The secession bell rang out in South Carolina on the 20th of December, 1860, not to summon the men to arms, nor to prepare the State for war. There was no conquest that the State wished to make, no foe on her border, no enemy to punish. Like the liberty bell of the revolution that electrified the colonies from North to South, the bell of secession put the people of the State in a frenzy from the mountains to the sea. It announced to the world that South Carolina would be free—that her people had thrown off the yoke of the Union that bound the States together in an unholy alliance. For years the North had been making encroachments upon the South; the general government grasping, with a greedy hand, those rights and prerogatives, which belonged to the States alone, with a recklessness only equalled by Great Britain towards the colonies; began absorbing all of the rights guaranteed to the State by the constitution, and tending towards a strong and centralized government. They had made assaults upon our institutions, torn away the barriers that protected our sovereignty. So reckless and daring had become these assaults, that on more than one occasion the States of the South threatened dissolution of the Union. But with such master minds as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun in the councils of the nation, the calamity was averted for the time. The North had broken compact after compact, promises after promises, until South Carolina determined to act upon those rights she had retained for herself in the formation of the Union, and which the general government guaranteed to all, and withdrew when that Union no longer served the purposes for which it was formed.
Slavery, it has been said, was the cause of the war. Incidentally it may have been, but the real cause was far removed from the institution of slavery. That institution existed at[10] the formation of the Union, or compact. It had existed for several hundred years, and in every State; the federation was fully cognizant of the fact when the agreement of the Union was reached. They promised not to disturb it, and allow each State to control it as it seemed best. Slavery was gradually but surely dying out. Al0ong the border States it scarcely existed at all, and the mighty hand of an All-wise Ruler could be plainly seen in the gradual emancipation of all the slaves on the continent. It had begun in the New England States then. In the Caribbean Sea and South America emancipation had been gradually closing in upon the small compass of the Southern States, and that by peaceful measures, and of its own volition; so much so that it would have eventually died out, could not be denied by any who would look that far into the future, and judge that future by the past. The South looked with alarm and horror at a wholesale emancipation, when they viewed its havoc and destruction in Hayti and St. Domingo, where once existed beautiful homes and luxuriant fields, happy families and general progress; all this wealth, happiness, and prosperity had been swept away from those islands as by a deadly blight. Ruin, squalor, and beggary now stalks through those once fair lands.
A party sprang up at the North inimical to the South; at first only a speck upon the horizon, a single sail in a vast ocean; but it grew and spread like contagion. They were first called agitators, and consisted of a few fanatics, both women and men, whose avowed object was emancipation—to do by human hands that which an All-wise Providence was surely doing in His own wise way. At first the South did not look with any misgivings upon the fanatics. But when Governors of Northern States, leading statesmen in the councils of the nation; announced this as their creed and guide, then the South began to consider seriously the subject of secession. Seven Governors and their legislatures at the North had declared, by acts regularly passed and ratified, their determination "not to allow the laws of the land to be administered or carried out in their States." They made preparation to nullify the laws of Congress and the constitution. That party, which was first called "Agitators," but now took the name of'"Republicans"—called at the South the "black Republicans"—had [11] grown to such proportions that they put in the field candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States. Numbers increased with each succeeding campaign. In the campaign of 1860 they put Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin forward as their standard bearers, and whose avowed purpose was the "the liberation of the slaves, regardless of the consequences." This party had spies all over the Southern States, and these emissaries incited insurrection, taught the slaves "that by rising at night and murdering their old masters and their families, they would be doing God's will;" that "it was a duty they owed to their children;" this "butchery of the sleeping and innocent whites was the road to freedom." In Virginia they sent down armed bands of whites, roused the negroes at night, placed guns, pikes, and arms of every kind in the hands of the poor, deluded creatures, and in that one night they butchered, in cold blood, the families of some of the best men in the State. These cold blooded butcheries would have done credit to the most cruel and blood thirsty of the primeval savages of the forest. These deeds were heralded all over the North as "acts of God, done by the hands of men." The leader of this diabolical plan and his compeers were sainted by their followers and admirers, and praises sung over him all over the North, as if over the death of saints. By a stupendous blunder the people of the South, and the friends of the Union generally, allowed this party to elect Lincoln and Hamlin. The South now had no alternative. Now she must either remain in a Union, where our institutions were to be dragged down; where the laws were to be obeyed in one section, but not in another; where existed open resistance to laws in one State and quiet obedience in another; where servile insurrections were being threatened continuously; where the slaves were aided and abetted by whites at the North in the butcheries of their families; or secede and fight. These were the alternatives on the one part, or a severance from the Union and its consequences on the other. From the very formation of the government, two constructions were put upon this constitution—the South not viewing this compact with that fiery zeal, or fanatical adulation, as they did at the North. The South looked [12] upon it more as a confederation of States for mutual protection in times of danger, and a general advancement of those interests where the whole were concerned. Then, again, the vast accumulation of wealth in the Southern States, caused by the the overshadowing of all other commodities of commerce—cotton—created a jealousy at the North that nothing but the prostration of the South, the shattering of her commerce, the destruction of her homes, and the freedom of her slaves, could answer. The wealth of the South had become a proverb The "Wealthy Southern Planter" had become an eyesore to the North, and to humble her haughty pride, as the North saw it, was to free her slaves. As one of the first statesmen of the South has truly said, "The seeds of the Civil War were sown fifty years before they were born who fought her battles."
A convention was called to meet in Columbia, in December, 1860, to frame a new constitution, and to take such steps as were best suited to meet the new order of things that would be brought about by this fanatical party soon to be at the head of the government. Feeling ran high—people were excited—everywhere the voice of the people was for secession. The women of the South, who would naturally be the first sufferers if the programme of the "Agitators" were carried out, were loud in their cries for separation. Some few people were in favor of the South moving in a body, and a feeble opposition ticket for the delegates to the convention was put in the field. These were called "Co-operationists," i.e., in favor of secession, but to await a union with the other Southern States. These were dubbed by the most fiery zealots of secession, "Submissionists" in derision. The negroes, too, scented freedom from afar. The old cooks, mammas, house servants, and negro eavesdroppers gathered enough of "freedom of slaves," "war," "secession," to cause the negroes to think that a great measure was on foot somewhere, that had a direct bearing on their long looked for Messiah—"Freedom." Vigilance committees sprung up all over the South, to watch parties of Northern sentiment, or sympathy, and exercise a more guarded scrutiny over the acts of the negroes. Companies were organized in towns and cities, who styled themselves "Minute Men," and rosettes, or the letters "M.M.," adorned the lapels of the coats worn [13] by those in favor of secession. The convention met in Columbia, but for some local cause it was removed to Charleston. After careful deliberation, a new constitution was framed and the ordinance of secession was passed without a dissenting voice, on the 20th of December, 1860, setting forth the State's grievances and acting upon her rights, declaring South Carolina's connection with the Union at an end. It has been truly said, that this body of men who passed the ordinance of secession was one of the most deliberate, representative, and talented that had ever assembled in the State of South Carolina. When the news flashed over the wires the people were in a frenzy of delight and excitement—bells tolled, cannons boomed, great parades took place, and orators from street corners and hotel balconies harangued the people. The ladies wore palmetto upon their hats or dresses, and showed by every way possible their earnestness in the great drama that was soon to be enacted upon the stage events. Drums beat, men marched through the streets, banners waved and dipped, ladies from the windows and from the housetops waved handkerchiefs or flags to the enthusiastic throng moving below. The bells from historic old St. Michael's, in Charleston, were never so musical to the ears of the people as when they pealed out the chimes that told of secession. The war was on.
Still with all this enthusiasm, the sober-headed, patriotic element of the South regretted the necessity of this dissolution. They, too, loved the Union their ancestors had helped to make—they loved the name, the glory, and the prestige won by their forefathers upon the bloody field of the revolution. While they did not view this Union as indispensable to their existence, they loved and reverenced the flag of their country. As a people, they loved the North; as a nation, they gloried in her past and future possibilities. The dust of their ancestors mingled in imperishable fame with those of the North. In the peaceful "Godsacre" or on the fields of carnage they were ever willing to share with them their greatness, and equally enjoyed those of their own, but denied to them the rights to infringe upon the South's possessions or rights of statehood. We all loved the Union, but we loved it as it was formed and made a compact by the blood of our [14] ancestors. Not as contorted and misconstrued by demagogueism and fanaticism. We almost deified the flag of the Union, under whose folds it was made immortal by the Huguenots, the Roundheads, the Cavaliers, and men of every faith and conviction in the crowning days of the revolution. The deeds of her great men, the history of the past, were an equal heritage of all—we felt bound together by natural bonds equal to the ties of blood or kindred. We loved her towering mountains, her rolling prairies, her fertile fields, her enchanting scenery, her institutions, her literature and arts, all; all were equally the South's as well as the North's. Not for one moment would the South pluck a rose from the flowery wreath of our goddess of liberty and place it upon the brow of our Southland alone. The Mississippi, rising among the hills and lakes of the far North, flowing through the fertile valleys of the South, was to all our "Mother Nile." The great Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada chained our Western border together from Oregon to the Rio Grande. The Cumberland, the Allegheny, and the Blue Ridge, lifting their heads up from among the verdant fields of Vermont, stretching southward, until from their southern summit at "Lookout" could be viewed the borderland of the gulf. In the sceneries of these mountains, their legends and traditions, they were to all the people of the Union what Olympus was to the ancients. Where the Olympus was the haunts, the wooing places of the gods of the ancient Greeks, the Appalachian was the reveling grounds for the muses of song and story of the North and South alike. And while the glories of the virtues of Greece and Rome, the birthplace of republicanism and liberty, may have slept for centuries, or died out entirely, that spirit of national liberty and personal freedom was transplanted to the shores of the New World, and nowhere was the spirit of freedom more cherished and fostered than in the bright and sunny lands of the South. The flickering torch of freedom, borne by those sturdy sons of the old world to the new, nowhere took such strong and rapid growth as did that planted by the Huguenots on the soil of South Carolina. Is it any wonder, then, that a people with such high ideals, such lofty spirits, such love of freedom, would tamely submit to a Union where such ideals and spirits were so lightly [15] considered as by those who were now in charge of the government—where our women and children were to be at the mercies of a brutal race, with all of their passions aroused for rapine and bloodshed; where we would be continually threatened or subjected to a racial war, one of supremacy; where promises were made to be broken, pledges given to be ignored; where laws made for all were to be binding only on those who chose to obey? Such were some of the conditions that confronted South Carolina and her sister States at this time, and forced them into measures that brought about the most stupendous civil war in modern or ancient times.
To sum up: It was not love for the Union, but jealousy of the South's wealth. It was not a spirit of humanity towards the slaves, but a hatred of the South, her chivalry, her honor, and her integrity. A quality wanting in the one is always hated in that of the other.