Nonpartisan (constitutionalist) Governor Francis W. Pickens, of the Independent Republic of South Carolina, orders the Citadel Cadets to fire on the USS Star of the West, preventing it from landing munitions and troops at Fort Sumter with which to enforce duties borne mostly by the southern States whose slave owners bought English products to repay the loans on slaves made by the English East Indian Trading Company.  Pickens orders a siege of the fort seeking to compel its surrender.

       [updated 1/18/2025]

      Upset with free States exercising their sovereignty by nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Secession Convention of Mississippi votes to withdraw from the voluntary Union (YEA, 83; NAY, 15) over the issue of and slavery:

       Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.

       The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

       The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

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       It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

· · · · · · ·

       It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

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       It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. (emphasis added)

       NOTE: This final justification from this excerpt provides a hint at the attitude of most of the anti-slavery movement in the northern States: they were not just anti-slavery, but they were also anti-Negro.

       [updated 1/18/2025]