Creating a More Perfect Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, the Constitution, and Secession in Antebellum America
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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In 1869, in Texas v White, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the unilateral secession of a state from the Union was unconstitutional because the Constitution created ‘an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States’. This meant that once a state became part of the Union, ‘[t]here was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States’. This dissertation’s thesis is that the Court’s ruling was wrong and that, on the basis of American constitutional law as it stood in 1860-1861, the unilateral secessions of the 11 Confederate states were lawful. This dissertation is anchored in the compact theory of the Constitution which held that because the Constitution was a compact between the member states of the Union, breaches of its fundamental provisions gave affected states the right to unilaterally secede from the Union. The Confederate states’ exercise of this right was based upon the claim that the provisions in the Constitution relating to slavery were fundamental to concluding the compact and that some of them had been breached. This dissertation argues that the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause and the new states and territories clauses were such fundamental provisions, and their breach grounded the right of the Confederate states to unilaterally secede. The entrenchment in the Constitution of the ‘original sin’ of slavery - an institution that most of America’s founding generation viewed as morally indefensible - represented the abandonment of the lauded principles of the Declaration of Independence. The Confederate states’ secessions were an attempt to protect and preserve this ‘original sin’ by forming a more perfect slaveholders’ Union.
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