Post by aric on Dec 12, 2015 7:11:08 GMT -5
Washington Post
For everyone's edification, here's the Texas 1861 Declaration of Secession
So... Yeah... LOL!
- Aric
Texas officials: Schools should teach that slavery was ‘side issue’ to Civil War
By Emma Brown July 5
Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.
And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.
Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”
The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.
There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and textbooks.
“It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.
If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its last battle.
[Their campaign for student government was a joke, but they’re serious about removing campus Confederate statues at the University of Texas]
Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to correct for what they said was a liberal slant.
Students in Texas are required to read the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
Rod Paige, a Republican who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past.
“I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are today,” Paige told the board at the time, according to the Texas Tribune . “We may not like our history, but it’s history.”
Historians acknowledge that disagreements over states’ rights played a role in the Civil War. But the states’ rights issue was inseparable from slavery, they say: The right that states in the South were seeking to protect, after all, was the right to buy and sell people.
Southern states made that clear in their declarations of independence from the union, said James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. Slavery’s primary role in driving the Civil War is a matter of scholarly consensus, he said.
“The War happened only because of the determination of the leadership of eleven states to defend the right of their residents to own other human beings,” Grossman wrote in an e-mail. “The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.”
Hardy, the Texas state board member who said the war was not about slavery, did not respond to requests for comment. The board’s chair, Donna Bahorich, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, said the new textbooks that will arrive in Texas classrooms this fall manage to “thread the needle,” meeting state standards while still acknowledging the importance of slavery.
“But the books muddy things by presenting sectionalism and states’ rights ideas throughout,” he said. “A lot of white southerners have grown up believing that the Confederacy’s struggle was somehow a noble cause rather than a war in the defense of a horrific institution that enslaved millions of human beings.”
Texas’s social studies standards are more politicized than any other state, said Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state standards for the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2011. He gave Texas’s standards a D and wrote that the board was “molding the telling of the past to justify its current views.”
Stern said the social studies standards in South Carolina — where the Civil War started, and where, in June, Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine black parishioners — deserve an “A” and honestly address slavery’s role in the conflict while also nodding to states’ rights as an important issue at the time.
“Are Southern states soft-pedaling the Civil War? By and large, the answer to that would be no,” Stern said. But he said there is often a difference between state standards and what children actually learn.
For decades, some Southerners have emphasized states’ rights as the cause of the war. Nearly half of Americans — 48 percent — believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the war, compared to 38 percent who said the main cause was slavery, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey.
Raul Cevallos, a 2015 graduate of Texas Tech University, said he was taught at his Dallas-area high school that the war was caused by slavery. But he said a group he founded to create political awareness last year found that many young people are ignorant about history.
The group asked students three simple questions about the United States, including “Who won the Civil War?” for a video that later went viral online. “The Confederates,” answered one student. “The South,” said another. Others said they’re weren’t sure. But the same students answered questions about pop culture — “Who is married to Brad Pitt?” — correctly.
“If you don’t know about the Civil War, and you don’t know about things like slavery, then you wouldn’t really be able to understand why our society is the way it is today,” Cevallos said.
James W. Loewen , a sociologist who wrote the best-selling book “Lies My Teacher Told Me ,” says textbooks perpetuate myths about the Civil War in order to avoid offending state textbook-adoption panels. Nineteen states, including almost all of those in the South, adopt textbooks at the state level, according to the Association of American Publishers.
“I think we are at last seeing the de-Confederatization of America,” Loewen said. “And I’m hoping that we will see some action towards de-Confederatizing our textbooks.”
Loewen, who has reviewed many textbooks, said he has found many errors and omissions that help de-emphasize the role slavery played in causing the war. Among the biggest and most common problems, he said, is textbooks’ failure to quote from key primary sources: the Southern states’ declarations of secession, which made clear that they were leaving the union to protect white citizens’ right to own slaves.
“Our position is clearly identified with the institution of slavery,” reads Mississippi’s declaration , signed in 1861.
Loewen identified one textbook — “American Pageant ,” in print for more than half a century — that quoted directly from South Carolina’s secession document. That’s admirable, Loewen said, but the quotation leaves out the document’s direct language about the role of slavery in driving South Carolina’s decision.
History can be a “weapon,” Loewen said, and it has been used “against all of us. It makes us all stupid about the past and thoughtless about the present.”
[From the Post archives: Virginia textbook criticized over claims on Black Confederate soldiers]
David M. Kennedy , a Stanford professor emeritus and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who co-authored “American Pageant,” said Loewen is nitpicking.
“I would defy anybody who read our text to conclude that we were unaware of slavery as the cause of the Civil War,” Kennedy said. He added that he and his co-author have bade farewell in the past to states that found the textbook’s content objectionable. Alabama has rejected the book for years because of what state officials consider derogatory portrayals of 19th century religious revivals, among other reasons.
“We’re not in the business of compromising our view of history so some state school board will be happy,” Kennedy said.
Publishers of other textbooks also pushed back against Loewen’s criticisms.
“Current titles for middle and high school students clearly state that the Southern states’ desire to preserve slavery was the primary reason for secession,” said Laura Gamble, a spokeswoman for Pearson.
Critics of Texas’s new history standards fear that their teaching about the Civil War will spread to other states via textbooks that cater to the Lone Star state; Texas is the second-largest market in the country.
But that narrative appears to be changing as digital books help publishers become more nimble, said Jay Diskey of the Association of American Publishers.
A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”
Stephen Wright, an eighth-grade teacher in Nacogdoches, a small and conservative East Texas town, said some Texas students undoubtedly leave their classrooms believing that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War. But not his students.
Wright said he has his students read the Southern state declarations of secession to learn for themselves what the war was about. He deals with the Civil War standards — he has to teach the standards, because they might show up on the state’s history test — by explaining the reasons that “some people believe” the war happened.
“Man, it’s all about slavery,” he said. “The students know that.”
By Emma Brown July 5
Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.
And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.
Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”
The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.
There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and textbooks.
“It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.
If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its last battle.
[Their campaign for student government was a joke, but they’re serious about removing campus Confederate statues at the University of Texas]
Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to correct for what they said was a liberal slant.
Students in Texas are required to read the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
Rod Paige, a Republican who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past.
“I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are today,” Paige told the board at the time, according to the Texas Tribune . “We may not like our history, but it’s history.”
Historians acknowledge that disagreements over states’ rights played a role in the Civil War. But the states’ rights issue was inseparable from slavery, they say: The right that states in the South were seeking to protect, after all, was the right to buy and sell people.
Southern states made that clear in their declarations of independence from the union, said James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. Slavery’s primary role in driving the Civil War is a matter of scholarly consensus, he said.
“The War happened only because of the determination of the leadership of eleven states to defend the right of their residents to own other human beings,” Grossman wrote in an e-mail. “The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.”
Hardy, the Texas state board member who said the war was not about slavery, did not respond to requests for comment. The board’s chair, Donna Bahorich, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, said the new textbooks that will arrive in Texas classrooms this fall manage to “thread the needle,” meeting state standards while still acknowledging the importance of slavery.
“But the books muddy things by presenting sectionalism and states’ rights ideas throughout,” he said. “A lot of white southerners have grown up believing that the Confederacy’s struggle was somehow a noble cause rather than a war in the defense of a horrific institution that enslaved millions of human beings.”
Texas’s social studies standards are more politicized than any other state, said Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state standards for the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2011. He gave Texas’s standards a D and wrote that the board was “molding the telling of the past to justify its current views.”
Stern said the social studies standards in South Carolina — where the Civil War started, and where, in June, Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine black parishioners — deserve an “A” and honestly address slavery’s role in the conflict while also nodding to states’ rights as an important issue at the time.
“Are Southern states soft-pedaling the Civil War? By and large, the answer to that would be no,” Stern said. But he said there is often a difference between state standards and what children actually learn.
For decades, some Southerners have emphasized states’ rights as the cause of the war. Nearly half of Americans — 48 percent — believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the war, compared to 38 percent who said the main cause was slavery, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey.
Raul Cevallos, a 2015 graduate of Texas Tech University, said he was taught at his Dallas-area high school that the war was caused by slavery. But he said a group he founded to create political awareness last year found that many young people are ignorant about history.
The group asked students three simple questions about the United States, including “Who won the Civil War?” for a video that later went viral online. “The Confederates,” answered one student. “The South,” said another. Others said they’re weren’t sure. But the same students answered questions about pop culture — “Who is married to Brad Pitt?” — correctly.
“If you don’t know about the Civil War, and you don’t know about things like slavery, then you wouldn’t really be able to understand why our society is the way it is today,” Cevallos said.
James W. Loewen , a sociologist who wrote the best-selling book “Lies My Teacher Told Me ,” says textbooks perpetuate myths about the Civil War in order to avoid offending state textbook-adoption panels. Nineteen states, including almost all of those in the South, adopt textbooks at the state level, according to the Association of American Publishers.
“I think we are at last seeing the de-Confederatization of America,” Loewen said. “And I’m hoping that we will see some action towards de-Confederatizing our textbooks.”
Loewen, who has reviewed many textbooks, said he has found many errors and omissions that help de-emphasize the role slavery played in causing the war. Among the biggest and most common problems, he said, is textbooks’ failure to quote from key primary sources: the Southern states’ declarations of secession, which made clear that they were leaving the union to protect white citizens’ right to own slaves.
“Our position is clearly identified with the institution of slavery,” reads Mississippi’s declaration , signed in 1861.
Loewen identified one textbook — “American Pageant ,” in print for more than half a century — that quoted directly from South Carolina’s secession document. That’s admirable, Loewen said, but the quotation leaves out the document’s direct language about the role of slavery in driving South Carolina’s decision.
History can be a “weapon,” Loewen said, and it has been used “against all of us. It makes us all stupid about the past and thoughtless about the present.”
[From the Post archives: Virginia textbook criticized over claims on Black Confederate soldiers]
David M. Kennedy , a Stanford professor emeritus and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who co-authored “American Pageant,” said Loewen is nitpicking.
“I would defy anybody who read our text to conclude that we were unaware of slavery as the cause of the Civil War,” Kennedy said. He added that he and his co-author have bade farewell in the past to states that found the textbook’s content objectionable. Alabama has rejected the book for years because of what state officials consider derogatory portrayals of 19th century religious revivals, among other reasons.
“We’re not in the business of compromising our view of history so some state school board will be happy,” Kennedy said.
Publishers of other textbooks also pushed back against Loewen’s criticisms.
“Current titles for middle and high school students clearly state that the Southern states’ desire to preserve slavery was the primary reason for secession,” said Laura Gamble, a spokeswoman for Pearson.
Critics of Texas’s new history standards fear that their teaching about the Civil War will spread to other states via textbooks that cater to the Lone Star state; Texas is the second-largest market in the country.
But that narrative appears to be changing as digital books help publishers become more nimble, said Jay Diskey of the Association of American Publishers.
A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”
Stephen Wright, an eighth-grade teacher in Nacogdoches, a small and conservative East Texas town, said some Texas students undoubtedly leave their classrooms believing that slavery was not the primary cause of the Civil War. But not his students.
Wright said he has his students read the Southern state declarations of secession to learn for themselves what the war was about. He deals with the Civil War standards — he has to teach the standards, because they might show up on the state’s history test — by explaining the reasons that “some people believe” the war happened.
“Man, it’s all about slavery,” he said. “The students know that.”
For everyone's edification, here's the Texas 1861 Declaration of Secession
DECLARATION OF CAUSES: February 2, 1861
A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union.
The government of the United States, by certain joint resolutions, bearing date the 1st day of March, in the year A.D. 1845, proposed to the Republic of Texas, then a free, sovereign and independent nation, the annexation of the latter to the former as one of the co-equal States thereof,
The people of Texas, by deputies in convention assembled, on the fourth day of July of the same year, assented to and accepted said proposals and formed a constitution for the proposed State, upon which on the 29th day of December in the same year, said State was formally admitted into the Confederated Union.
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.
The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harrassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.
These and other wrongs we have patiently borne in the vain hope that a returning sense of justice and humanity would induce a different course of administration.
When we advert to the course of individual non-slave-holding States, and that [of] a majority of their citizens, our grievances assume far greater magnitude.
return to top
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holdings States in their domestic institutions--a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a "higher law" than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.
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And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.
In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.
For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons--We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.
Adopted in Convention on the 2nd day of Feby, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one and of the independence of Texas the twenty-fifth.
SOURCE:
Winkler, Ernest William, ed. Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas 1861, Edited From the Original in the Department of State.... Austin: Texas Library and Historical Commission, 1912, pp. 61-65.
Page last modified: August 25, 2011
A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union.
The government of the United States, by certain joint resolutions, bearing date the 1st day of March, in the year A.D. 1845, proposed to the Republic of Texas, then a free, sovereign and independent nation, the annexation of the latter to the former as one of the co-equal States thereof,
The people of Texas, by deputies in convention assembled, on the fourth day of July of the same year, assented to and accepted said proposals and formed a constitution for the proposed State, upon which on the 29th day of December in the same year, said State was formally admitted into the Confederated Union.
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery--the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits--a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.
The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harrassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.
These and other wrongs we have patiently borne in the vain hope that a returning sense of justice and humanity would induce a different course of administration.
When we advert to the course of individual non-slave-holding States, and that [of] a majority of their citizens, our grievances assume far greater magnitude.
return to top
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holdings States in their domestic institutions--a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a "higher law" than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.
They have refused to vote appropriations for protecting Texas against ruthless savages, for the sole reason that she is a slave-holding State.
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And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave-holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave-holding States.
In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.
For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons--We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.
Adopted in Convention on the 2nd day of Feby, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one and of the independence of Texas the twenty-fifth.
SOURCE:
Winkler, Ernest William, ed. Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas 1861, Edited From the Original in the Department of State.... Austin: Texas Library and Historical Commission, 1912, pp. 61-65.
Page last modified: August 25, 2011
So... Yeah... LOL!
- Aric