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Rare original broadside from the Charleston Mercury newspaper, printed in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 20, 1860, 12.75 x 23.75, announcing South Carolina’s repeal of the Constitution of the United States and the state’s secession from the Union. The text reads, in full: “EXTRA: Passed unanimously at 1.15 o’clock, P.M., December 20th, 1860. AN ORDINANCE / To dissolve the Union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled ‘The Constitution of the United States of America.’ We, the People of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained,
That the Ordinance adopted by us in Convention, on the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and also, all Acts and parts of Acts of the General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved. THE UNION IS DISSOLVED!” Affixed to a slightly larger cardstock mount and in very good to fine condition, with repairs to edge tears and intersecting folds.
Printed as an "Extra" edition of the Charleston Mercury, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a breaking news bulletin, this remarkable broadside announced one of the defining political events in American history. Shortly after South Carolina's Secession Convention unanimously adopted the Ordinance of Secession at 1:15 p.m. on December 20, 1860, the Mercury rushed this special edition into print. The ordinance repealed South Carolina's 1788 ratification of the United States Constitution, making it the first state to secede following Abraham Lincoln's election the previous month and setting in motion the secession of ten additional Southern states, the formation of the Confederate States of America, and, less than four months later, the outbreak of the Civil War at nearby Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
According to the consignor, this example descended through the family of Philip Augustin Clayton, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury of the Confederate States of America, passing from his granddaughter, Mary Weems Clayton, to her son, Ronald Rogers of Atlanta, Georgia, who received it as a gift from his mother in the 1960s.
