The Address of the People of South Carolina Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States

South Carolina. Convention

Jan. 1860 · Evans & Cogswell, printers to the Convention

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This call to arms, prepared by Robert Barnwell Rhett, is, accoding to Harwell, the earliest Confederate imprint. It chronicles the "discontent and contention" between North and South "for the last thirty-five years," caused by "the aggressions and unconstitutional wrongs, perpetrated by the people of the North on the people of the South." Today the United States government, once a "government of confderated republics," is now "a Despotism." Rhett argues that the "Southern States, now stand exactly in the same position towards the Northern State, that the Colonies did towards Great Britain." Rhett urges like-minded southerners to join with South Carolina by seceding from the Union. "It cannot be believed, that our ancestors would have assented to any Union whatever with the people of the North, if the feelings and opinons now exisiting amongst them, had existed when the Constitution was framed. There was then, no Tariff -- no fanaticism concerning negroes." He argues them "to be one of a great Slaveholding Confederacy..."