Carey, Anthony Gene
Description
Encyclopedia article about Georgia's secession from the Union. Secession followed nearly two decades of increasingly intense sectional conflict over the status of slavery in western territories and over the future of slavery in the United States. Secession had been seriously mentioned as a political option at least as far back as the Missouri crisis of 1819-21, and threats to disrupt the Union were commonplace in every sectional crisis from the nullification era (1828-33) onward. While white Georgians, along with other white southerners, disagreed over whether secession was a constitutional right (embodied in the national compact that grew out of the 1787 Constitutional Convention) or a natural right of revolution (arising from the inherent power of the people to form and abolish governments), in a practical sense this distinction mattered less than the fact that secession was widely recognized as a legitimate potential remedy for perceived southern grievances. Thus, when Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery, northern Republican Party, won the 1860 presidential election, states in the lower South moved quickly to call state conventions to consider secession. Georgia's state legislature set January 2, 1861, as the election date for a state convention, which was to meet on January 16.
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![[Southern secessionists raise flag at Yale College]](https://d2l9jrtx1kk04i.cloudfront.net/9051f843f8cacbcea31ffd8d6adf8a1d08d50159.png "[Southern secessionists raise flag at Yale College]")
![Grand Secession March [sheet music]](https://d2l9jrtx1kk04i.cloudfront.net/0d4b188f0c74c947625dd774bc72a343ae37c38e.png "Grand Secession March [sheet music]")
