Georgia Ordinance of Secession (Approved, Tuesday, January 29, 1861)
The question of “Confederate heritage” has been raised once more in the latest dust up over the Confederate flag. It comes from Georgia where a “vanity” or special license plate features the Confederate battle flag, as the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.
The state of Georgia has released a new specialty license tag that features the Confederate battle flag, inflaming civil rights advocates and renewing a debate on what images should appear on state-issued materials. The new specialty tag has stirred a clash between those who believe the battle flag honors Confederate heritage and those, particularly African-Americans, who view it as a racially charged symbol of oppression.
Since this issue once more raises the question of “Confederate heritage,” code words for why the Civil War was fought, it presents an opportunity to revisit exactly why the state of Georgia decided to secede from the Union in January 1861. This is also a good example of doing some primary document reading as called for in the Common Core.
Here is the opening paragraph of the Georgia Ordinance of Secession:
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. . . . The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party . . . is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state.
Text of Georgia Secession Ordinance January 29, 1861 Source: The Avalon Project-Yale Law School
The text concludes by setting a price tag on slavery and raising the specter of the threat to Southern wives and children:
Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants; because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides.
This is Georgia’s stated reason for its “Confederate heritage.”
