PeaRidge:
"You used the term ‘official reasons for secession.’
Who was the official?"According to those documents themselves, conventions which approved ordnances of secession:
- "The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared... Adopted December 24, 1860"
- Mississippi's "Copied by Justin Sanders from "Journal of the State Convention", (Jackson, MS: E. Barksdale, State Printer, 1861), pp. 86-88]"
- Georgia's: "[Copied by Justin Sanders from the Official Records, Ser IV, vol 1, pp. 81-85.]... [Approved, Tuesday, January 29, 1861] "
- Texas's: "[Copied by Justin Sanders from E.W. Winkler, ed., *Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas*, pp. 61-66.]... Adopted in Convention on the 2nd day of Feby, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one and of the independence of Texas the twenty-fifth.
[Delegates' signatures] "
Naturally, when I say "official", I mean the term loosely, since neither Unionists in 1861 nor most people today considered those secession conventions constitutionally legitimate.
It was all an unconstitutional fraud, from the beginning.
Nevertheless, to the degree that any act of secessionist conventions was "official", then so were their "Declarations of Immediate Causes..."