The Civil War is still being fought–150 years after secessionists fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.   The sesquicentennial of the Civil War has again brought the spotlight of national media attention on the continuing debate over  why South Carolinians elected  to leave the Union and fight a prolonged war.

Much of the debate has been inspired by provocative events such as the Secession Ball held in Charleston in mid-December. The Ball, sponsored by the Confederate Heritage Trust and held in accordance with the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, was overwhelmingly deemed celebratory and contentious by the media and other groups, such as the Fort Sumter/Fort Moultrie Trust.  That such events have fostered conflicting perceptions of the war’s causes and its effects has shown yet again how the past is often a contested terrain.

Divergent media headlines illustrate the continuing controversy.  The New York Times’ recently published an article titled “Secession Defended on Civil War Anniversary” while a recent edition of  The Tennesean included an opinion piece encouraging readers to “Commemorate the Civil War, but in a Balanced Manner.” No event in American history has sparked more debate, inspired more passion, or cost more lives than the Civil War. Even the name itself generates disputed discussion: some prefer the “Civil War,” while others opt for the “War Between the States” or “The War of Northern Aggression.”

The continuing debate centers on the essential cause of the decision by eleven states to secede from the Union: a defense of the principle of states’ rights, or a defense of slavery. On December 17, 1860, delegates to the South Carolina Secession Convention effectively ended the state’s  relationship with the Union. One week later, Convention delegates passed the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” This document announced that South Carolina had “resumed her separate and equal place among nations,” and offered a detailed explanation of why and how the delegates rationalized their actions. Over the next several months, other states produced  similar statements, and the Confederate States of America was formed in February 1861. Events from the decade leading up to secession and the Declaration  itself point to the preservation of slavery as the primary motivating factor  for secession, justified by historical evidence and constitutional arguments relating to the rights of individual states within the Union.

In 1850, the United States Congress debated the balance of slave and free states in the Union, the Fugitive Slave Act (which required the return of runaway slaves to their owners) passed, and states’ rights advocate John C. Calhoun died. In response to  Congressional actions, South Carolina planter Edward B. Bryan championed secession in a state where nearly 60 percent of the people were enslaved, and he very publicly set the stage for conflict when he dramatically proclaimed: “Give us slavery or give us death.”  That same year, several slaveholding states convened to consider secession, but decided against such a radical step. In 1851,  secessionists  from Beaufort declared that “…we regard domestic slavery as the safeguard of political freedom. Therefore it is now the solemn duty of the Southern States to sever the tie that binds us to a Union already practically sundered, and to unite in a slaveholding Confederacy, maintaining as a fundamental principle, the perpetual recognition of that institution.”  In 1856, the governor of South Carolina demanded the reopening of the African slave trade.  In 1858, South Carolinians were so paranoid about northern efforts to abolish slavery that the state legislature passed laws to discourage northerners from traveling to the state. Early in 1860, politicians throughout South Carolina threatened that if a Republican won the presidential election  they would organize a state  convention to initiate secession.

The original Ordinance of Secession passed at that convention in December of 1860 has been displayed across the state in recent weeks, making appearances at various locations and events, including the Secession Ball. It is the Ordinance’s lengthier and less well known companion document, however, that provides greater detail about the historical and legal causes which “induce[d] and justified]” the state  to take such monumental action.

The Declaration mentioned the increasing “encroachments” of the federal government on the state and the worrisome implications of Lincoln’s recent election, a man “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”  It argued that since northern states had neglected to follow Congressional legislation relating to the return of slaves to their owners, and Congress had ceased to enforce its own laws in regards to non-slaveholding states, the government had become destructive to the ends for which it was founded, and thus South Carolina was released from her obligation to that government. The federal government’s unwillingness to enforce protections relating to slavery provided what South Carolina secessionists perceived to be a legitimate constitutional basis for leaving the Union.

Yet, the justifications argued in the Declaration beg an obvious question: would South Carolina have left the Union had there been no institution of slavery?