Student Question
Why did the South form the Confederacy according to Stephens's "Cornerstone Speech" and the Ordinances of Secession? Did Stephens argue for different things?
Reference: Alexander Stephens's "Cornerstone Speech of the Confederacy" and the Declarations and Ordinances of Secession from South Carolina and Texas, Georgia, or Mississippi.
Quick answer:
The "Cornerstone Speech" by Alexander Stephens and the Declarations of Causes by the secession conventions each reveal that the Southern states left the Union primarily to preserve slavery. They all spoke of the danger posed to the institution of slavery by 1860, and each asserted that slavery was a "positive good" worth leaving the Union to defend.
The Ordinances of Secession do not reveal much about the reasons the states of the Deep South seceded. However, the Declarations of Causes, which were promulgated by the secession conventions at roughly the same time as the ordinances, do. These declarations all point to an identical cause for secession, which can be summed up in one phrase from the Mississippi Declaration: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world."
Each of the states argued that Northern states had become gripped by anti-slavery ideologues who sought to destroy slavery in the Southern states. For years, Southern states had been able to use the threat of secession to get concessions out of Northern states on a number of issues, most notably the package of legislation known as the 1850 Compromise. By 1860, the states of the Deep South at least were convinced they would...
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no longer be able to do so. The "states rights" they asserted amounted to the right to secede from the Union. The Declarations make it quite clear that they undertook this step in defense of slavery. The Texas convention made this abundantly clear, arguing that slavery was a positive good worth defending and that African Americans were unfit for anything but slavery:
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States... were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
In his speech in March of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the new Confederate States of America, made a similar point, asserting that even the founding generation of the United States had failed to grasp the positive benefits of slavery, which men like Thomas Jefferson had generally seen as a necessary evil:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
If the new Confederacy was founded upon this idea, then the states that remained in the Union saw things differently, Stephens continued:
They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...
The crux of the Vice President's argument was that the Southern states, founded on this "cornerstone," could no longer coexist with the North. According to this logic, secession was the only real choice slaveholders had. Stephens also spoke at length about the economic potential of the South, but the point is that, later "Lost Cause" mythologizing aside, the first seven Southern states to leave the the Union did so because they believed slavery was threatened.
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