 Every night, in the city of Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, a drummer boy would bang out a signal 10 minutes before 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock when the days were longer. This was the signal for the blacks in the city, slave or free, to move indoors to observe curfew. The streets were patrolled by patrolmen and vigilance committees. These laws were necessary, or at least that's what the people of Charleston believed. They were necessary because the city was overrun by abolitionists. And the very fact that no abolitionists had actually been caught in the city was proof as to how cunning these abolitionists were as they ran about stirring up revolution among their slaves. A month before the presidential election, the Charleston courier reported that the citizens of Greenville, a city at the northern edge of the state, quote, have had reason to believe that their slaves were being tampered with by abolition emissaries. Vigilance committee was formed, but owing to the cunning and dexterity of the incendiaries, it was found impossible to catch them. The Alabama Mail ran an article that was reprinted in other newspapers throughout the South, including the Charleston courier that stated, quote, the South is infested with scores and hundreds of abolition agents whose business here it is to prepare our people for the rule of Lincoln. Southern men everywhere ought to be on their guard against them, end quote. White men who were suspected of being Republican supporters were arrested and tried in front of mob juries. Some of them hanged, some imprisoned, some expelled from the state after having their homes ransacked. The courier tells the hanging of a man and his son in the October 18th issue for having letters that proved them to be abolitionists. It doesn't tell us the content of these letters. William Freeling in the Road to Disunion tells of a Republican who had the misfortune of wandering into South Carolina when he was arrested and imprisoned for 10 days while his home was raided before he and his son were finally released and they were chased by a mob until they made it out of the state. Lincoln was elected on November 6th, but most people in the state already knew what the election meant. On November 7th, Robert Gordon, the jury foreman for the U.S. District Court in Charleston announced that the Republican election had, quote, swept away the last hope for the permanence, for the stability of these sovereign states. In these extraordinary circumstances, the grand jury respectfully declines to proceed with their presentments, end quote. With Gordon's announcement, the presiding judge, Andrew Gordon McGrath, took off his robes and announced his resignation. As far as I'm concerned, Judge McGrath said to the audience, the temple of justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is now closed. Before the election, one South Carolina diarist, a widow named Kazia Brevard, wrote, quote, It is time for us to show the rabble of the North we are not to be murdered in cold blood because we own slaves, end quote. She got word of the election results on November 9th. She lived away out of the city, so the news was delayed, and she wrote, quote, Oh my God, this morning heard that Lincoln was elected. I do pray that if there is to be a crisis, that we all lay down our lives sooner than free our slaves and our midst. No soul on earth is more willing for justice than I am. But the idea of being mixed up with free blacks is horrid, end quote. At the time of her writing that, Charleston actually had more than 3,000 free blacks, and 131 of them actually owned slaves themselves. But I guess she was far enough out of the city to not have to interact with any of them. Senator Charlstonian H. Pinkney Walker wrote that he believed the new government, quote, will be bent on the destruction of the Southern institutions, end quote. On November 17th, Captain M. Barry of the steamship Columbia set off from the New York Harbor to head back to Charleston. After he was at sea, he ordered that the U.S. flag be lowered, and he raised a new flag to replace it. South Carolina didn't have its own official flag yet, though it had battle flags for the South Carolina militia companies, but Barry had his own flag custom made for this occasion. It had 15 stars, one for each slave state, and the iconic Palmetto of South Carolina. For this bold act, Barry would be presented with a gold-headed Palmetto cane shortly after his arrival at South Carolina. For much of the South, secession was a serious question that would have to be debated. But for South Carolina, the matter had been decided before Lincoln was even officially elected, and the state's political leaders had resolved to secede, even if they had to do so alone. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. Today's episode will wrap up the series on the end to bellum years with the culminating event, which was the first wave of secession. It doesn't even need to be said that this was a remarkably significant event in United States history, but the only thing I want to talk about is the actual act of secession itself and the history surrounding it. There are many important questions that I'm sure people would be interested in that I do not intend to cover, such as the question of the constitutionality of secession, but I'm going to defer to historians like Kevin Goodman and Brian McClanahan on that question because I agree with their answers. They argue that it is constitutional, and they base their arguments on certain elements of the ratification debates, which they, and I believe are the most legitimate source for constitutional legitimacy, as James Madison himself asserted. But I'm less interested in the constitutional question. There is historical significance to it because both sides wanted to demonstrate that they had the constitutional higher ground, and particularly in the case of Lincoln, the constitutionality of his actions was something that he needed a legal defense of, which led to several significant points of debate throughout the war. And I will talk about some of these issues when we get to those episodes, but I'm less interested in the constitutionality of secession than I am the constitutionality of other things that apply to the Civil War. To me, it seems like a moot question. Secession itself is nothing more than the statement that you, as a person or political representative, refuse to recognize the government you have been subordinate to any longer. You can't physically move the territory you live in. It's just a matter of recognizing the political authority that claims jurisdiction over you and submitting to it. So even if there were a clause in the U.S. Constitution that specifically prohibited secession, what would it matter? Secession would be a statement that you no longer recognize the political authority of the entire document. So the question of secession is not whether the states have a right to secede, but whether or not the federal government has the authority to use force to compel you to submit to their authority. The reasons for why the southern states seceded and the particularities of this historical event are of no consequence regarding this ultimately philosophical question. Ethically or illegally, it can only be posed as a question of whether or not any government has the legitimate right to use political force to force submission by any other government or persons. Now, some people might accuse me of posing this question in a way that compels a certain answer, basically that I'm biased in my view here, but I don't think I am. Some political and ethical theorists throughout history would say that, yes, the government absolutely has the right to do this. Thomas Hobbs and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I believe, would answer this question in the affirmative. So my blunt rephrasing of the question certainly doesn't compel any answer. It just offers the perspective that I think people should have when thinking about the particular history of the southern secession and the American Civil War, because for many people in the north and the south, this was the question that colored their opinions of legitimate reaction to the southern states. I'm posing the question as something to keep in mind for this episode and the next season, but any answers of legitimate action will necessarily depend on your personal philosophy. I just want everybody to think about whether their personal philosophical answer to the question I posed is consistent with their view of the historical circumstances of the United States in 1860 and 61. At least that's the kind of thing that makes history interesting to me. But given that question, I'm going to do my best to relate the history as accurately as possible. When Lincoln was elected, there were 15 slave states, though some of them, like Delaware, barely qualified as slave states because there were so few slaves in them. But the initial hope among the deep south states was that all 15 slave states would join the Confederacy. I think this is worth thinking about, too, by the way. Secession is a decentralizing movement by definition. But people forget that southern secession was accompanied immediately by a centralizing movement as well. I'm not mentioning this to paint southern secession as a good or a bad thing. That usually just depends on your personal values or ideological leanings rather than the objective facts of history. But it is a point that's often overlooked. The secessionist hotbed, of course, was South Carolina. And it was the first state to secede, being the only one to secede in 1860. They did so on on December 20th. For nearly a month, South Carolina was the only state to have left the union. The second state to secede, Mississippi, didn't do so until January 9th, at which point the other five states rapidly followed. But when South Carolina seceded, it already had the Confederacy in mind, as well as a strategy to convince other states to follow suit. South Carolina believed that if they left the union, the rest of the South would follow their lead. And newspaper editorials argued that, quote, dissolution will never come by the voluntary act of the people. Some master spirits must lead the way, end quote. Such editorials already spoke about the unified southern nation. One said, quote, we will be a compact people made homogenous by a great similarity of interests and one principle of cohesion above all others, slavery, end quote. South Carolina seceded alone, but they did so with a plan in mind for the centralizing movement that would follow to bring the southern states together under a national government, not incredibly unlike the one they just left. So all the secession movements were individual to the state, but these decentralizations were quickly followed by the centralizing movement to unite in their own confederation, just as the colonies had with the US Constitution. Naturally, this was largely motivated by the fear of war, but that doesn't mean we should ignore this element of southern secession. One of the editorials I quoted from asserted that dissolution could not be a popular act of the people. This is something historians continued to debate, was secession top down, bottom up or something in between. But one of the first seven states did put secession to a popular vote. This was Texas and it won by a three to one vote, which means that the majority of Texans who supported secession would not have been slave owners. James McPherson asserts that there's no reason to believe that it would have been any different in any of the other states either, which suggests that there was at least some grassroots support for secession. Two states, in fact, South Carolina and Mississippi had populations in which more than 50 percent of their white citizens were slave owners or the children of slave owners. And it's probably not a coincidence that these were the first two states to secede. There's a correlation between the proportion of slave owners in a state and its willingness to secede, which suggests that there was a top down element to the movement as well. Southerners are generally divided into three camps on the issue of secession. The first category, which probably encompassed most of the deep south, was the immediate secessionists. At their center was a group referred to as fire eaters, being those people who are most vocally agitating for disunion. This would be somebody like Lawrence Kitt, who held onlookers at Bay while his colleague Preston Brooks, beat Charles Sumner with a cane in 1856. In the previous episode, I mentioned that historian Gary North considers John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, two of the three people most responsible for disunion. Dr. North considers Lawrence Kitt to be the third person because of his fire eating speeches he gave to rally support for secession. A good example of the typical immediate secessionist might be the Georgian Thomas Cobb. He made arguments in favor of secession that would be common in the deep south. Lincoln's election had violated the spirit of the Constitution, he claimed, because his victory was evidence that the North as a whole was attacking the constitutional right of slavery. Because of this, Cobb and those like him argued that Southerners needed to take action before Lincoln was inaugurated because this would be safer. Many Southerners were afraid of the prospect of war if they seceded and the immediate secessionists believed war was less likely if they seceded before Lincoln was in office. Additionally, Cobb and others argued, even though the executive powers were constrained, the president still had enough power to do damage without the help of Congress. He can appoint officials in the South for certain federal positions, for example, and he could help build up a Republican Party in the South, which meant that Lincoln had enough power to threaten slavery, even if Southern congressmen were able to prevent anti-slavery legislation. The second category of Southerners, which would be more important for the Upper South in the second wave of secession, were the conditional unionists. These were Southerners who were not thrilled at Lincoln's election and they were wary of the new government. They also believed secession was a constitutional right. However, the conditional unionists thought it was best to wait until the new administration took some offensive action before seceding. For the four states who seceded during the second wave of secession, Lincoln's decision to call for troops after the bombardment of Fort Sumter was a violation of his executive authority. And as I mentioned earlier, many people saw the bombardment of Fort Sumter as a defensive action, so the mobilization of troops was the type of action they were holding out for. Where the fire eaters stood out among the immediate secessionists, the ultimatists stood out among the conditional unionists. These Southerners did not want to secede immediately, but they did want the Southern states to draft a list of demands for their loyalty to the union. These would be predictable demands mirroring the Southern Democratic Party platform of the recent election. They wanted assurance that the fugitive slave law would be enforced and the personal liberty laws of many northern states would be repealed. They also wanted express guarantees that slavery would not be interfered with where it existed, and they wanted slavery to be allowed in at least to those territories south of the Missouri compromise line. But the ultimatists were a minority among the conditional unionists. And in a few episodes early in the next season, I am going to talk about the infamous Corwin Amendment and the compromise proposals that led to the Corwin Amendment. So there were northerners who were willing to take these ultimatums seriously. But there were other northerners, of course, who were offended at the entire idea of the South making an ultimatum after the election. But but I'll get to that in a few episodes. A more typical example of a conditional unionist would be the Georgian Alexander Stevens. He made arguments typical for a conditional unionist. He claimed that the country had resolved the dangerous conflicts of the past. So it was possible that this conflict could also be resolved. Thank, for example, the Missouri compromise and the nullification crisis. Stevens also argued that Southerners should make an effort to do everything they could to protect their rights within the union before making the decision to secede, which should only be a last resort. Stevens, who knew Lincoln personally, also argued that the incoming president wasn't really a threat. He was a moderate Republican for one thing. And Stevens pointed out that Lincoln had never advocated the abolition of slavery where it already existed. This was true, of course, but many Southerners either doubted the sincerity of this claim or were of the completely wrong impression. Also, Stevens argued that the House and Senate stood in the way of Lincoln's abilities to pass anti-slavery law, though remember that the immediate secessionists were countering this argument by pointing out what the president could do with his executive power. Finally, Stevens argued most people in the North harbored no ill will towards the South. But if the Southern state seceded, they would lose the support from the friendly citizens of the North. And this, both the immediate secessionists and the conditional unionists were arguing for strategies that they believed were most likely to avoid war. So the fear of the North waging war was real. And both sides wanted to avoid it, but they didn't agree on the best way to avoid war. Both sides, by the way, I mean the immediate secessionist and the conditional unionists. In the North, there were a lot of people that wanted to avoid war, but there were also a lot of people calling for war, even before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. So both sides being the immediate secessionists and conditional unionists wanted to avoid war. The third category of Southerners on the secession issue would be the unconditional unionists. There were not many of these in the deep South. Most of these types were in the border states that would either secede in the second wave or would not secede at all. A standard example of an unconditional unionist would be, again, the Georgian William Markin, who made standard unionist arguments against secession. It was treason, it was unconstitutional, it was immoral. Secession was a plot by the slaveholders. That would be of no benefit to the common people in the South. They also argued that secession would actually hasten the demise of slavery and it would lead to a war that would end slavery. These last arguments are interesting because many people in the North, like William Lloyd Garrison since 1832, believe that disunion would hasten the demise of slavery as well. It's a reasonable theory because secession meant that the Northern states were no longer obligated to enforce the fugitive slave law, at least not against the slave states who seceded. But of course, many Southerners believed that the threats to slavery by a Republican administration would make the fugitive slave law moot anyway. Notice that all my examples came from the same deep South state. This is partly to highlight the fact that no state enjoyed uniformity in the position on secession among its constituents or politicians. Georgia was the fifth state to secede doing so on January 19th, but it was also one that stood out in a number of ways. For example, any evidence in favor of the tariff thesis for secession typically comes from Georgia. So now let me tackle the all important question over the motivation for secession. I talked about the tariff thesis in the last episode of that. And I also mentioned it in the first episode of the season. Additionally, for those interested, I have an article on the Mises wire on whether or not the tariff disagreement drove secession. The title of the article is did tariffs caused the civil war? But I actually think the title is misleading because I was only addressing whether or not the tariff debate drove secession. Though I don't think tariffs were the reason Lincoln waged the war either. Some people argue I just think it's important to separate the two questions. So let's look at the tariff question and see why I reject it. And I know I feel like I'm I'm almost beating a dead horse at this point on the tariff question. But I keep bringing it up because no matter how much I bring it up, I still get people giving me pushback on this. And it seems to be just such a widely circulating misconception that that I can't help bringing it up any time we're talking about secession to just drive this point home because it isn't important. And the profession of history, there is a degree of trust that historians expect their readers to have when they are writing or in this case doing a podcast or giving a lecture, whatever the case may be, people have to trust that you as an historian are honestly and accurately reporting the facts according to your investigation. This is never perfect because even if you're being honest and accurate, there's always evidence that you haven't seen or evidence that is destroyed or doesn't exist or whatever. So there's nothing wrong with historical disagreement or historical debate. And a lot of these disagreements are waged between equally honest historians or simply debating over the best interpretation of historical causes according to imperfect evidence and imperfect knowledge. But the matter of trust comes into play, particularly when the historian presents his or her evidence. The general assumption is that the historian has looked at large mountains of historical evidence and when choosing quotes or documents to cite or offers supporting evidence that these isolated pieces of evidence are representative of the general documentary evidence. A dishonest historian is not usually one who directly falsifies information. It's usually a historian who selectively presents evidence. So here's a quote that supports the argument and the general audience, if they trust the historian, assumes that the supporting quote is representative of the large body of evidence. But a cherry picked quote and you hear this accusation a lot, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, is one that is an exception to the larger body of evidence. This, in my estimation, is how the tariff thesis for Southern secession is argued. You have really compelling quotes like the one from George's Robert Tombs, where he argued that the proposed moral tariff, which would be passed shortly after the South seceded, would raise tariffs to extreme heights. And remember that Republicans did advocate a protective tariff in their platform. And Tombs says that the proposed tariff was presented because Northerners were, quote, united in a joint raid against the South, end quote. So this is a compelling quote that supports the idea that the tariff drove secession. George's secession document also alludes to protective tariffs. George's ordinance of secession, like the other deep South secession documents, does explicitly cite slavery as the first and primary cause for secession. But unlike other states, it does reference the tariff controversy. After a lengthy outline of the slavery issue. So even here in the Georgia document that is the primary culprit, the Georgia ordinance of secession reads, quote, the material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the federal government, that of the South, not at all. In the first years of the Republic, the navigating, commercial and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests, end quote. And then goes on to list specific examples of protective tariffs, though it does not use the word tariff, but that is clearly what they are referring to. So again, we see some pretty interesting evidence that tariffs are a driving motive for secession. The problem, and this goes back to what I said about trusting that the evidence historians to cite is representative of the larger body of evidence that cannot all be meticulously included. The problem is that this is just about it. I mean, you can get a line here. They're nodding to the tariff, the Confederate Constitution outlawed protective tariffs. And as I said, the disagreement over the tariff between the North and the South still existed. But when you actually start digging into the documents, the evidence is just overwhelming that the issue that dominated the 1850s all the way up to secession was slavery. And the tariff issue is hardly mentioned at all, except when people claim to miss the days when people were divided over tariffs rather than the far more contentious issue of slavery. So some people were actually saying, I miss. I miss the day when we were divided over things other than slavery, like the tariff, then you might hear it mentioned a little bit. There's also a logical flaw in the tariff thesis that I hear a lot. This primarily comes from pointing to the nullification crisis of the 1830s, which was, at least on the surface, a dispute over the tariff. There's a private letter from John C. Calhoun, in which he admits that he sees the real issue as being over slavery. But that isn't even important in understanding secession, because when I say that the tariff was not the reason for secession, the response I commonly provoke is something like, but the tariff dispute goes back for decades. And then they cite the tariff controversy during the constitutional convention and the nullification crisis in which protective tariffs really were a divisive issue between the two sections of the country. But this is odd logic to me. If the question is, why did the southern states secede in 1860 and 1861, then why are we pointing to controversies from the 1830s or 1780s? It is true that the tariff dispute goes back a long way, but that is nothing to show that it survived all the way up to the 1860s. The only way the history of the tariff dispute can even be applicable to the 1860s is to show that it continued to create major issues in the recent history before secession. So showing how far back the dispute goes, if that's what you have to resort to, seems to me to actually weaken the argument, not strengthen it. It's like if I were to say that southern secession was driven by a belief in Zeus, the Greek God of Thunder, but my evidence to this was to show that the belief in the Olympus gods goes all the way back to ancient Western civilization. It would be immediately apparent how absurd such an argument is. But this is what people do when they point to the nullification crisis of the 1830s as evidence that tariffs drove secession in 1860 with little to no evidence of a tariff controversy. In the 30 years in between, especially the decade before secession, which is when all this controversy was really heating up. So I find that the tariff thesis is supported by cherry picked quotes that represent very little in the way of southern conversation during the 1850s, while slavery was on everybody's mind. You you really can explain nothing about the 1850s by looking at tariffs. But slavery is at the center of every major political issue. And the tariff thesis is also supported by what I can only call poor logic in interpreting the historical evidence, this fallacy that evidence found further back in history is somehow more compelling than recent evidence prior to an event like the secession movements of 1860 and 61. So there are references to the tariff disagreements here and there. But these few references don't seem to explain anything significant. Slavery, on the other hand, does. And in addition to the entire political controversy of the 1850s that I've spent months on, there are two really clear sources that slavery was the southern concern during the secession movements themselves. One would be the secession documents. Some of the secession documents like George's come out and state that slavery is the reason for secession right up front. Mississippi, for example, which was one of only two states in which a majority of whites owned at least one family slave, says at the very top of the document, quote, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. Now, I said that the tariff quotes do not represent the larger body of evidence and the audience has to have some degree of trust that any supporting quote is representative of the larger pile of evidence. And that's true here, since it would be impossible for me to list all of the evidence supporting the slavery thesis for southern secession. It would be impossible because the evidence on this end is mountainous. All of the deep south ordinance of secession cite slavery as their motivation, though some of the documents in the second wave of secession like Virginia's don't cite slavery at all. Since the second wave of secession was driven more by opposition to Lincoln's perceived usurpation of authority. But the secession documents have a lot of interesting and insightful tidbits in them. The Mississippi documents, like many of the other secession documents, claims that the Union has, quote, nullified the Fugitive Slave Act in almost every free state in the Union, end quote. Remember this, if you ever need an argument in support of nullification, people who oppose nullification never seem to give a reasonable philosophical basis for their opposition. They typically just point out that John C. Calhoun put forth the idea of nullification. So it must be axiomatically bad. But nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law was a common grievance among southern states. So the themes of the secession documents, all of which you can read in full online at the website for Yale's Law School is first and foremost slavery and secondarily would be states' rights, usually as an extension of slavery. But it's worth remembering that even non-slave owners often saw an attack on slavery as an attack on their rights in general. And states' rights became the more general motivation for Confederate soldiers after the right to peaceful secession was denied by the Union government. And the theme of violations of the Constitution are also apparent in the secession document, though this would be according to their interpretation of the Constitution, which I find to be somewhat contradictory, given the citation of the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law by sovereign states as something that the South did not recognize as legitimate. But one other interesting source affirming that slavery rather than the general states' rights of the Constitution was the motivation for secession, at least among the politicians who had the power to vote for secession, since only Texas put it to popular vote, is found in the arguments made by the secession commissioners. A lot of the public speeches on the matter downplayed the issue of slavery. Jefferson Davis' first speech as president of the Confederacy, for example, cited the common arguments about Northern aggression and states' rights. But when urging secession, several deep South states appointed commissioners to travel to other Southern states to encourage secession. This would include states that did not secede or did not do so until after Fort Sumter. But the arguments of the secession commissioners are a little bit more blunt than people like Jefferson Davis when he was speaking publicly. The secession commissioners did not dance around the issue of slavery. They were appealing to the state's politicians and the various state legislatures naturally had a higher population of slave owners than their respective states as a whole. Additionally, the commissioners were not making public speeches that would be advertised to their entire country. So they were able to avoid the political maneuvering that public figures have to include in their rhetoric. So prior to Lincoln's inauguration, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana all appointed secession commissioners to visit other states and try to convince them to join the secession movement. These arguments continued from December of 1860 until April of 1861. Mississippi and Alabama were the only two of these states to send a commissioner to every slave state, all 14, not including their own, which meant they even sent commissioners to South Carolina, which seems rather unnecessary in hindsight. But the arguments that the commissioners used are what's really telling, at least for those who question how much the slavery issue played a role in the decision for the deep south to secede because these commissioners were giving the reasons that their own states seceded as part of their appeals. William Harris, Mississippi's commissioner to Georgia, is a useful example. He gave arguments typical of the secession commissioners, quote, Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the Negro as an ignorant inferior barbarian race and capable of self government and not therefore entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political or social equality. The Lincoln administration wants to overturn and strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races. This new union with Lincoln black Republicans and free Negroes without slavery or slavery under our old constitutional bond of union without Lincoln black Republicans or free Negroes either to molest us. Harris went on to say that if Southerners wanted to avoid, quote, submission to Negro equality, secession is inevitable. Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish. The part of Mississippi is chosen. She will never submit to the principles and policy of this black Republican administration. She had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children emulated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the Negro race. The Mississippi commissioner to Maryland argued that, quote, slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity. And Southerners, quote, would not give up their slaves because doing so would mean turning the, quote, beautiful cotton fields into barren wastes. I pointed out in the previous episode that Lincoln, regardless of whether or not he was speaking out of sincere conviction or simple political moralization, he did speak of slavery as an immoral institution. Lincoln's statements about the morality of slavery were also referenced by the secession commissioners. Handy again said, quote, the moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil, a sin by the general government, that moment, the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone, end quote. Obviously, this is meant to appeal to fears among Southerners about Lincoln's moral statements about slavery, which is one of the reasons they are important to recognize even if you believe Lincoln was insincere or hypocritical on the matter. You also find explicit statements of what a lot of people already assume, which is that the Confederate states banned the importation of slaves because they wanted to protect the prices of domestic slaves. Isham Garrett, the Alabama commissioner to North Carolina, said, quote, the non slave holding states while declaring that we shall not expand and that thereby we shall be crushed by our slave population are charging upon us a design to reopen the African slave trade. The charge is slander upon our people and a reflection upon their intelligence. Southerners fill no desire to depreciate the value of their own property nor to demoralize their slaves by throwing among them savages and cannibals, end quote. There's a lot to be gleaned out of the records of the secession commissioners. John C. Calhoun's son, by the way, served as the commissioner to Alabama, which meant that he did attract more attention from the press than other commissioners. But for the most part, the secession commissioners are largely overlooked in the histories, even though they're a very useful source for the Frank motivation for the first wave of secession. In the end, of course, only seven of the 15 slave states would secede prior to Lincoln's inauguration. South Carolina led the way on December 20th, with Mississippi following on January 9th, Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th and Texas on February 1st. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call for troops, four of the eight remaining slave states would join the Confederacy, this time motivated by Lincoln's abuse of executive power. And among the four slave states to remain, two of which, Missouri and Maryland, seemed like they might have joined as well, had Lincoln not sent troops to impose martial law and prevent their secession. But all of this will be covered in the next season, which will cover the war itself. And we will begin by looking at the decision for war, which, unlike secession, was distinctly not motivated by the issue of slavery. Additionally, if you want to see my sources for this season, I have written up a bibliographical essay detailing my most commonly referenced pieces of scholarship, just as I did for the first season on the War on Drugs, which you can read at Mises.org. It is by no means a complete list of works on the antebellum controversy, as there are thousands of books on this period, but it should give you enough to check my claims, or if you simply want to do some further readings. Our look at the American Civil War will begin in the next episode. For more content like this, visit Mises.org.