Ordinance of Secession

Common card · No. 326391

An Ordinance of Secession is the name given to multiple resolutions drafted and ratified in 1860 and 1861, before or soon after the beginning of the American Civil War, by which each seceding Southern state (and Arizona Territory) formally declared secession from the United States. South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas also issued separate documents purporting to justify secession. Adherents of the Union side in the Civil War regarded secession as illegal by any means, and President Abraham Lincoln, drawing in part on the legacy of President Andrew Jackson, regarded it as his job to preserve the Union by force, if necessary. However, President James Buchanan, in his State of the Union Address of December 3, 1860, stated that the Union rested only upon public opinion, and that conciliation was the only legitimate means of preserving it; President Thomas Jefferson had also suggested, after his presidency but in official correspondence in 1816, that the secession of some states might...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Mississippi. Convention (1861), Public domain