Fragile Freedom

Secession was “a right unknown in the Constitution”, one that, without doubt or question, would ultimately lead to “anarchy and war”, at least that would be what James G. Taliaferro, Delegate to the Louisiana Secessionist Convention, would argue as the state debated its place in the Union. Only 58 years earlier the territory had been purchased from the French at 3 cents per acre, but the US ban on the African slave trade and importation had created prosperity and it flourished. By 1840, only 28 years since it had been admitted as a full state, its premier city, New Orleans had grown to one of the largest and wealthiest in the country. Even as the population of the Bayou state grew to almost three quarters of a million, they knew that everything relied on the 47 to 48 percent of the population that lived in the bonds of that brutal and bitter subjugation known by that simple word: Slavery. They could not and would not abide under a President that would rip from them what they considered their property, and, in