December 20th 1860: South Carolina secedes
On this day in 1860, the US state of South Carolina declared its intent to secede from the Union by issuing the Ordinance of Secession. The government of South Carolina issued the ‘Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union’ on December 24th to justify their decision; this mostly centred around the perceived federal effort to abolish slavery. Secession was prompted by the election of anti-slavery presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, after years of tensions over the slavery issue had heightened divisions between the Southern and Northern states. Other Southern states followed South Carolina, thus forming the Confederacy who fought and lost to the Union in the American Civil War. During the post-war Reconstruction era, South Carolina underwent drastic changes, seeing the election of many newly enfranchised African-Americans to political office. However, as elsewhere in the South, Reconstruction came to a bloody end in South Carolina after a violent ‘redemption’ by white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, who retaliated against the increased rights of black freedmen.
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