The Civil War: Jefferson Davis: Farewell Address in the U.S. Senate

January 21, 1861

United States Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, rose on the floor of that august chamber the morning of January 21, 1861 to make an announcement. It would not be one pertaining to some Senate bill, or a resolution, but instead an announcement that he was leaving the Senate.

That day, Davis, as well as four other southern Senators—two from Florida and two from Alabama—claimed they were “withdrawing” from the Senate based on their states seceding from the Union. It was a moment that, up until the preceding few months, had been nearly unimaginable.

But nonetheless, Davis took the floor and began: “I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose of announcing to the Senate that I have satisfactory evidence that the State of Mississippi, by a solemn ordinance of her people in convention assembled, has declared her separation from the United States.” Thus, his “functions are terminated here.”

He argued that Mississippi’s secession was not reminiscent of the doctrine of nullification; secession was a different remedy and one “justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign.” As for Mississippi, she had found herself “withdrawn from the Union,” and the federal government could “make war” on such a foreign state. Further, there could be no legal illusion that the federal government had “any power to execute the laws of the United States within” Mississippi—a foreign state at that moment.

The fact was, so Davis argued, that Mississippi had its rights, and the federal government had deprived the state of her rights. “She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.” As with many likeminded southerners, Davis was quick to look to the Declaration of Independence as opposed to the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence’s language about equality referred not to everyone but to “the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families, but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body-politic.” There was no mention of these portions applying to slaves, he said. These portions of the Declaration were simply solidifying that the United States would not be the sort of country with a society stratified in the way that England was.

Just as the colonies declared their independence from England, “when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Government which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence, and take the hazard.” They were taking that hazard “from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our sacred duty to transmit unshorn to our children.”

In framing secession in this way—as a second American Revolution—Davis was dignifying the South’s secession, framing it as that generation’s fight against tyranny, and making it seem to be a noble cause.

But, if events continued to unfold along this trajectory and there would be conflict between the states, it would “bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear; and thus, putting our trust in God and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may.”