# South Carolina Declaration of Secession The "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union," adopted by the state's secession convention on **December 24, 1860** — four days after South Carolina became the first state to secede, and six weeks after the [[1860 Presidential Election]]. Drafted principally by Christopher Memminger (soon the Confederacy's Treasury secretary), it is the founding document of the secession-declaration genre and the single most-cited primary source for rebutting [[The Lost Cause]] claim that the [[American Civil War]] was about something other than slavery. ## Structure: the 1776 pastiche The Declaration self-consciously models itself on the Declaration of Independence — a recitation of compact theory, a bill of grievances, a formal dissolution. This is the template the genre carried forward: Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas issued their own declarations of causes within weeks, and the [[White Declaration of Independence]] reached for the same founding-era costume in 1898. The pattern — counter-democratic substance legitimized by revolutionary-era form — is one of the most durable rhetorical technologies in this vault. ## What it actually says The grievances are about slavery, explicitly and almost exclusively: - "An increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" — the phrase "slaveholding States" and variants appear throughout; the document names the institution roughly 18 times - Northern states' refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and their personal-liberty laws — a complaint that Northern states were exercising *too much* state sovereignty - Northern tolerance of abolition societies and of those who "denounce as sinful the institution of slavery" - The election of [[Abraham Lincoln]], "a man... whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery," and the prospect that the federal government would be turned against the institution Tariffs and economics-in-general are absent. The Declaration's intellectual scaffolding is [[John C. Calhoun]]'s compact theory, but its operative content is the protection of property in human beings, with [[Dred Scott v. Sandford]] standing as the constitutional settlement the North refused to honor. ## The states' rights self-refutation The document's most analytically valuable feature is its central contradiction: its loudest grievance is that Northern states asserted *states' rights* — nullifying federal fugitive-slave enforcement — against slavery. South Carolina objected not to federal power but to federal power's insufficient deployment on slavery's behalf. Any "states' rights, not slavery" account of secession has to survive contact with this text, and cannot. ## Why it matters for the KB It is the anchor primary source for the entire [[The Lost Cause]] cluster: when postwar revisionism (including [[Alexander Stephens]]'s own memoirs, walking back his [[Cornerstone Speech]]) recast the war as a constitutional dispute, the declarations of causes remained on the record saying otherwise. It also opens the genre lineage this Works folder now tracks — 1776 pastiche put to anti-democratic use — running 1860 → 1898 Wilmington → the founding-era cosplay of contemporary movements. For monument and memory debates ([[Confederate Monuments]]), it is the document that states what the commemorated cause was, in the commemorated actors' own words. ## Key passage > "...an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations... [Northern states] have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States." [[Manifestos and Founding Documents Hub]]