"Disunion by armed force is treason," he declared to South Carolinian nullifiers, "I will ...have the leaders arrested and arraigned for treason." President Jackson's firm stand was met with grateful, patriotic cheers throughout the nation, and put a swift damper on the South Carolinian hotheads.
The Constitution, said Jackson, derives its whole authority from the people, not the States..."each State, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other States, a single nation, can not, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league, but destroys the unity of a nation…."
Southern Unionists, including the slave-holders among them, were men who put country before personal property or sectional advantage. They did not value the "peculiar institution" more than their American ideals. These were the real heroes of the Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to those areas in rebellion against the United States. It did not apply to the border states, nor to the area of Tennessee and Louisiana under federal authority.
Southern secessionists pushed secession because they believed that they were losing their power to dictate terms to the United States. As of the census of 1860, and the admission of California as a state, they were outnumbered in both Houses, and had also lost the Presidency. They had dreams of a vast slave empire, from sea to sea, that included Mexico, all the southwestern territories, Cuba, and beyond, greater than any European empire. Cotton was king, and as king, it deserved its own nation. They would not become impotent vassals of Northern states, full of immigrants hostile to slavery and Northern traders who leached off the Southern cotton growers.