December 20, 1860

South Carolina Ordinance of Secession

South Carolina's convention adopts the Ordinance of Secession

The convention voted behind closed doors, but cannon fire and a newspaper broadside carried the result into Charleston's streets within minutes.

1:15 p.m., 20 December 1860

At 1:15 p.m. on 20 December 1860, South Carolina's elected secession convention completed a roll-call vote adopting an ordinance that purported to dissolve the state's union with the other United States. All 169 delegates present voted for it.

The ordinance itself was a single paragraph. It repealed South Carolina's 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution and declared the existing union dissolved, and it gave no reasons.

Two halls in one day

The decisive vote took place behind closed doors at St. Andrew's Hall in Charleston. The delegates postponed signing and affixing the state seal until a public evening ceremony at South Carolina Institute Hall, before a reported audience of about 3,000.

Convention president David F. Jamison presided, not Governor Francis Pickens, who attended the evening ceremony. After the signing, Jamison proclaimed South Carolina a separate independent nationality.

The reasons came four days later

The explanatory Declaration of Immediate Causes was a separate document, adopted on 24 December after work by a seven-member committee led by Christopher G. Memminger. It centred perceived threats to slavery and failures to enforce fugitive-slave obligations.

Of the 169 delegates in the hall, 153 enslaved people in 1860.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The date, vote and ordinance are secure. The constitutional legality of unilateral secession was disputed at the time and was later rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court; describing the ordinance as what South Carolina 'claimed' or 'purported' to accomplish avoids silently resolving that legal dispute.
Some institutional summaries collapse the afternoon vote at St. Andrew's Hall and the evening signing at Institute Hall into a single meeting place.