why south carolina seceded in it's own words.

One delegate to the convention was German-born [Christopher Gustavus Memminger] who owned 12 slaves and is considered a Founding Father of the Confederacy. The convention tapped Memminger to write the [Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union], outlining the reasons for secession:

“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He has declared ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

Referencing their grievances regarding what they saw as dwindling enforcement of the [Fugitive Slaves Act], South Carolina stated the primary reasons for secession:

“The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor… For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution… We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”

Memminger was later selected as a South Carolina delegate to the [Provisional Congress of the Confederate States] and chaired the committee that drafted the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States. After heading the state’s Finance Committee for 20 years, he founded the Confederate financial system and served as Treasurer Secretary of the Confederacy. President Andrew Johnson gave him a full pardon in 1871. He returned to private life and worked in railroads and the South Carolina public school system, proving old Confederate White supremacists never die, they just go on to teach our children.