Uh huh. You're going to argue with a straight face that while the actual ordinances of secession issued by the conventions are valid documents because they were later voted on by the people, the declarations of causes issued by those same conventions in which they explain the reasons for their actions are just so much hot air, not to be taken seriously, and it's all the media's fault, anyway. I will say you never disappoint in your capacity for willful obtuseness.
Here's the debate at the South Carolina secession convention over their document.
A lot of good stuff there. I particularly like the part where someone asks if they should mention the tariff and Keitt says that this isn't about the tariff and someone else compares this to the Declaration of Independence. (Of course, that was never ratified by the people, either, was it? So I guess it can't really be considered more than an "editorial.")
By the way, the South Carolina convention was called by the legislature as "a Convention of the People." There was no direct popular vote to enact their measure. In fact, all of the secession conventions were Conventions of the People, since the Constitution was ratified in the same way, and only three states put the resolutions of those conventions to a vote. Actually they had to vote twice in Tennessee to get the result they wanted.
Here's a link to the Proceedings of the Mississippi secession convention, in which you can find the committee being appointed to write the declaration of causes, the submission of the final document to the convention, the vote adopting it, and "Resolved, That twenty-five hundred copies of the Declaration and Address of the immediate causes of the secession of Mississippi from the Federal Union, together with the Ordinance of Secession, with the names of the members who signed it, be printed in pamphlet form, and distributed to the members of this Convention." No, not at all an official document, right?
In the Proceedings of the Georgia secession convention, you can find this:
Mr. Nisbet, from the committee of seventeen, to report the Ordinance of Secession, after stating that it was written by Mr. Toombs made the following REPORT, which was taken up, read, and adopted."The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates, and the world, the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years…
You can find the same for Texas here
Many thanks, Bubba, for posting the link to the Texas document. I’ve not seen that before. The document lists the dates of abandonment of the forts in the state, the first comprehensive listing of those dates I’ve seen.
Whoever pieced the document together or reassembled it sometime in the past, might have done it from partial pieces or loose pages as they sometimes got the pieces put together incorrectly. Even so, it is still an interesting document.
I see mention in it of my great great grandfather’s commander in the war, John Salmon R.I.P. Ford, a former Texas Ranger captain who was hell on wheels. They drove the Federals down the Rio Grande Valley to an offshore island alhough the Federals had three times as many men.
Thank you for that interesting research.
So it is your position that the Ordinances of Secession specifically say that the reason for secession was slavery.