<P> The declaration was the second of three documents to be officially issued by the South Carolina Secession Convention . The first was the Ordinance of Secession itself . The third was "The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States", written by Robert Barnwell Rhett, which called on other slave holding states to secede and join in forming a new nation . The convention resolved to print 15,000 copies of these three documents and distribute them to various parties . </P> <P> The declaration was seen as analogous to the U.S. Declaration of Independence from 1776, however, it omitted the phrases that "all men are created equal", "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights", and "consent of the governed". Professor and historian Harry V. Jaffa noted this omission as significant in his 2000 book, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War: </P> <P> South Carolina cites, loosely, but with substantial accuracy, some of the language of the original Declaration . That Declaration does say that it is the right of the people to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established . But South Carolina does not repeat the preceding language in the earlier document:' We hold these truths to be self - evident, that all men are created equal'...</P> <P> Jaffa states that South Carolina omitted references to human equality and consent of the governed, as due to their racist and pro-slavery views, secessionist South Carolinians did not believe in those ideals: </P>

According to this excerpt what issue was the main basis for south carolinas secession