slavery, thus choking off its expansion, was directly at odds with the cotton states' demand for a federal guarantee of slavery in the territories. (It was, after all, the cotton states' insistence on this guarantee that split the Democratic Party into the Stephen Douglas and John Breckenridge factions, making Lincoln's election possible.)

The first cited reason is the Confederacy's strongest point. Due to a compromise reached in Philadelphia between the slave states and those turning away from slavery, the Constitution protected the South's institution of "involuntary servitude" and called on the states to "deliver up" any "person held to service or labour" that escapes from one state to another. With growing abolitionist sentiment in the North, many states declined to abide by this requirement.

Lincoln addressed this in his First Inaugural, pointing out that each state should have full discretion to insure that individuals alleged to be fugitive slaves are accorded the "safeguards of liberty" rather than simply surrendering them up based on the claims of their possible masters alone. Yet Lincoln, while endorsing the premise that many northern states cleverly used to drag their feet in returning escaped slaves, still called upon all the people and the states to "conform to, and abide by" the Constitution and all its provisions.

The question on this point isn't whether the northern

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