Virginia Ordinance of Secession

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Introduction

The 1860 presidential election triggered a Constitutional crisis unlike anything the United States had ever experienced. Slavery, specifically the potential extension of slavery into newly acquired western territories, had divided the nation since 1819, when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave state. The compromises in 1820 and 1850 stifled threats of disunion, but the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the Dred Scott decision (1857), and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859) brought the tension to the boiling point. Most northerners were anti-slavery but not abolitionists. They rallied to Abraham Lincoln’s call to “put slavery on a path to its ultimate extinction” by restricting it to those states where it existed in 1860. Most Southerners interpreted the Republicans’ win in 1860 as a sign that the electoral advantage the slaveholding states held under the Constitution’s three-fifths clause had evaporated, as the Northern population was increasing faster than the South’s. Secession, many Southern politicians believed, preserved slavery. Staying in the union meant its inevitable demise. Seven slaveholding states in the Deep South adopted secession declarations between Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, and his inauguration on March 4, 1861. In early February 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas formed a new government, which they called the Confederate States of America, elected Jefferson Davis its President, and began preparing for civil war. The shooting started on April 12, 1861, with Confederate forces attacking Fort Sumter, a federal garrison in Charleston, SC’s harbor. The attack prompted Lincoln to call for 75,000 volunteer militiamen to put down the rebellion. With war looming, four Upper South states – Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee — that had been reluctant to secede switched sides and joined the Confederacy.

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AN ORDINANCE to repeal the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America by the State of Virginia, and to resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution.

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight having declared that the powers granted under said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

Now, therefore, we, the people of Virginia, do declare and ordain that the ordinance adopted by the people of this State in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified; and all acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying and adopting amendments to said Constitution are hereby repealed and abrogated; that the union between the State of Virginia and the other States under the Constitution aforesaid is hereby dissolved and that the State of Virginia is in the full possession and exercise of all the rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State.

And they do further declare, That said Constitution of the United States of America is no longer binding on any of the citizens of this State.

This ordinance shall take effect and be an act of this day, when ratified by a majority of the voter of the people of this State cast at a poll to be taken thereon on the fourth Thursday in May next, in pursuance of a schedule hereafter to be enacted.

Source

Ordinance of Secession, 1861. Virginia. Convention (1861). Records, 1861–1961. State Government Records Collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.

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