When the Nation Split.

• Author: KELLEY, TIMOTHY
• Position: Brief Article

Long before Kosovo and Chechnya demanded independence, America faced its own "breakaway republic"

In the Russian republic of Dagestan near the Caspian Sea, Islamic separatists are fighting Russian soldiers to make their land independent. In the Serbian province of Kosovo this spring, ethnic Albanians fought for separation from Serbia. Other separatist movements have popped up around the globe, from India to Iraq.

Does part of a nation have the right to break away and become a nation itself? The United States faced that question in 1861, when 11 Southern states tried to secede from--or leave--the Union and form their own country. The effort led to the roar of cannons on an early April morning--and a four-year Civil War.

The conflict had its roots in black slavery. That institution, which had died out in the North, was now the foundation of the South's plantation economy--and the legal backbone of a social system for keeping blacks in submission.

Southern leaders feared that a growing antislavery movement in the North threatened slavery's survival. New territories seeking statehood became the testing ground: Would they permit slavery? And if they didn't, would their votes in Congress tip the scales against the South, putting it under the North's domination?

Those questions hung in the air in 1850, when Congress was deciding what to do about the new state of California. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun held that because the original 13 colonies had voluntarily formed the Union, states could leave at will too. If California was admitted as a free state, he thought, it might be time for the South to secede. Ailing and near death, he sat in the Senate while a colleague read for him a speech Calhoun was too weak to deliver. It warned the North:

If you are unwilling we should part in peace, tell us so; and we shall know what to do when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.... California will become the test question ... [showing the North's] intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections.

Three days later, in his famous "Seventh of March" speech, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster rejected secession on both moral and practical grounds:

Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility... The disruption of the union ... must produce war.... We could not sit down here today and draw a line of separation that would satisfy any five men in the country.

California was admitted, but Congress pleased the...