The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston. The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago. Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood up for their rights. “The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom,” said Antley. “What I’m doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law."
Is the act of secesion a "demonstration of freedom?" What sort of freedom? Let us now read from South Carolina's Articles of Secession, which asserts that the federal government has impinged upon states' rights.
"The right of property in slaves was recognized [under the Constitution] by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety."
Yes, it's true. Citizens of some states have not captured fugitive slaves or returned them to their owners, have denounced slavery as sinful, have elected a president who is hostile to the "peculiar institution," and have (horror of horrors! even granted citizenship to former slaves.
The South Carolina document is extraordinarily clear. Can anyone fairly doubt that there would have been no secession and therefore no need for a Secession Ball except in defense of slavery? The "demonstration of freedom" is nothing more than a celebration of the freedom of one person to own another.
Nowadays, when slavery is no longer defensible, "conservative" South Carolinians are reduced to protecting their guaranteed right to make life difficult for gays and immigrants. And keep women in their places. A far cry from their glorious past.
But they continue to nurture that nostalgia for the great old antebellum days.
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