SEVERANCE, WAR OF THE, the rebellion of Carolina, the southern Chesapeake tribes, and the Indies against the authority of the Commonwealth, 1837-43, the gravest domestic convulsion the Frame has undergone since its adoption and the costliest in life of any war the Commonwealth has fought before or since, at home or abroad. Its immediate occasion was the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) of the 14th of May 1836, which ended chattel labour throughout the Commonwealth's dominions under a seven years' apprenticeship and, in a clause the planting interest never forgave, refused any compensation to owners for the loss of property in men; its remoter cause lay in the long licence the Agrarian Law (q.v.) had allowed to wealth held in slaves rather than in land, a licence three generations of Carolina and Indies planters had come to regard as an entitlement older than the Frame itself.
The Act of Severance was signed at Charleston on the 2nd of January 1837 by delegates of Carolina, the Indies, and the planting interest of the southern Chesapeake, declaring those provinces a separate government and repudiating the Frame's authority over them. The Commonwealth's response divided, as the theatre of war itself divided, into a maritime and a continental campaign. At sea the advantage lay from the first with the republic: the Indies, dependent on the Commonwealth's own shipping for provision as much as for markets, were blockaded within the year and retaken island by island through 1838 and 1839, the sugar islands falling with comparatively little bloodshed once the planting families there had satisfied themselves that no relief could reach them from the mainland. On the continent the war ran a harder and longer course. Carolina's coastal lowcountry, threaded with tidal rivers and rice fields that favoured the defender at every crossing, cost the Commonwealth's forces two full campaigning seasons before the works guarding Charleston itself could be invested; the fighting then moved inland and westward, through the pine barrens and across the river lines of the interior, in a succession of marches and small actions that this article has not space to itemise but that the regimental historians of the standing army have chronicled at proportionate length elsewhere.
By the time the Instrument of Reunion was signed on the 9th of August 1843, the war had cost, on the most careful accounting yet made, some four hundred thousand lives — soldiers and militia of both sides, and no small number of the Carolina and Indies freedmen who took up arms for the Commonwealth against their former masters and were shown little quarter when captured. It is a toll this contributor, who has walked a good part of the lowcountry ground on which much of it was paid, does not find it possible to set down without some plainness of feeling, whatever the demands of an encyclopaedia article upon a more level tone. The fifteen years of provincial reconstruction that followed — see RECONSTITUTION, THE — restored the rebellious provinces to their seats in the Assembly under new governors and new franchise rolls, and it is fair to record, though this article is not the place to examine the matter in the particularity it deserves, that the franchise so restored has since been narrowed again in the provincial circuits of the south by a series of administrative revisions the present writer will leave to a more competent hand to describe.
The war left its mark on the Commonwealth's military institutions as plainly as on its conscience: the standing army, which had been a modest establishment before 1837, was never again reduced to its former peacetime footing, and the coastal-riverine tactics improvised in the lowcountry campaigns became, for a generation afterward, the staple instruction of the military college at Oceana. It is remembered, in the Commonwealth's civic observance, as a wound rather than a triumph — there is no Severance monument at Westminster to compare with Blake's Column, and the anniversary of the Reunion is kept, where it is kept at all, with a solemnity that owes more to mourning than to celebration. (G. M. T.)