Why Did North Carolina Secede? Al Mackey asks this question in his blog post at
Of course anyone who knows Mackey, knows what the answer will be — SLAVERY What else????
I do admit Mackey lays out his case well using facts and figures to support his argument, but these are just cherry picked figures. In Reality North Carolina did not even mention slavery in their secession document. They do mention maintaining their sovereignty.
Now more to the point of secession let’s just take a couple of sources into consideration related to the act of secession–
Unionism and Secession in the South:
One further caveat in thinking about Southern Unionism. Virtually all historians, including this one, are agreed today on the centrality of slavery in explaining the road to secession. Yet if we would understand the nature of Southern Unionism we cannot stop there in accounting for
the abandonment of Unionist by sufficient Southerners to create the Confederacy. Human motivation and loyalties are more complex than that. A concern about the future of slavery was more often in the background than in the forefront of Southerners’ thinking about the Union.
Certainly it is difficult to show a clear causal line between direct involvement with slavery and attitudes toward secession. For one thing, too many unconditional Unionists….were slaveholders. For such persons the ownership of slaves was not sufficient reason for supporting
secession. For another, most of the Southerners who made up the Confederacy were not directly connected with slavery at all. The majority of white Southerners, after all, did not own a single slave. Their concern for the institution of slavery could at best have been
only an indirect motive for supporting secession and later the Confederacy.
It makes much more sense to see slavery as a shaper of Southern civilization and values than as an interest. The anxiety about the future of slavery was there because the future of the South was intimately tied up with the institution. But the role of slavery in moving individual Southerners from Unionism to secession was neither simple nor obvious. Precisely at what point an individual Southerner decided that he or she could no longer support the Union when it came
into conflict with region depended upon many things, not only upon his or her immediate relationship to slavery.”
(The Other South, Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century, Carl N.
Degler, Harper & Row, 1974, page 122), pp. 8-10)
Last One
A New Yorker on Southern Secession:
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Mackey in his infinite wisdom flat out makes the statement that North Carolina left the Union for no other reason but to protect slavery. Here we see three different reason why North Carolina or the cotton states left the Union. I have recorded way too many reason and sources on secession to post here, and I know long pots get boring, but if you have an interest you may go to Southern Heritage Advancement Preservation and Education and read as many entries and you want on the subject. You will see how slanted Mackey’s version of history really is.