Secession

About the lecture

In this module, we think about the immediate background to the secession of South Carolina from the Union on 20 December 1860, focusing in particular on: (i) the implications of the Dred Scott decision (1857), including its undermining of the Missouri Compromise (1820); (ii) the rise of Abraham Lincoln and the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858); (iii) John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (October 1859); (iv) Lincoln's election as President in November 1860; (v) the secession of South Carolina on 20 December 1860; (vi) the fact that the southern states secede individually from the Union; (vii) the fact that some slave states do not secede from the Union, e.g. Kentucky; (viii) the legal and moral justification for secession; and (ix) the question of why the Union decided to go to war over the secession, i.e. why not just leave the southern states to form a separate nation?

About the lecturer

Professor Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (2006) and editor of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (2003) and Themes of the American Civil War: The War Between the States (2010).