secession

—secessional, adj.

/si sesh"euhn/, n.

1. an act or instance of seceding.

2. (often cap.) U.S. Hist. the withdrawal from the Union of 11 Southern states in the period 1860-61, which brought on the Civil War.

3. (usually cap.) Fine Arts. a style of art in Germany and Austria concurrent with and related to Art Nouveau.

[1525-35; < L secession- (s. of secessio) withdrawal, equiv. to secess(us) (ptp. of secedere to SECEDE; see CESSION) + -ion- -ION]

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(1860–61) Withdrawal of 11 Southern states from the U.S. The precipitating event was the election of Abraham Lincoln as president (1860).

Since the Republican Party strongly opposed slavery and its extension into the new territories, most slaveholding states had vowed to secede if the Republican candidate won. Secession had been proclaimed by states'-rights advocates as a corollary to the compact that united the states, permitting them to withdraw as easily as they had joined. Earlier threats of secession were made at the Hartford Convention (1814), in the nullification crisis (1832), and in the 1850s before the Missouri Compromise. Secession was first approved by South Carolina (1860); six other states followed in the period before Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861. After Lincoln resisted the South's attack on Fort Sumter, four other slaveholding states voted to secede, joining the newly formed Confederate States of America.

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▪ United States history

      in U.S. history, the withdrawal of 11 slave states (states in which slaveholding was legal) from the Union during 1860–61 following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Secession precipitated the American Civil War.

      Secession had a long history in the United States—but as a threat rather than as an actual dissolution of the Union. Prosecessionists found philosophical justification for altering or abolishing a government and instituting a new one in the Declaration of Independence. More specifically, those who held that the Union was simply a compact among the states argued that states could secede from that compact just as they had earlier acceded to it.

      While never counseling secession, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had clearly enunciated the states' rights-compact (states' rights) doctrine in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Their political opponents, New England Federalists, briefly considered withdrawing from the Union at the Hartford Convention in 1814. The Mississippi question elicited hints of secession from proslavery states, but the famous Missouri Compromise (1820) temporarily quieted the agitation. South Carolinians, however, went to the very brink of secession in the 1830s over the tariff question.

      From the 1840s to 1860, Southerners frequently threatened to withdraw from the Union as antislavery sentiment in the North grew stronger. The Compromise of 1850 eased some of the sectional strife, but the problem of permitting or prohibiting slavery in the western territories continued to inflame opinion on both sides throughout the 1850s.

      The Republican Party formed during this decade around the idea that the territories should remain free; i.e., slaveholding should not be permitted in them. Southerners vowed that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would make secession a certainty. When the Democratic Party disintegrated in 1860 over the slavery-extension question, Lincoln (Lincoln, Abraham) was elected as the first Republican president.

      On Dec. 20, 1860, a special convention called in South Carolina unanimously passed an ordinance of secession. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed in January, while Texas voted to secede on Feb. 1, 1861—still more than a month before Lincoln was actually inaugurated. President James Buchanan (Buchanan, James) denied the right of secession, but he also denied the right of the federal government to use force against the seceded states.

      Lincoln waited a month after his inauguration before deciding to send provisions to Fort Sumter in the harbour of Charleston, S.C. On April 12, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the fort, and the Civil War began. Forced now to make a choice between the Union and the Confederacy, the states of the upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee—voted to secede.

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